JOHN JAKES

The Sellers of the Dream

John Jakes is one of a number of science fiction writers (including Frank Robinson, John D. MacDonald, and Tom Scortia) who have been successful in other areas of literature. Jakes had produced hundreds of stories and novels in the mystery, Western, and historical fiction genres before his massive success with a series of historical novels on Bicentennial themes during 1975 and 1976.
In science fiction, he is best known as the author of a number of excellent short stories. In "The Sellers of the Dream" Jakes constructs yet another social system dominated by advertising. But this story is not derivative-it is in many ways a classic treatment of the theme of choice eradication. We are all familiar with the way in which the automobile industry appeals to millions of consumers by yearly changing the design or other features-changes which are often minor and not necessarily improvements-of its major lines. Jakes takes this one step further to a time when human personalities can be changed at "will," and new models are introduced each year in much the same way that new cars are brought onto the market. The sellers in this case are marketing the dream of "the new you" and regard their mission in life as keeping the masses consuming. How they go about it in this story makes it required reading for many businesses and the people who support them.

     His gaudy wristwatch showed thirty minutes past nine, sixth July. It was time. From here on it was do the job right or be ruined. If not physically, then professionally.

Finian Smith dug for tools in the pouches of his imitation stomach. The left eye of the watch's moon face gave a ludicrous wink to complete the time signal. Finian hated the watch. He'd got used to the confines of the camouflaged polymer leech clinging to the keel of the hydrofoiler. He'd got used to performing necessary bodily functions in intimate contact with the leech's servomechanisms for thirty-six hours. But the watch-never.
It was effete, like his clothes. Effeteness was big this year. Next year it would be hand-loomed woolens. But he wasn't being paid to inherit the soul of the man he was impersonating, after all. He applied the first of his meson torches to the thick hull. His long, pleasantly ugly face began to bead with perspiration.
He had precisely four minutes to cut through.
His face was half shadowed by the hull as he worked, half washed in flickering sunlight through anemone and brain coral. He defused a large U-shaped section and replaced the torch with a pistol unit fitted with a round cup at the muzzle. This cup he applied to the hull. A blue whine of power-he forced the hull inward far enough to accommodate entry to the fuel baffle chamber.
He set a small black box to blow the polymer leech off the hull in fifty seconds, glad that he'd spent a full twenty nights under the hypnolearner. The penetration plan was drummed so deeply into his skull he could operate like an automaton.
With a last tool he resealed the hull, touched a stud and watched the tool collapse to gritty pumice. Right now the leech should be quietly disintegrating, without so much as a murmur to disturb the TTIC spy radar. It took a lot of money to arrange this penetration, Finian thought. Knowing how much made him nervous.


Finian hurried up a lonely companionway. Before stepping to the yacht's deck he dusted his pleatless puce satin pantaloons and also made sure the precision camera, a combined effort of G/S dental technicians and optics men, was in place where his right front incisor had once been. The blade shutter's release was a knob on the tooth's inner surface, triggered by tongue pressure. Fake enamel would fly aside a microinstant and TTIC secrets would be recorded for posterity, not to mention G/S market analysts.

On deck, Finian adjusted his identification badge.
Beneath his picture it said Woodrow Howslip, Missoula, Mont., Upper North American Distributorship. Finian hoped Woodrow Howslip was still lost in the Mojave Desert. If so, the only thing Finian had to worry over was his old enemy.
Every few yards along the deck armed TTIC security men stood at attention: TTIC seemed to have innumerable armed guards. So did

G/S for that matter. Finian often wondered why. No one. got angry anymore, why have armed guards?
"Hi, there, I'm Woody Howslip.-
"Morning, sir." The guard stared into the Pacific's cobalt swell.
"Say, fella. Last year when I came to see the new models introduced, I ran into a hell of a swell person-Spool or Stool. Sure like to A buy him a drink. Is he on board?"
"I don't believe so, sir."
"Oh, too bad. Maybe he'll show up. They always have the top dogs at these distributor shows. I hear Stool's a top dog. Chief of company spies or something.
The guard concealed irritation.
"Sprool, sir. Chief of industrial investigation.
Finian gigged the man's ribs. "Keep those Goods/Services jerks hopping, huh? Well, sorry Sprool isn't around. Maybe later. See you in the videofunnies-"
Overdoing it, Finian thought as he hurried along. Still, it was reassuring to know the intelligence was correct: Sprool was in Bombay. Finian had run up against him most recently when TTIC tried to steal G/S designs for the midyear hairdo changes during the 2004-5 season.
Finian joined a crowd of distributors hurrying into an auditorium beneath a banner reading:

WELCOME
Things to Come Incorporated
World Distributors
"Last Year's Woman Is This
Year's Consumer"

As he took a seat in the shadowy hall he listened to voices all around:
"It's rumored she's of the Grecian mode," said the European Common Market distributor.
"What? Copy the tripe G/S peddled two years ago?" That was the White/Blue Nile man.
The Chinese distributor protested: "Last year, too severe. Humble percent of market drop severely. Five thousand years in fields, China women do not desire box haircut, woolen socks."
"Hope it's a real smasher this time," said the British Empire distributor, a seedy fellow wearing cologne. One run-down warehouse in

Jamaica comprised the Empire anymore. TTIC or G/S could buy or sell the Empire a thousand times. Or any other country. Finian was sweating. No wonder the stakes were so high.

On an austere platform up front sat three men. One was a florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed eyes. Another-a spindly type with a flower at each cuff-rose and was introduced by a loudspeaker as Corporate Director of Sales, Northcote Hastings.
"Thank you, thank you. I won't waste time, gentlemen. You've traveled thousands of miles in secrecy and we appreciate it. We trust you also appreciate why we must maintain the mobility of our personality design center. One, never knows when the-ah--competition might infiltrate a permanent site. They can't match our sales in new personalities, so they try to outfight us with punches below the belt. "
He fingered his, of ermine, to illustrate. Finian joined the laughter, but meant his.
"After luncheon, gentlemen, you're scheduled for individual sessions with our designers, psychiatrists, plastic surgeons and sociability coordinators, not to mention apparel teams and accessory experts."
Hastings glanced at the old gentleman with the vaguely crossed eyes.
"Before we proceed, however, I should like to introduce TTIC's beloved chairman of the board, Mr. Alvah Loudermilk. Stand up, Mr. Loudermilk." The sales manager was plainly annoyed by having to make the introduction. The old dodderer took a step toward the podium. Hastings let a tolerant smile be seen by the distributors but did not relinquish the mike.
"You can talk with Mr. Loudermilk personally later, gentlemen."
The florid old gentleman sat down again, as though no one appreciated him. Smoothly Hastings continued, "Let me get on by bringing forward the great design chief of Things to Come Incorporated-- He flung out a hand. "Dr. Gerhard Krumm."
The famed Krumm, an obese toad with the inevitable disarrayed look of the corporate intellectual, walked to the podium. His apricot slippers, pantaloons and bolero jacket seemed to have come from a dustbin. Behind Krumm stage blowers whirred. They were readying curtains and screen.
Finian slid his tongue near his tooth.
"Gentlemen," Krumm said, "first the bad news."

At the unhappy grumble he held up his hand. "Next year-I promise!-TTIC will absolutely and without qualification be ready to introduce the concept of the obsolescent male personality, exactly as we did in the female market ten years ago. I can only emphasize again the tremendous physical problems confronting us, and point to the lag in male fashion obsolescence that was not finally overcome until the late twentieth century, by the sheer weight of promotion. Men, unlike women, accept new decorative concepts slowly. TTIC has a lucrative share of the semiannual male changeover, but we are years behind the female personality market. Next year we catch up."
"May we see what you have for the girls, old chap?" someone asked. "Then we'll decide whether we're happy."
"Very well. " Krumm began to read from a promotion script: "This year we steal a leaf from yesterday's-uh-scented album. " The lights dimmed artfully. Perfume sprayed the chamber from hidden ducts. A stereo orchestra swelled. The curtains parted. Finian's upper lip was rolled back as far as possible.
A nostalgic solido view of New York when it was once populated by people flashed on the screen. Violins throbbed thrillingly. .
"Remember the sweet, charming girl of yesteryear? We capture her for you-warm, uncomplicated, reveling in-uh, let's see-sunlight and outdoor sports."
A series of solido slides, illustrating Krumm's points with shots of nuclear ski lifts or the Seine, merged one into another.
"Gone is the exaggerated IQ of this year, gone the modish clothing. A return of softness. A simple mind, clinging, sweet. The stuff of everyman's dreams. Gentlemen, I give you-"
Hidden kettledrums swelled. The name flashed on the screen:

DREAM DESIRE.
"Dream Desire! New Woman of the 2007-08 market year!"

Over enthusiastic applause Krumm continued: "At our thirty thousand personality alteration centers over the world, every woman will be able to change her body and mind, by means of surgical and psychological techniques of which TTIC is the acknowledged master, to become Dream Desire. Backed by the most intensive promotion program in history, we promise that more women will become Dream Desire than have ever become one of our previous models. Because, gentlemen, no woman could possibly resist becoming-this."

Sitting forward with tooth ready to shoot, Finian was unprepared for the shock that awaited him.
On the screen slid the naked figure of a girl. Only her back was exposed. Nothing could be seen of her face. Her hair was yellow, that was all. The flesh itself was tanned, in sharp contrast to the pale library look currently being merchandised. The proportions of the girl's buttocks had been surgically worked out to be almost the apex of voluptuousness. But what shook Finian to the soles of his mink slippers was a star-shaped raspberry mark on the new model's left rear.
That isn't Dream Desire, he thought wildly. That's-4hat's-
"We begin with the, uh, rear elevation," said Krumm. "In that colorful mark you see TTIC marketing genius. That mark will stamp the woman who buys this new personality as a genuine Dream Desire, not a shoddy G/S counterfeit. To be frank, adoption of this unique-ah-signature, was not planned. When we sought a girl for our prototype, we discovered the girl we chose was blessed with such a mark. It inspired serendipity. But this is just the beginning. See what we have done with the face."
Only just in time did Finian remember to trigger his tooth and take a shot of the rear elevation before the front view flashed on. The girl, naked and coy on a divan, had pink cheeks, red lips, china-blue doll eyes. Pretty, in a cuddlesome, vapid way.
Quickly he exposed two more frames. He was falling apart, muffing the job. Krumm's voice became a drone detailing the surgical and analytical procedures necessary for a woman to buy the appearance and personality of Dream Desire. Finian didn't hear a thing about price schedules or what lower-priced models were contemplated. He photographed each slide mechanically, thinking of the raspberry mark.
It's not Dream Desire, he said to himself. My God-it's Dolly Novotny.
Not the face, not the breasts. But there, far down in the eyes. They weren't even brown anymore. But colored contacts could change eyes so easily.
Never had he been more profoundly shocked. His own sweet lost Dolly!
A heavy hand seized his shoulder.
"Here he is!"
Finian was dragged from his seat. A searing light flashed in his face.

"Well, well. Finian Smith. When you took hold of that rail coming into the hall, you should have recalled we have sweat prints for all you G/S boys. Give me the camera and come along quietly," finished Sprool.

"I thought you were in Bombay," said Finian. "I got bum information.
Sprool smiled somewhere in the depths of his almost colorless eyes. His pale, saturnine face, however, was devoid of humor.
"Never trust Lyman Pushkyn for information, Fin. Since when is an advertising man qualified to supervise an industrial investigation program?"
"You're right. I tried to get them to give me the post once."
"Did you? I didn't realize that. When?"
"Right after I was cashiered by the DOCs and finished my first case for G/S." He couldn't repress a smile. "The time I stole your men's changeover layouts by disguising myself as part of the lavatory wall. When you still had the design center on land, out in California."
Sprool chuckled flatly. "We've been friendly enemies quite a while, haven't we, Fin?"
"You never put one over on me like this, though."
"Shame you forgot sweat prints."
"My own damned fault." Finian thrust out his jaw. "I'll take what's coming. I was counting on this play to cut through all that stupid bureaucracy at the top of G/S and maybe net me the chief investigator's post." Finian scowled out of the office porthole to the heaving blue Pacific. Sprool smoothed thinning hair.
"Might as well give me the camera."
Finian made a show of dipping into his artificial paunch. He came up with a palm-sized micro 35mm. and snapped open the case release. He pulled the leader on the cassette all the way out, exposing the film. Chuckling, Sprool picked up the cylinder.
"Very nice, Finian. May I now have the real camera?"
"Ah, you slick bastard," grumbled Finian. This time he took piece of equipment from beneath his singlet. Sprool dropped it down hissing disposal tube.
"You look positively vengeful, Fin."

"I could smash a few heads right now. That damn G/S Comptroller Central makes investigators do their own penetration workups. They're nickel-nursers besides. I thought of sweat prints. They said the corrective was too expensive. I wasn't positive you had the index on file, so-"
"Fin, please don't bristle. Remember we have telephotos on you at this very moment. In that bust of Loewy, for instance. His collar button is watching you. Don't fight me and you won't get hurt. TTIC is a business operation just like G/S. Firm but paternalistic. When we dispose of an irritant, we do it with flexibility and permanence, but no physical pain.
"That's nice to know, considering you'll probably ruin my career."
"Were you ever really cut out for business, Fin?"
"If I wasn't what the hell was I cut out for? Not the DOCs.-
Sprool raised a chiding finger. "See? That burst of temper is all too typical of you. People simply don't rock the boat these days, Fin. Why, if either G/S or TTIC went for more than a fifty percent share of the renewal personality market-plus or minus the two percent gain or loss as a result of spying, design leaks and so forth-the UN would have its economic cycle theorists down on us instantly."
"God, Sprool, I try and try. I guess I just wasn't meant to be a twenty- first-century man. I never had the proper education, like those reading primers written by the market boys from-where was it?  BBDO?   I went to private school. On my pop's knee."
"Then your attitudes are understandable. How can you expect to be anything but yourself when your father was a Galbraither? Perhaps the last of that persuasion allowed to teach economics in public universities? Your father was dead set against the kind of obsolescence practiced by the corporations we both represent. The two largest corporations in the world!"
"Pop wanted consumer money spent on libraries, schools, highways, pretty, green, roadside picnic parks."
"None of which contributes very much to keeping the world plant running at top output. None of which provides the millions of jobs needed to give black and yellow and white alike ample opportunity for the good life. If you'd only understand yourself, how you fit the scheme of things."
"I don't. That's the trouble. What the hell am I supposed to do, join the prisoners in New York? I keep quiet about what I think. I call He panicked.
Almost as though there were a mental vacuum cleaner in his head, certain synapses were blocked, certain memory receptors temporarily sucked dry. The technique was a portion of that employed in changing the female consumer's intelligence quotient from year to year to conform to the new personality design she purchased. It made Finian fume to think of them tampering with his skull. He was no rotten Metropolis wife merchandised into adopting the latest fashion trend. He writhed ferociously. Sprool looked on with disapproval.
Try as he might, Finian could not remember what--good Lord! He'd forgotten the name!
What did she look like? What?
He had a blurry recollection of colors on a screen, little else. The laboratory cretins unhooded him. The chair relaxed.. Sprool assisted him to his feet.
"Feeling better? Free of unpleasant memories?"
"You've no business tampering-"

Dolly Novotny had a raspberry mark.

So did Dream Desire.
"Yeah, Yeah. I'm okay."

It took all Finian's strength to keep from revealing that the mental dike had just burst.
He wasn't really surprised. Dolly Novotny had once meant far more to him than assignment could. She would again, when he learned how and why she-
He laughed inwardly. Poor Sprool. He'd stolen a march. Two. Finian still had the tooth camera. And how could Sprool know Finian wanted to--must-remember Dolly Novotny, because she was the only creature he ever really loved?
Dolly was the girl to whom he'd been engaged, before her parents broke it off after he was cashiered from the DOCs. An ex-DOC who became an industrial investigator was little more than a low-life spy in their estimations. Finian had been away so much, on assignment. Dolly had tried to resist her parents, but they held the cash-box for a modeling career. She tried; she loved him. But one day when he came back to Bala-Cynwyd she was gone. The whole family had moved.
Finian received one final letter. He thought from the words, or

rather what was between them, really, that she still loved him. The words were obviously parentally ghosted.
Blinking at Sprool now, scratching his scalp to relieve the prickle, Finian realized anew the rather disheartening truth. He was a maverick. Pop had made him so, against his mother's shrill protests. So be it. Especially since someone-the system, maybe, he didn't know, cared less because a man couldn't really fight a system, not an ordinary man anyway-had corrupted the flesh he loved so well.
Finian was vaguely aware of Sprool, bland, pointing.
"Up that stairway, Fin. Directly to the vertijet takeoff stage. Spare you the embarrassment of going on deck." He extended his hand. "Luck, Fin. I hope the sacking isn't too bad."
Finian slipped the hand aside. He grinned. If you had to be a loony, why not enjoy it'?
"Thanks for nothing, pal."
He marched defiantly up the stairs into sunlight.
Who had Sprool been kidding about paternalism? Three hours later the vertijet hovered six inches from Lyman Pushkyn's green front door, the lawn of Panpublix on the outskirts of the Eastern metropolis. Finian was rudely pushed out. The vertijet climbed a white column of vapor into the sky.
Finian picked fresh-cut grass from his pantaloons. Oh, that kind, gentle Sprool. On his instructions the vertijet pilot had beamed an anonymous message on the Panpublix band, announcing that Finian Smith was being returned to continental U.S. by a TTIC skycraft. Still, Finian had one ace to stave off financial disaster.
Five minutes later he lost it.
A squad of G/S industrial guards boiled onto the lawn and hustled Finian to a cold tile room in the personnel wing. There he discovered two astonishing things. One, the corporation was not quite so paternalistic as it masked itself to appear. The policemen roughed him as they stripped him. Two, the vast G/S industrial police force was not the harmless, aimless body it looked to be from outside. Apparently the guards were paid so well because they had to move savagely if a bubble boiled up the bland surface of the world stew.
In fact, their professionalism with the see-rays in the personnel lab relieved him, howling and kicking and pummeling, of the precious tooth camera, just before he was hustled to Pushkyn's floor.

Panpublix was the wholly owned internal advertising agency for G/S. The building loomed forty stories. Within its curtain walls quite a few thousand communicators devoted themselves to the task of planning and executing campaigns to move the bodies, as the expression went. The fortieth, or solarium, floor belonged to the agency's executive officer, Pushkyn, into whose presence Finian was unceremoniously thrust.
"You miserable creep," Lyman said, as he shooed away his masseuse and beetled his thick Ukrainian brows. "You bumbler, you! We heard all about your incredible performance from Sprool's agents. You're fired. Blackballed. Eradicated. Kapoosht."
Finian had a hard light in his eyes. He sat down, tilted his feet to the chaise footrest and dialed the arm for a B-complex cocktail. "Lyman, those goonies of yours messed me up. I never knew they were more than window dressing. I didn't know they were supposed to fight. "
Pudgy Pushkin snapped the elastic of his old rose knickerbockers. His stomach, lumpy and white as the rest of him, hung out unglamorously.
"Rock the boat some more, creepnik. You'll find out how they can fight.
"Oh, shut up. I delivered your pictures. Even if your men did take them by force."
Pushkyn turned his back. "Peddle it another place, jerk. You're through. "
"You can't talk to me that way. If you hadn't chintzed about a lousy sweat-print job-"
Pushkyn squinted around. "So that's how. That Sprool, he's a regular fiend."
"Damn it, Lyman--
Extending a trembling sausage finger Pushkyn breathed, "You we ought to have psyched, deep and permanent. What a fool I was to string along with you for years! A stumblebum private cop dignifying himself by calling himself an industrial investigator. Come in here storming, cursing-no wonder the DOCs kicked you out!"
Momentarily bewildered, Finian countered, "Lyman, your own guards-"

"Quiet! We'll get a nice fat rap in the public image when the investigator trade journals pick up the story of how G/S flopped."
Glowering, Finian stalked him. "Regardless of that, I delivered. I want my fee."
"I'll be damned if I--
Conflict was temporarily forestalled by the arrival of a thin assistant art director, carrying a square item masked in gray silk. Finian stared moodily at the G/S model announcement layouts in the wall display racks. The trade name of the new G/S woman and her figure were greeked; but from the woodcut and steel-engraving technique of the gatefold and bleed comps, Finian suspected G/S was going to market a bit of nostalgia even older than the kind chosen by TTIC. Bustless, mandolins and stereopticons by gaslight? Finian had a prepossessing urge to throw up.
"Want to see this, chief ?" said the assistant art director.
He whipped off the silk, revealing an oil painting in a platinum frame.
"What the rinkydink hell is that?" Pushkyn cried.
The art director blanched. "Why, chief, it's R. R. Pharoh III"
"Of course, of course, jerkola. You think I don't know? I haven't seen the old smeller in three years maybe, but think I don't know the chairman of my own bread and butter? Why the fancy-fancy oil treatment? You do it?"
"Spare time, only, chief," trembled the art director. "Got a memo. Salinghams-you know, the audiotonal effects veep-memoized Pharoh. Wanted a personal portrait of his leader. Pharoh memorized me, okaying having his picture done. I patched together this little work from the descriptive PR biog. There aren't any good portraits extant. "
"Why bring it to me?"
"But, chief! You memorized me when I memorized you that-"
"I did? Oh, yeah. Well, I'm busy. Take it to Salinghams."

The art director veiled his creation and disappeared down the tube. Pushkyn was about to speak to Finian when he noted the gray sweat Patina on Finian's face. He demanded to know whether Finian was ill.
" Nothing, nothing's wrong," said Finian, shivering, wildly curious. The image in the portrait burned into Finian's skull. It was that of a

florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed eyes. Tightening his nerves, Finian said, "Pushkyn, let me lay it out. I got to have the fee. I need it to find the prototype of the TTIC girl. I used to know her.
A visorphone glowed. Pushkyn slapped the command button. A paIe man danced up and down on the screen.
"Chief, chief, it's a breakthrough, a breakthrough! We turned up the TTIC pilot plant just an hour ago. Molecular triangulation. My God, sir, it's a miracle of deception. Manhattan! The prison! An old, run-down distillery company building in the worst stews of-- He consulted a paper. "Parkave, that's the place."
Listening transfixed, Pushkyn started, slid his gaze to Finian and snarled at the screen, "Oh, boy, is your fat in the fire. Call me back." He shut off and squinted at Finian, whose mind churned. "You were talking?"
Finian swallowed hard. "Pushkyn, I must find out what's happened to the girl they made into the TTIC prototype. If they've changed her they've done wrong. She was sweet and desirable. They've made her all soft and disgusting., Like marshmallow."
"The new TTIC broad? You were hot for her once, that it?"
"That's it. I was only holding back the camera so you'd pay me. Give me a chance!"
"Think we run a sniveling charity?" Pushkyn's sweeping gesture encompassed the heavens and the pulsing, overpopulated smog banks beneath. "We gotta keep the plant running! Create demand every minute! Off with the old woman! On with the new! The old woman, she smells, she's out of date! We got a crusade here at Panpublix! We got a holy mission! You want the plant wheels to stop like they put sand in them? While we take care of your personal problems? Don't be a jerkola. Like to argue about the fee? I'll call up the guards again."
Something akin to a cool rush of air swept Finian's brain.
"Then I'll find her without the fee, Lyman."
"Hah-hah, sure. Big independent operator, big millionaire. Go get psyched and lose those hostile tendencies. Don't rock the world, she don't rock so good. Everybody's happy, you be happy. Go grub and be happy."
"I'm not happy. All of a sudden I'm not happy, if people like you make the only girl I ever fell in love with obsolete."

"Get out, chummo. I don't like you anymore. You're dangerous."
Finian Smith nodded crisply. "I could very well be." And left.

As Finian left the Panpublix building he heard a menacing hiss. He tried to dodge the rainbow spray. Too late.
His clothing was soon soaked with a noxious admixture of water, special nitrites and phosphorous compounds shot into the air by the underground sprinkler system.
At the levacar station he finally controlled his anger. How petty they could be, to order the lawns sprinkled just then.
Waiting passengers moved away and made rude remarks about his smell. Finian found himself sole occupant of the front car on the ride down the Philadelphia spur.
The enforced loneliness gave him a chance to organize his muddled thoughts and decide what course of action he had to pursue concerning Dolly Novotny.
Two facts he possessed. What they meant, he didn't know.
A likely place to find her was the TTIC pilot plant on Manhattan, the prison island. Still, he was certain to have a rough time getting onto the island and into the plant after that. With few resources at his disposal it might be better to pursue the other thread a bit.
Its significance left him even more muddled. Alvah Loudermilk, TTIC chairman, had appeared at the dealer presentation, somewhat to the annoyance of his inferiors. And R. R. Pharoh, top G/S executive, hadn't been acting quite sensibly either when he permitted an oil portrait of himself to be painted. Finian had never seen a public photo of either man. Both executives were practically legendary.
Then why in the name of Galbraith did they look so much like each other?
When Finian thought on it, one cold, unpleasant word gnawed his head. Conspiracy.
A moment later his professional memory dredged up a source of proving or disproving his odd theory. What he intended to do with evidence, if any existed, he couldn't say. But he had a vague desire to be armed with a little more certainty before he sought Dolly.
An achingly musical name. Dolly, Dolly-
He remembered her so well, from summer evenings on the back

porch before Bala-Cynwyd, like the other suburbs, was swallowed in the fester of the metropolis.
Her dark hair. Her gentle eyes. Her animated mouth. And the raspberry mark, one night during an electrical storm.
She'd tentatively shared Finian's inherited ideas about their constantly obsolete world, ideas long suppressed in him and now flooding back under the double stimulus of Sprool's lecture and Pushkyn's vindictive parsimony. Dolly hadn't exactly been sympathetic. The philosophy of enduring worth was too daring even then. (Today it was sheer lunacy.) But neither had she been as adamant as most citizens. As her parents, for example. They replaced their furniture monthly with the latest G/S fiberboard laminate imitation Finnish modern modes. Good consumers, both. Then came his dismissal from the DOCs, the enforced breakup-
The levacar slowed for Bala Cynwyd. In the abstract, remodeling a woman's mind to make her the pattern to which nearly all other women in the world could conform was acceptable to Finian. When it came to the specific of changing Dolly to the marshmallow-trumpery creature looming on the screen behind Krumm, that was too much.

As he stepped off at Bala-Cynwyd, it began to rain. He hurried along beneath warped building fronts of chartreuse and electric blue extruded plastic. From a doorway a hapless bum in last year's pseudocotton sport clothes begged for three dollars for a tube of model cement to sniff. Finian shuddered and walked faster. He stopped at Abe Kane's Autosuiter, the last shop left open on the block, selected a few new clothes from the plastic catalog sheets fastened to the walls and fed his universal credit card into the slot after punching out his measurements.
A red lucite sign blinked on: Credit N.G.
Finian frowned, hit the cancel lever and tried again. The third time he tried his card was not returned.
Pushkyn! Damn the vindictive bastard.
He trudged on through the rain, never having felt so alone in his life. It was a queer sensation, the total absence of credit. Once, he remembered dimly, Pop had brought home a suit of clothes purchased with cash. It had caused a near-riot among Bala-Cynwyd burghers.
Reaching his shabby apartment, Finian changed from the effete suit, scrubbed up as best he could, packed his few belongings into a satchel

and walked back into the rain. He passed a crowd of workers from the local G/S visorphone plant. It specialized in treating receiver parts with reagents that would crack the plastic precisely eight months after installation.
A little smog had mixed with the rain, turning the street ghostly. At a corner booth Finian used his last few coins to make a toll call to the House of Sinatra in Los Angeles.
A sound truck rolled past, repeating over and over, "Gee-ess, Geeess, don't guess, it's bess-Take free shuttle at Exit 5-6 to the GIS Plazam--Gee-ess, don't-"
A dapper young man appeared on the screen, snapping his fingers."  Hiyah. What can this gasser of a full-service bank do for you, Clyde?"
Finian showed his bank identification card.
"I'd like to withdraw my balance."
The banker came back into view a moment later. "Get lost. Your balance is nonesville. Garnisheed at noon. Unperformance and nonfulfilling of verbal contract, with waiver of cooperation. You signed it, Charlie. "
"Damn it, I performed-- Finian began.
The screen had already blacked.
He staggered into the drifting smog. So Pushkyn had gone that far. Just for the sake of meanness. Well, Finian Smith would show the whole rotten bunch. They had angered him now. He wasn't quite witless, not yet.
Gee-ess, Gee-ess, it's bess came a lonely bellow. The polluted smog made Finian cough. His eyes smarted as he turned his pockets inside out.
A dollar left. Enough for a cup of coffee. No transportation. Just a single walking man in a cloud of industrial fumes and a long, empty night for thinking of Dolly.
Resolutely Finian hefted his satchel and started out to walk to Missouri.

Thirty-six days later Finian staggered into the National Record Office in Rolla. Thirty-six frightening, alarming, eye-opening, solitary, transfiguring days they had been, too.  

Days of dodging robot levacars whose spot beams hunted him in the shadows beneath the elevated turnpikes, seeking to arrest him for pedestrianship.
Days of remembering his pop. And nights too. Especially nights, thinking as he lay under a berry bush half-starved and chilly, how Pop had enjoyed prizefights, antisocial, uncooperative prizefights. How young Finian had been dragged to lonely boxcars or dim garages where furtive men watched the sport before it was finally stamped out in the name of bland humanity.
The world too was one bland custard, blandly happy. Except not really, as Finian, horrified, discovered.
No plant could function at total efficiency, at complete peak year after year. A low percentage of chronic unemployment had never been whipped by the cyclic theorists. Strange wild caravans of men and wives and children, human wolves almost, passed Finian occasionally on red-leafed back roads in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He almost fell into the hands of one such band. Thereupon he decided he must possess a weapon of self-defense at all costs. His belly he could protect by shoveling in wild berries and an occasional stolen chunk of honeycomb. But his life, against such a seething pack of wild creatures as he had fled from on that lonely road, needed more dependable protection.
Difficult problem. Under law, weapons were prohibited except upon special occasions. What necessity for weapons when all was pleasant cooperation?
Yet the G/S guards carried weapons. So did the TTIC internal force. Finian was beginning to believe he knew why that might be so. Too early to tell, however. And the other problem pressed him to concentration upon it.
Weapon devotees were even more suspect than pedestrians in the lonely country between metropolises. Occasionally Finian glimpsed a wire compound, acres and acres, against the sunburned horizon. Manhattan Prison was too far for local DOCs to send recalcitrant Hoosier or Buckeye antiobsols, so they were thrown into smaller country compounds, together with those few madmen who settled disputes with fists. Such compound inmates were described as juves, Finian remembered, passing one such wire enclosure on a white moonlit night and shuddering. He didn't recognize the term juve, but it obviously meant the middle-aged or geriatric specimens huddled within the cages, a few defiantly wearing ancient gaudy jackets with mottoes stitched on them, forgotten anarchist slogans like Pfluger's Idle Hour Pin Barons.

On the outskirts of South Bend, Finian luckily came upon an obsolescence carnival.
Several thousand people swarmed across a treeless terrain in a housing project smash. Motorized work gangs stood at the development's fringe, waiting to set up new prefab Moorish Manors to replace obsolete Five-Bedroom Geneva ChAteaux.
Finian infiltrated the wild carnival crowd, ripping draperies and smashing furniture with feigned laughter ringing from his lips. When the carnival wore itself out near dawn and the work gangs rolled in through clouds of soy-fuel smoke, Finian filched a shiny flick-blade knife from a Boy Scout chopping up a last slab of plastic plaster and lath.
The Scout shrieked for the DOCs on duty. Finian was away and running through a hydroponic cornfield before he could be caught.
Now, dressed in his only presentable suit, last year's G/S Nubby ,Oppenheimer, he flashed his personal identification card before the computer grid in the empty green marble rotunda of the National Record Office. Personal identity was one quantity Pushkyn couldn't revoke.
Finian felt his fingers tingle as the grid scanned the card.
"Investigator Smith, Bond Number PA-5006, you are recognized."
"Permission to examine ownership statements for corporations over one billion, please."
"What year?" buzzed the mechanical voice.
"Not certain," Finian replied. "Could be as far back as 1980 or even 1970. "
"Second tier from lowest level. Tube nine, your left."
It gave Finian a weird sensation, plummeting in the airtube and realizing he was dropping eighty stories into the depths of the nation's largest insane asylum. But legal transactions had proliferated so in the past decades, as had neurotic behavior, that only a combined institution and record office was feasible for saving space and offering a lessthan-fatal end for hopeless maniacs.
The reading room below ground smelled of mold. Gray block walls

heightened the unpleasant mood. Finian sat at the call-out console. He manipulated the controls and spoke into the unit:
"Let me have the volume covering Goods/Service corporation for-ah-1974, please."
Several minutes passed. A door slid aside. A white male, perhaps seventy, with yellow-rimmed lackluster eyes and a lantern jaw, shuffled in and waited with docile manner. The creature wore a seedy twill uniform, anciently cut.
"What do you have on any asset transfers for Goods/Services,',, please?" Finian asked.
The elderly gentleman did not so much as blink. He hesitated only a moment as the index system in his sick skull, instilled by hypnolearning, turned over record after invisible record. Finally he said vacantly, "No asset transfers."
"Nothing in the way of stock, even?"
"No asset transfers, no asset transfers.
"Thank you, that's all."
But the man had already departed, needing no thanks. Finian turned to the console again, wondering whether he could endure as many days as it might take:
"Let me have the volume covering Goods/Services corporation for 1975. "

A total of eighteen hours went by, relieved only by three short naps above ground, Finian sleeping in a magnolia bush on Rolla's outskirts, before he found what he wanted.
He'd worked through Goods/Services from its 1969 inception to 1997, - interviewing assorted madmen and women who shuffled in, reeled off figures and names or lack of them, then shuffled back out. Asset transfers exhausted itself as a lead. He tried register of directorship as well as deposition of tangible real-estate sale. Useless, useless. Only then did it slip back.
-In some dim time in the past-Pushkyn had mentioned it once public stock of G/S had been called off the market.
Once more he began with a different set of volumes, working his way down the years. In 1992 he located it: All certificates dedeemed.
The scent overpowered the must of the underground box like the

smell of blood. He called out the volume covering Things to Come Incorporated for the same year. It was a naturalized Japanese weighing close to three hundred pounds.
one month after the G/S redemption came a callback by the board of TTIC. Finian almost wished the poor Japanese could appreciate tea. He'd have bought him a bucket, had he the money.
Tensely his fingers flew to the console.
"Two volumes, please. For 1992 and 1993. Covering Flotations without tangible assets."
When 1992 arrived (a mulatto with his face fixed in a perpetual grin) Finian was disappointed. Nothing. The volume for 1993 (a strikingly voluptuous red-haired girl who had eyes that made him think hauntingly of Dolly) was another case entirely. Finian trembled:
"Give me what you have on holding companies, please."
The third was it, the redhead staring through him:
"Holders Limited. Ten thousand shares privately issued."
Finian was on his feet, sweating, his empty belly achurn. "Officers, please. "
"Chairman of the board, Alvah Pharoh."
"There must be some mistake. Uh-recheck, please. What is the name?"
"Full legal name Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh."

A florid old gentleman with dewlaps and blue, vaguely crossed-by
heaven!
Finian almost forgot to return the volume to its detention cell after he got the names of the other registered corporate executives, which meant nothing to him. But Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh most certainly did.
Finian wondered, as he left the National Record building and turned his face east again, what had possessed the old man to think it safe to appear occasionally as head of both companies. Not that he appeared often, mind you. The painting must have been a slip. So too the appearance on the hydrofoiler, displeasing his underlings. Senility? Senility and a strength that had refused to completely drain away, as the dewlaps lengthened?
Hungry and tattered though he was, Finian felt renewed as he threw himself into the weary tramp back to Manhattan. The flick-blade knife armed him. So did the knowledge that even the most mighty, even

those who kept the plant running at all costs, including the cost of sloth, could occasionally slip.
And they still had Dolly.



Ahead in the gloomy purple twilight, giant rats were squealing after blood.
Quickening his step, Finian unshipped the flick knife. Making headway was hard. This particular section of the Hudson Bluffs National Dump was a miniature mountain range of discarded but eminently serviceable--except for the usual engineered-to-fail tubes and cracked cabinets-solido sets. To the east behind the rubble the towers of Manhattan Prison thrust into the darkening sky.
Finian walked rapidly away from the squee-squee of the rats. He'd glimpsed a pack of them earlier, down by the Tunnel at the far end of the hundred-thousand- acre junk tract. They were nearly three feet long from drinking the waste spewed out by the pharmaceutical factories upriver. Hoping to avoid a meeting with needly fangs, Finian was suddenly arrested by a fresh sound.
A human voice, in fright.
He doubled back in his tracks, cold sweat all over him. The vitaminized beasts were attacking a real person!
Finian rounded a solido heap. A little wisp-haired balloon of a man in a ragged gray smock was backed against a trash peak, trying vainly to swing at three of the rats, armed only with a plastic leg broken from a solido console. The man's left trouser leg was shredded, blackshining with blood. The blood maddened the rats. They danced and snapped and squee-squeed and made the little man even more pale..
Finian snatched up a solido cabinet and heaved. One of the rats yipped, turned and scuttled at Finian like a small furry tank. Shaking, Finian stood his ground. He tried to dodge the creature's leap but was not agile enough. Hellish teeth sank into his arm.
Finian jammed his flick knife into the smelly hair at the base of the rat's brain. Squirting blood like a fountain, the rat flipped over in the air and gave a death squee. Its comrades received solid whacks between the eyes from the other man. They turned tail and vanished.
"Let me see that arm," said the man, a filthy specter with moist,

disappointed eyes. "Oh, not good at all. Come along. I'm a doctor. Humphrey Cove."
Finian gaped as he was led along the bluff. "A doctor? In the National Dump?"
"I live here. Never mind, I'll explain later. I have a shack. Hurry, we don't want those rat toxins to run through you. I think I have immunization. Oh, I was really done for until you came along."
The small doctor giggled as he hustled Finian along. Finian was not too sure he approved of his would-be savior. In spite of Dr. Cove's rather pitiful mien, there was a certain unsteadiness in his wet eyes. He clucked and talked to himself as he led the way to a ramshackle structure nearly the size of a small private dwelling, constructed solely of panels from solido consoles jerry-rigged together with wire and other scrap materials.
"No one comes here. No humans. Only the littersweep convoys from up and down the coast, all mech-driven. The only people I ever talk with are the poor juves in the prison. What's your name? What are you doing here?"
At the hovel entrance Cove suddenly halted, stared at Finian and turned pale.
"Did you come to arrest - ?"
Finian shook his head. "I came to get into Manhattan."
"Via the Dumps?" Cove blinked suspiciously. "There's the Tunnel. "
"To use the Tunnel, you have to be a priest going in for last rites. Or a coroner or a psychiatry student. Or have a DOC pass. I watched the Tunnel three hours." Suddenly Finian had an impulse to trust this odd little person: "I have no pass. I'll be entering the prison illegally.
"Well, then! Come inside, do come inside!"

Names were exchanged again, Cove having forgotten he'd given his. From behind a triple stack of ancient medical texts Cove said he'd rescued from dump piles, the doctor produced a frowsy leather-plas diagnostic kit. He clamped the analyzer to Finian's upper arm and switched on the battery. A whir. A moment later the proper Medication had been pressure-sprayed through Finian's epidermal cells.
Cove watched with proud glowing eyes, saying as he unstrapped the unit:  "A miracle I found this kit, I'll tell you. Three years ago. The only persons who use it are the poor juves. No regular medical help for them, I'm afraid. So I've a skiff. Actually an old levacar inverted. I paddle across once a month after dark." He giggled. "The DOCs at the Tunnel post would psych me if I got caught. But I feel I'm doing my bit to keep the antiobsols content in their unhappiness."
Through a rift in the wall Cove's moist eyes sought the darkening towers. His voice was quickly vengeful.
"I'd like to see those buildings fall to ash. Margarita, ah, poor Margarita. " He whipped his head around, eyes almost as vicious as those of the rats. "Who are you? If this is all a clever trap to smoke me out-"
"No trap," Finian assured him. "I'll tell you about it. But do you have any food?"
Cove nodded and fetched a brown gallon pharmaceutical bottle, instructing Finian to drink.
"Protein and vitamins. Distill it myself from the drug sludge in the river. After you drink I may or may not give you one of the soy bars I get from the juves. When their wives bear children, it's the only way they can pay, you know. They're very proud, always pay. "
Cove squatted with difficulty, an oddly savage little man in the fading light.
"Whether I let you have a soy bar depends on your story. If you're an enemy, I can run away and leave you to wander the Dumps at night. You won't last long with the rats, being a stranger."
"There's a woman over on that island I have to find," said Finian and launched out.
As he recounted his tale, careful not to become too emotional about it, he noticed a growing excitement in Cove's damp eyes. Finally, when he had concluded, Cove leaped up.
"Capital, Smith, that's capital. Let me help. Let me ferry you across.
Finian smiled grudgingly. "Okay. I was prepared to swim it."
"The sludge would poison you before you got halfway."
"What's your stake in this, Cove? I mean, this food pays me back for the rats."
Cove's little eyes were miserable.
"Margarita. My wife. She died over there."

Painfully the story came out, dredged from an unhappy past:
Cove had been a plastic surgeon by specialty, in the employ of TTIC at its Bangor Personality Salon. But a quirk in his nature made him rebel against the work, permitted him to fall prey to dangerous Galbraither notions. His wife had informed on him.
Cove discovered it before the T71C police could arrest him. He fled to the outskirts of Bangor, hiding there in the woods while a few reluctant friends supplied him with food. TTIC industrial police combed the woods with talk horns, threatening to psych his wife into antiobsol attitudes if he didn't surrender.
"The filth!" Cove rocked on his haunches. "I thought it was a trick, a lever. I ran away. Margarita, poor thing, was on their side. She couldn't help what she did. She came of a respected family. TTIC middle management. But a year later I found out. They did it anyway. Oh, they smile and smile and treat the mob kindly. But underneath, when they're opposed-I learned Margarita had been sentenced to Manhattan. It took me another nine months to get here and find means of crossing. By that time she'd died of pneumonia. No antibiotics allowed the juves, you see. Juves are worthless. She died." Cove rocked and rocked, wild-eyed. "Died, died."
"Dr. Cove, will you help me get across?"
"Of course, of course. But to hunt that pilot plant, a knife won't be much good. The moment you're discovered they'll set on you like wild dogs."
"Then I'll need something else."
Finian's brain ran rapidly with his career with G/S. He recalled Leveranz, an unfortunate operative charged with a dangerous penetration of the TTIC Marketing Office in Beirut.
"I knew a man once who was bombed. Is there anything here -?" Finian's gesture swept the shack and dump beyond. "Do you remember enough, even if we could find an explosive source, to bomb me?,
The moist eyes of Cove widened with malicious delight. "Blow them up?"
Now Finian himself felt hard and cold.
"I just might, if they've hurt her."
"Possibly we could use the charger pack from an old solido Cove was warming to the challenge. "Yes, we very well might. Extremely

miniaturized. I'd have to check the formula but I think I have a chem text in that pile. And a military medicine volume, too. " He began to tear through the books. "No anesthesia, or precious little. Perhaps I could knock you out."
"What for a trigger?" Finian questioned. He showed his mouth. "I have this empty socket where I carried a camera once."
Chortling, Cove scuffled among his belongings and produced a cardboard carton full of ivory chips of all sizes,
"Why, that ought to work, Smith. The miserable juves aren't fluoridated either. I do quite a few extractions. Imagine a plastic surgeon doing extractions! Let's see, give me a minute to find the chem text . . . "
Dr. Humphrey Cove unearthed the text in two minutes. The rest took four days.
Finian suffered excruciatingly, especially during the operation. Cove kept smacking him on the head with a solido leg when the pain grew too hideous. Finian dug his nails into his palms and thought of murmurous summer evenings on the back porch in Bala-Cynwyd, and vowed in his pain-streaked mind the hurt was worth it if only he had a means to strike at them if they'd hurt Dolly, his own Dolly.
When he was ready to enter the prison, his left foot flesh carried a small capsule that would detonate an explosive force when the yellowing tooth in his dead socket was turned a proper one-half turn in its clumsily hand-chiseled housing.
An old trick, bombing. A relic of the Triple Play War. But it gave Finian a little more courage to go hunting death.

In an unpleasant mist-clammy midnight, Dr. Cove paddled the improvised skiff through the sticky penicillin waste forming a crust on the Hudson, to the dilapidated pier that once belonged to the Cunard division of G/S. Off down black, ruined streets distant reddish lights pulsed. Cove shook his hand fervently. "I hope you kill them. I hope you don't cooperate and kill them all."
. Then the skiff slithered away into the smelly broth. Finian shivered and walked.
Three blocks from the pier a ragged band of thirty-odd men and women, with a couple of malnourished youngsters hanging at the fringes, slipped out of an alley and closed around him.
They hissed and backed a terrified Finian against a polybrick wall.

The leader of the juve pack, an oldster of eighty in tapered blue denim trousers and an antiquarian jacket spangled with fake platinum stars and buckles swaggered up and down, thumbs hooked in a six-inch belt.
"Sending DOCs into the streets these days, are they, sonny?"
"I'm no DOC." Finian searched the hostile eyes for succor. There was none.
"We eat DOCs alive in the prison. They step off the guard post, we swallow 'em up and chew 'em to pieces, sonnyboy."
"A DOC stew tonight! Oh, wunnerful!" piped a seven-year-old.
"Scream a little for us, will you please?" said the aging juve with a smile, shuffling forward.
Finian thought of the flick knife and whipped it out. Another sibilant hiss ran from mouth to mouth as the blade caught the distant red glow.
"Look, don't kill me. See this? It's a knife, a real knife. You people can recognize a genuine useful antique twentieth-century artifact, can't you? Nonobsolescent. Nonobsolescent, see? Still works?"
A touched stud and the blade retracted. Another touch and it sprang out.
"Would I be a DOC and carry this?"
The juve leader had an almost religious expression on his face. His hand shook as he extended it.
"Uh-could you-leave me see?"
Finian thrust it into his hand.
"Yours. Listen, take it." A dark, malicious streak forced out the next words. "Could you make more? Why don't you try? Now you have a pattern. Then you wouldn't have to wait for the DOCs to leave the guard post. Then a lot of you could pay them a visit."
Whispering over their icon, the juves melted into the night.

Keeping to back streets, Finian crossed Bway several blocks above a strange complex of glittering red lights. Cove had told him it was the prison recreation area, a kind of open plaza known, unpronounceably, as Timesq. Hurrying on, he reached Parkave.
Several blocks south he saw a white chain working its way across the ruined thoroughfare. Approaching in the cover of shadows, he

gazed up at a glistening glass structure with windows painted over. Then he looked down to the street again.
The white chain came apart into individual females, double-timing along between a cordon of TTIC industrial guards. One chain rushed west, another east, vanishing into the building. Finian skulked, grinning mirthlessly, estimating the time to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven at night. Protected, the pilot plant nursing staff was changing shift. Cove had told Finian about the nurses, and also what might be done. He hurried back toward Bway.
The recreation area was curiously deserted of juves at this hour. Finian wondered whether the flick knife was really that much of a talisman. It must be, since he'd seen no juves after the first encounter. Cove said there were several hundred thousand on the island. Perhaps they'd gone underground to the ruined transportation tubes.
Timesq featured open shops subsidized out of national taxes as a sop to the theory of rehabilitation . . . antiques, genuine meatburgers, bizarre novelty stores where articles were actually displayed on open counters instead of behind automated windows. But the shops were actually intended to pander to the vices of the juves. Else why would Finian have been able to slip so easily into a deserted costumer's?
Half starved, his shanks frozen by wind Whistling under the ancient white uniform and the musty gray wig prickling his ears, Finian dozed the daylight hours away in an alley, blearily on the alert for juves. He saw one large pack passing a block away, several hundred on the run. They didn't see him. Otherwise he was undisturbed until night fell again.
Midway between the hotel which apparently served as nurses' quarters and the ruined liquor building, Finian ducked into one of the double-timing white chains as the eleven o'clock shift changed. He hoped his male shoes wouldn't be too noticeable But the street was dark. The hundred or so nurses were on dangerous extra-pay duty from the way they rushed along between the guard cordons, not speaking, intent only on gaining the safety of the pilot plant.
As in all hospitals, lights burned low in the marble mausoleum of a lobby as the nurses fanned out to the various tube banks. Finian spied a rest room next to a boarded-up newsstand, slipped inside and waited half an hour out of sight.
Then he returned to the lobby. A late nurse was hurrying to the tubes. Outside, the TTIC guard cordons were no more. Finian ran up

behind the nurse, thinking smugly that it had been easy so far. He'd remembered to touch no doors, in case there was a sweat-print check.

The nurse gave a frightened kkk sound as Finian looped his elbow around her neck.
"Where's the prototype kept, lady? Tell me or I'll crack you in half. "
"Tw-twelve," came the panicky answer. "I can't breathe!"
"You won't ever again unless you take me up there."
"It's not my floor-"
"With lights out, who'll know? There's the tube. Inside! Don't speak to anyone. Don't even raise an eyebrow, or I'll throttle you."
In the deserted tube the alarmed woman, elderly, eyed Finian's wig, all too obvious in the full illumination.
"What are you, some kind of degenerate?"
"Yes, but not the kind you think."
Finian laughed, feeling frightened and brave all at once.
On twelve, isolated pools of radiance interspersed vast islands of aseptic black. Three nurses clustered at a floor desk to the right. Finian's terrified victim led him to the left.
Double doors loomed at the far corridor end. Why was it so easy? Finian felt vague alarm as he shoved the old lady through the doors. The isolation, that must be it, he reasoned. The improbable isolation here on Manhattan where no investigator would dream of looking for a pilot plant.
Still, Pushkyn's people had discovered it by molecular-triangulation sonics. Were they penetrating even now?
In the chamber a white blur stretched naked in the warm, purified air. Finian held tight to the old nurse's arm and approached the dreaming girl. The raspberry mark stood out black in the faint gleam from the half-open door of an attached dispensary. There encephalographs and other equipment winked, chromed and cold.
"Dolly?" Finian's lips felt like shreds of paper, crinkled dry. "Dolly, hear me?"
A vacuous mewing sound came from the girl. She twisted deeper in silk coverlets. "Wake her," Finian ordered.
"You're a madman! I don't know how. I'm on six, neurosearch."
He shoved her rudely. "There must be a chart in the dispensary."
Finian had to threaten to cuff her several times before she trem-

blingly translated the medical Latin in the last twelve thick casebooks on the dispensary shelf. From the section marked Emergency Antidotal Procedures she read out the correct mix of ampoules from the wallwide freezer.
Finian was acutely conscious of the silence of the great dark room, the whisper of Dolly's breathing from the bed, the rush of controlled air in and out of blowers. Time was moving inexorably. What he would do when and if he wakened Dolly he was not precisely sure. All he could tell was that he must talk to her. Talking to her once was what he had worked and tramped and almost died for.
The pressuredermic barrel gleamed in the light. Finian snatched it from the nurse.
"If you've tricked me-I don't take to hurting women, but I will I"
"I swear to Loudermilk I didn't. Only please don't hurt me."
"In there," Finian instructed. He latched the dispensary door behind her. There was no visorphone inside. He would be safe a moment longer.

With shaking hands he pressed the instilling cup near the raspberry mark, and plunged.
Slowly, slowly, the naked girl rolled over, lids fluttering drowsily. Finian crouched by the bed. His hand knotted up in the silken sheets. He'd turned up a rheostat to provide a gleam for judging her eyes. Doll-blue, they flew open-
Blank, unknowing.
"Why, hello there." The voice tormented him. It was so slow, so silly. "Whatever are you doing in Dream's bedroo- Dream's bed--
Like a broken mechanism the voice ran down. One of her voluptuous hands crept tentatively toward his. "Finian?"
"Oh, my God, my God, Dolly."
He buried his head on her shoulder, almost crying.
When he had controlled himself sufficiently to talk, he asked her what it was like.
"Not too terrible." Dolly's voice now, not her body but for the mark, only her voice trying painfully to re-form old associations ' "When we moved . . . Well, it was luck and a little moral compromise that snared me a chance to be the prototype."
"Do you remember anything? I mean, when you're under?"

"A little. A very little. Far down in my head, like the bottom of a well. I won't in a week or two, so they say."
"It's wrong, Dolly! It's wrong for them to change you!"
She laughed tolerantly, not a little sadly.
:'Those wild old ideas of yours again."
'I love you, Dolly. I want you the way you were."
"Impossible, Fin. My body's changed." One hand lifted the hem of the sheet. "It's part of the price for being the prototype. I nearly died when my parents made us move. I wasn't strong. I'm not much stronger now. This--a gesture to the room--when they're finished with me, in a week or two, I'll never be able to go back. The prototype can't. Other women can, the change isn't so deep when it's purchased. But in return I'll receive more money than most women ever see. I wish you hadn't come here, Fin. I'd nearly got over you."
"Take out the contacts, Dolly. Then tell me it's all over."
"Fin, I can't. They're permanent." She clutched his arm. "If you're caught here-"
Rapidly he told her of what he'd learned at the National Record Office. "Some kind of conspiracy, Dolly. Awful, awful. Hell, I'm not bright enough to fathom what it means. Maybe Pop could have. I'm just certain I want you out before this crazy double cross blows right up. "
Dolly hesitated. "I'm not sure. My mind's full of someone else-"
"Don't let him frighten you," said a voice. "He's done anyway."
Caught, heartbeat wild and racing, Finian turned as all the lights blazed up in the room. Dolly shrieked and burrowed under the sheet.
Outside the closing panel Finian glimpsed a phalanx of armed TTIC police. The three men inside moved swiftly toward him. Sprool and Pushkyn shoulder to shoulder, and shuffling behind, Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh with his dewlaps jiggling and his blue, vaguely crossed eyes filled with fright.

"We should of killed the jerko," Pushkyn offered.
"Be quiet." Sprool breathed tightly, thinking hard.
"No one listens to me," Alvah Robert Loudermilk Pharoh whined. "No one listens anymore even though I'm the chief executive of Holders. "
"You simpleton!" Sprool spun on him, barely able to control his fury. "You incredible wreck! I wish Pushkyn and I had retired you to

a senility farm long ago. If your addled brain could have understood it wasn't safe for you to go around making public appearances! Having your portrait painted!"
"Holders is my firm!"
"It was. Before your brains turned to mashed potatoes," said Pushkyn.
"You wouldn't have penetrated the pilot plant, would you, Pushkyn?" Finian was suddenly enraged, and beginning to understand. "Even though you knew where it was."
. Pushkyn sneered. "Whaddya think, put sand in the wheels? Always the funny finko, hub? If it wasn't for me, Sprool and a few others on both sides, running the show while this old bonebag sits on the Holders board--
"He means to say," Sprool put in, somewhat sadly, "we have done our best to keep the plant running. You, Fin, have done your best to stop it."
"How did you find me?" Finian demanded.
Sprool shrugged. "See-ray."
"I never touched a doorknob anyplace!"
"There is a false socket in your head. Every person entering or leaving this plant is rayed for dental coding. Yours failed to check. It took a few minutes to collect Pushkyn. And the old man. I want him to see the fruits of his senility. We vertijetted."
"Ah, damn," said Finian, impotently.
"I very nearly admire you," Sprool told him. "In proper circumstances you might have filled a responsible position with Holders. Do you realize what a difficult and exciting enterprise it is to run this world, Fin?"
"I realize you sold everybody a bill of goods, kept them soft, sucked their guts out."
"Would you rather have howling millions out of work and rioting?"
"Yes! Yes. I mean, no. I don't want people to starve, but this way-I'd rather have some guts in life. Trouble and guts."
"Trouble we have, Finian," Sprool returned with a sigh. "Do you know what we saw as we came over the Tunnel in the vertijet? The DOC post in ruins. The juves are breaking out, Fin, actually breaking out. Most of them are dead, of course. But several hundred escaped. There's a pitched battle going on in Jersey this minute. The juves will die as soon as I give the mobilization order. A few may get away and start in other cities, inciting riot, pulling down what we've built so carefully to ensure everyone a decent life. Both TTIC and G/S are alerting industrial guards for trouble such as this. We'll also have to apply considerable pressure for the DOCs to move. But we'll win. We gave up war long ago, Fin. We won't permit another to start."
"The creeps had knives!" Pushkyn bellowed. "Real knives! You stupid, did you-?"

"I think so," Finian looked up. "I hope so."
Again Sprool sighed, almost sympathetically.
"Fin, Fin. You seem to think we're evil men. We're not. We're businessmen. We didn't begin the system. We only inherited it. But you've never understood, have you? Always, I think, you resented us as a result of what your father, taught you. " Sprool was white now, impassioned. "We had no choice! Either we maintained calm or-"
"You changed Dolly! I don't understand your theories beyond that!
Sprool outshouted him: "The alternative to a rocked boat is chaos!"
"There's got to be another way."
"Go to the guard post! See the mangled bodies and then say that."
"I don't care, Sprool! I'm taking Dolly off the island."
"Creep, you won't set one foot from here."
Finian peeled his lips back.
"Look at the tooth, Lyman. You know what was there before." He waggled his left foot. "I'm bombed. The tooth will set it off. Either instantaneously or on timed delay. Stop me from walking out with Dolly and find out."
"Salinghams wanted my portrait-" the florid old gentleman began.
"Bluffer! Lousy, rotten bluffer!" Screaming, Pushkyn rushed forward.
Sprool's hand flew up.
"Don't! I believe him."
For the first time Finian Smith saw Sprool perspiring.
"He's the kind to do it, Pushkyn. I don't want slaughter here, too. So you keep quiet and remember who's senior troubleshooter."
Cold, shrewd lights glittered in Sprool's eyes. "Fin, what guarantee can you offer if we release this woman to you, allow her to go with you under duress?"
"No."  Heads swung, startled. Dolly went on slowly:
"I think-I want-"
A disgusted sigh came from Sprool's lips. He controlled himself. "Very well, Fin. If we permit you to leave, what guarantees do you offer that you'll cause no further trouble? We'll have our hands full quelling the disturbances the juves will start. It hasn't got too far out of hand yet. But if I don't give the mobilization order, it could go nationwide. Even to other countries. I have to be around to stop it. It can be done, even though I don't much like removing the velvet glove.
"Guarantees?" said Finian. "My word. That's all."
Sprool walked quickly to the door and opened it. The threatening knot of industrial police still waited in the shadows. Finian bundled Dolly into the bedclothes and moved her toward the entrance as Sprool said, "Let him pass."
"I won't stand for it!" Pushkyn leaped forward and landed a solid one that rocked Finian on his heels. Then Sprool snapped his fingers. The TTIC police carried the foam-lipped Pushkyn into the dispensary.
Trembling, suddenly cold and trembling clear through, Finian made an effort to keep his face an inflexible mask as he guided Dolly through the aisle between the guards. He hoped she wouldn't question him, wouldn't relent until they were free. Sick fear engulfed him as he touched the tip of his tongue gingerly to the fake tooth while the tube shot down.
Dolly leaned on his shoulder, her hair warm. She made frightened mewing sounds. Finian shepherded her into the night, began the long, terrible walk to the Tunnel, hoping she wouldn't come to her senses until they reached the opposite shore. In time she'd be herself again. That much he could give her even if his search had been all for nothing.
The DOC post at the Tunnel entrance was afire. Juve corpses sprawled everywhere.
Midway along the empty tunnel Finian halted. A figure capered toward them.
"Capital, oh, marvelous!" Humphrey Cove trilled, stepping over a dead DOC's openmouthed head. "Three hundred of them got out, running for their lives. I think it will spread this time. The local camps, the jobless-full-scale! There are so many really lovely pockets of resistance!"

"Shut up and walk." Finian pushed Cove back toward the Jersey side .
"What in heaven's name is wrong with you, Smith?"
"Armed." Finian whispered it so Dolly couldn't hear. "A guy hit me, I'm armed. Can't have more than half an hour before I blow. Cove, don't you say anything. When we're outside, you take care of this girl, understand? Watch out for her until she recovers. She's free of them, I bought her that much."
They passed a shrilling visorphone in a lighted kiosk at the far Tunnel mouth. A DOC alert was being scheduled for Philadelphia. Juve gangs were forming in the streets there, handmade knives were appearing. The mask was off. Full mobilization of combined TTIC and G/S industrial police was being ordered by Sprool. Cove clapped his hands.
Rain was falling as Finian led Dolly out of the Tunnel. Three DOC vertijets from the south were homing on Manhattan, agleam with emergency lights. Dolly murmured. Finian lifted her chin and stared into the doll-blue eyes a moment, conscious of the bomb working, working toward detonation in the flesh of his foot. He couldn't even feel the death seed. Wasn't that a joke?
"Cove'll take care of you," Finian said. He kissed her. Bewildered, Dolly called for him as he turned and walked rapidly away, not seeing the rain or the littered bodies.
He had gone but a dozen steps when something felled him and brought the dark.

Pain, incredible pain was his first sensation.
Then a warmth of flesh. Dolly bending over him. Through a slatted section of solido panel he saw vertijets winking over Manhattan. Finian wriggled, then struggled up, screaming:
"My leg . . . what happened?"
Crying, Dolly pressed him down.
"Cove did it. Cove operated. He hates them, Fin. He hates TTIC. Something about his wife. He said you ought to live, even with-I wish my mind would straighten out. I can't say things all right yet."
Finian fought the terror, the dull-fire agony. "Where is he?"
Dolly shuddered. "He packed it in a valise and ran for the Tunnel."
In a burst of fire the center of Manhattan Prison blew up.

When the reverberations and Dolly's screams had stopped, the two of them clung together, listening to the hysterical automatic sirens at both ends of the island wailing as they hadn't wailed since the Triple Play War. Confused, hurting, glad of life, guilty and fearsomely glad and yet sickened by the suddenly swarming sky full of vertijets, their flaring emergency lights promising violence across the land, violence maybe everywhere, Finian clutched the girl to his shoulder and stared at the inferno of the prison island.
"My God, I think I started a war, Dolly. Sprool said-I didn't mean to start-"
The words tore out of him, almost animal: "Is this the only way?"
Dolly sobbed. There wasn't any other answer, except the sirens multiplying all around in the disrupted night.