THREE FOR TOMORROW
Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction
by
ROBERT SILVERBERG, ROGER ZELAZNY,  JAMES BLISH
With a Foreword by
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
 

MEREDITH PRESS / New York


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Contents
Editor's Introduction

Foreword - ARTHUR C. CLARKE

How It Was When the Past Went Away - ROBERT SILVERBERG

The Eve of RUMOKO - ROGER ZELAZNY

We All Die Naked - JAMES BLISH


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"HOW IT WAS WHEN THE PAST WENT AWAY"

COPYRIGHT © 1969 BY ROBERT SlLVERBERG

"THE EVE OF RUMOKO" COPYRIGHT © 1969 BY ROGER ZELAZNY

"WE ALL DIE NAKED" COPYRIGHT © 1969 BY JAMES BLISH

 

 
All rights reserved. No part of this book in excess of five hundred words may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

No character in these stories is intended to represent any actual person; all the incidents of the stories are entirely fictional in nature.

First edition

 

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-85419

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR MEREDITH PRESS 

VAN REES PRESS • NEW YORK


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Editor's Introduction
The three stories presented here were written specially for this book. They are the outcome of an unusual sort of literary challenge. Arthur C. Clarke, one of the world's best-known science-fiction authors, whose works include the novel Childhood's End and the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey, was asked to write a brief essay setting forth a general theme for a science-fiction story. Clarke's theme then was offered to Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, and James Blish, three award-winning science-fiction writers; each was told to use it as the basis for a short novel, and each was given no hint of the approaches the others were taking. The result is a trio of stories that differ markedly in style, technique, and tone, while demonstrating in three individual ways the uncomfortable possibilities that the future may hold for us.


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Foreword
With increasing technology goes increasing vulnerability; the more Man "conquers" (sic) Nature, the more prone he becomes to artificial catastrophe. The last few years have brought a series of previews: the Torrey Canyon oil tanker and the Santa Barbara oil slick, the blackout of the northeastern United States, the thalidomide disaster, the tobacco and automobile industries…

Some even more fascinating prospects are now looming up ahead. Thousand-seater jets, sonic bangs, really big geodesic domes, the Pill, nuclear-power stations (how many people know that, a year later, the AEG was still trying to get a good look at the inaccessible object that had wrecked the multimillion-dollar Fermi reactor?) provide material for some gloomy thoughts.

But the most terrifying prospects are those which involve psychological, not only technological, factors. Remember the "Mad Bomber" of the New York subway. Think of all the airliners that have been destroyed by explosives in the baggage compartment. (There are many more attempts at aerial sabotage than the public ever hears about.) And don't forget that clean-cut, all-American sniper in the University of Texas clock tower.

How is the society of the future going to protect itself from an increasing spectrum of ever more horrendous disasters, particularly those made possible by new devices (high-powered lasers? drugs??) in the hands of madmen? To put the matter in one sentence: When will some Lee Harvey Oswald attempt to assassinate a city—or a world?

Of course, miscellaneous disasters have been the stock-in-trade of science fiction since its earliest days. (One of my favorites remains the Saturday Evening Post story about the giant new skyscraper that collapsed because the occupants of the—watertight!—penthouse left the bathroom tap running when they went on vacation.) Everyone is familiar with the Dr. Strangelove/Fail-Safe theme; few realize that such things could happen even in a peaceful, unified world society.

I would like to see more of those possibilities explored—if only in the hope that, by so doing, we can avoid them.

 

ARTHUR C. CLARKE


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How It Was When the Past Went Away
by
Robert Silverberg

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Robert Silverberg's first science-fiction stories were published in 1953; since then he has written a score of novels and hundreds of short stories, as well as editing anthologies and producing a number of books on scientific subjects. His recent novels include Thorns, The Masks of Time, The Time Hoppers, Hawksbill Station, and The Man in the Maze. He received the Hugo award in 1956, and was President of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1967-68.


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How It Was When the Past Went Away
The day that an antisocial fiend dumped an amnesifacient drug into the city water supply was one of the finest that San Francisco had had in a long while. The damp cloud that had been hovering over everything for three weeks finally drifted across the bay into Berkeley that Wednesday, and the sun emerged, bright and warm, to give the old town its warmest day so far in 2003. The temperature climbed into the high twenties, and even those oldsters who hadn't managed to learn to convert to the centigrade thermometer knew it was hot. Air-conditioners hummed from the Golden Gate to the Embarcadero. Pacific Gas & Electric recorded its highest one-hour load in history between two and three in the afternoon. The parks were crowded. People drank a lot of water, some a good deal more than others. Toward nightfall, the thirstiest ones were already beginning to forget things. By the next morning, everybody in the city was in trouble, with a few exceptions. It had really been an ideal day for committing a monstrous crime.

 

On the day before the past went away, Paul Mueller had been thinking seriously about leaving the state and claiming refuge in one of the debtor sanctuaries—Reno, maybe, or Caracas. It wasn't altogether his fault, but he was close to a million in the red, and his creditors were getting unruly. It had reached the point where they were sending their robot bill collectors around to harass him in person, just about every three hours.

"Mr. Mueller? I am requested to notify you that the sum of $8,005.97 is overdue in your account with Modern Age Recre-ators, Inc. We have applied to your financial representative and have discovered your state of insolvency, and therefore, unless a payment of $395.61 is made by the eleventh of this month, we may find it necessary to begin confiscation procedures against your person. Thus I advise you—"

"—the amount of $11,554.97, payable on the ninth of August, 2002, has not yet been received by Luna Tours, Ltd. Under the Credit Laws of 1995 we have applied for injunctive relief against you and anticipate receiving a decree of personal service due, if no payment is received by—"

"—interest on the unpaid balance is accruing, as specified in your contract, at a rate of four percent per month—"

"—balloon payment now coming due, requiring the immediate payment of—"

Mueller was growing accustomed to the routine. The robots couldn't call him—Pacific Tel & Tel had cut him out of their data net months ago—and so they came around, polite blank-faced machines stenciled with corporate emblems, and in soft purring voices told him precisely how deep in the mire he was at the moment, how fast the penalty charges were piling up, and what they planned to do to him unless he settled his debts instantly. If he tried to duck them, they'd simply track him down in the streets like indefatigable process servers, and announce his shame to the whole city. So he didn't duck them. But fairly soon their threats would begin to materialize.

They could do awful things to him. The decree of personal service, for example, would turn him into a slave; he'd become an employee of his creditor, at a court-stipulated salary, but every cent he earned would be applied against his debt, while the creditor provided him with minimal food, shelter, and clothing. He might find himself compelled to do menial jobs that a robot would spit at, for two or three years, just to clear that one debt. Personal confiscation procedures were even worse; under that deal he might well end up as the actual servant of one of the executives of a creditor company, shining shoes and folding shirts. They might also get an open-ended garnishment on him, under which he and his descendants, if any, would pay a stated percentage of their annual income down through the ages until the debt, and the compounding interest thereon, was finally satisfied. There were other techniques for dealing with delinquents, too.

He had no recourse to bankruptcy. The states and the federal government had tossed out the bankruptcy laws in 1995, after the so-called Credit Epidemic of the 1980's, when for a while it was actually fashionable to go irretrievably into debt and throw yourself on the mercy of the courts. The haven of easy bankruptcy was no more; if you became insolvent, your creditors had you in their grip. The only way out was to jump to a debtor sanctuary, a place where local laws barred any extradition for a credit offense. There were about a dozen such sanctuaries, and you could live well there, provided you had some special skill that you could sell at a high price. You needed to make a good living, because in a debtor sanctuary everything was on a strictly cash basis—cash in advance, at that, even for a haircut. Mueller had a skill that he thought would see him through: he was an artist, a maker of sonic sculptures, and his work was always in good demand. All he needed was a few thousand dollars to purchase the basic tools of his trade—his last set of sculpting equipment had been repossessed a few weeks ago—and he could set up a studio in one of the sanctuaries, beyond the reach of the robot hounds. He imagined he could still find a friend who would lend him a few thousand dollars. In the name of art, so to speak. In a good cause.

If he stayed within the sanctuary area for ten consecutive years, he would be absolved of his debts and could come forth a free man. There was only one catch, not a small one. Once a man had taken the sanctuary route, he was forever barred from all credit channels when he returned to the outside world. He couldn't even get a post office credit card, let alone a bank loan. Mueller wasn't sure he could live that way, paying cash for everything all the rest of his life. It would be terribly cumbersome and dreary. Worse: it would be barbaric.

He made a note on his memo pad: Call Freddy Munson in morning and borrow three bigs. Buy ticket to Caracas. Buy sculpting stuff.

The die was cast—unless he changed his mind in the morning.

He peered moodily out at the row of glistening whitewashed just-post-Earthquake houses descending the steeply inclined street that ran down Telegraph Hill toward Fisherman's Wharf. They sparkled in the unfamiliar sunlight. A beautiful day, Mueller thought. A beautiful day to drown yourself in the bay, Damn. Damn. Damn. He was going to be forty years old soon. He had come into the world on the same black day that President John Kennedy had left it. Born in an evil hour, doomed to a dark fate. Mueller scowled. He went to the tap and got a glass of water. It was the only thing he could afford to drink, just now. He asked himself how he had ever managed to get into such a mess. Nearly a million in debt!

He lay down dismally to take a nap.

When he woke, toward midnight, he felt better than he had felt for a long time. Some great cloud seemed to have lifted from him, even as it had lifted from the city that day. Mueller was actually in a cheerful mood. He couldn't imagine why.

 

In an elegant townhouse on Marina Boulevard, The Amazing Montini was rehearsing his act. The Amazing Montini was a professional mnemonist: a small, dapper man of sixty, who never forgot a thing. Deeply tanned, his dark hair slicked back at a sharp angle, his small black eyes glistening with confidence, his thin lips fastidiously pursed. He drew a book from a shelf and let it drop open at random. It was an old one-volume edition of Shakespeare, a familiar prop in his nightclub act. He skimmed the page, nodded, looked briefly at another, then another, and smiled his inward smile. Life was kind to The Amazing Montini. He earned a comfortable $30,000 a week on tour, having converted a freakish gift into a profitable enterprise. Tomorrow night he'd open for a week at Vegas; then on to Manila, Tokyo, Bangkok, Cairo, on around the globe. In twelve weeks he'd earn his year's take; then he'd relax once more.

It was all so easy. He knew so many good tricks. Let them scream out a twenty-digit number; he'd scream it right back. Let them bombard him with long strings of nonsense syllables; he'd repeat the gibberish flawlessly. Let them draw intricate mathematical formulas on the computer screen; he'd reproduce them down to the last exponent. His memory was perfect, both for visuals and auditories, and for the other registers as well.

The Shakespeare thing, which was one of the simplest routines he had, always awed the impressionable. It seemed so fantastic to most people that a man could memorize the complete works, page by page. He liked to use it as an opener.

He handed the book to Nadia, his assistant. Also his mistress; Montini liked to keep his circle of intimates close. She was twenty years old, taller than he was, with wide frost-gleamed eyes and a torrent of glowing, artificially radiant azure hair: up to the minute in every fashion. She wore a glass bodice, a nice container for the things contained. She was not very bright, but she did the things Montini expected her to do, and did them quite well. She would be replaced, he estimated, in about eighteen more months. He grew bored quickly with his women. His memory was too good.

"Let's start," he said.

She opened the book. "Page 537, left-hand column."

Instantly the page floated before Montini's eyes. "Henry VI, Part Two," he said. "King Henry: Say, man, were these thy words? Homer: An't shall please your majesty, I never said nor thought any such matter: God is my witness, I am falsely accused by the villain. Peter: By these ten bones, my lords, he did speak them to me in the garret one night, as we were scouring my Lord of York's armour. York: Base dunghill villain, and—"

"Page 778, right-hand column," Nadia said.

"Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio is speaking:… an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling. Thou hast quarreled with a man for coughing in the street, because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not—"

"Page 307, starting fourteen lines down on the right side."

Montini smiled. He liked the passage. A screen would show it to his audience at the performance.

"Twelfth Night," he said. "The Duke speaks: Too old, by heaven. Let still the woman take an elder than herself, so wears she to him, so sways she level in her husband's heart: For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, our fancies are more giddy and unfirm—"

"Page 495, left-hand column."

"Wait a minute," Montini said. He poured himself a tall glass of water and drank it in three quick gulps. "This work always makes me thirsty."

 

Taylor Braskett, Lt. Comdr., Ret., U.S. Space Service, strode with springy stride into his Oak Street home, just outside Golden Gate Park. At 71, Commander Braskett still managed to move in a jaunty way, and he was ready to step back into uniform at once if his country needed him. He believed his country did need him, more than ever, now that socialism was running like wildfire through half the nations of Europe. Guard the home front, at least. Protect what's left of traditional American liberty. What we ought to have, Commander Braskett believed, is a network of C-bombs in orbit, ready to rain hellish death on the enemies of democracy. No matter what that treaty says, we must be prepared to defend ourselves.

Commander Braskett's theories were not widely accepted. People respected him for having been one of the first Americans to land on Mars, of course, but he knew that they quietly regarded him as a crank, a crackpot, an antiquated Minute Man still fretting about the Redcoats. He had enough of a sense of humor to realize that he did cut an absurd figure to these young people. But he was sincere in his determination to help keep America free—to protect the youngsters from the lash of totalitarianism, whether they laughed at him or not. All this glorious sunny day he had been walking through the park, trying to talk to the young ones, attempting to explain his position. He was courteous, attentive, eager to find someone who would ask him questions. The trouble was that no one listened. And the young ones—stripped to the waist in the sunshine, girls as well as boys, taking drugs out in the open, using the foulest obscenities in casual speech—at times, Commander Braskett almost came to think that the battle for America had already been lost. Yet he never gave up all hope.

He had been in the park for hours. Now, at home, he walked past the trophy room, into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, drew out a bottle of water. Commander Braskett had three bottles of mountain spring water delivered to his home every two days; it was a habit he had begun fifty years ago, when they had first started talking about putting fluorides in the water. He was not unaware of the little smiles they gave him when he admitted that he drank only bottled spring water, but he didn't mind; he had outlived many of the smilers already, and attributed his perfect health to his refusal to touch the polluted, contaminated water that most other people drank. First chlorine, then fluorides—probably they were putting in some other things by now, Commander Braskett thought.

He drank deeply.

You have no way of telling what sort of dangerous chemicals they might be putting in the municipal water system these days, he told himself. Am I a crank? Then I'm a crank. But a sane man drinks only water he can trust.

 

Fetally curled, knees pressed almost to chin, trembling, sweating, Nate Haldersen closed his eyes and tried to ease himself of the pain of existence. Another day. A sweet, sunny day. Happy people playing in the park. Fathers and children. Husbands and wives. He bit his lip, hard, just short of laceration intensity. He was an expert at punishing himself.

Sensors mounted in his bed in the Psychotrauma Ward of Fletcher Memorial Hospital scanned him continuously, sending a constant flow of reports to Dr. Bryce and his team of shrinks. Nate Haldersen knew he was a man without secrets. His hormone count, enzyme ratios, respiration, circulation, even the taste of bile in his mouth—it all became instantaneously known to hospital personnel. When the sensors discovered him slipping below the depression line, ultrasonic snouts came nosing up from the recesses of the mattress, proximity nozzles that sought him out in the bed, found the proper veins, squirted him full of dynajuice to cheer him up. Modern science was wonderful. It could do everything for Haldersen except give him back his family.

The door slid open. Dr. Bryce came in. The head shrink looked his part: tall, solemn yet charming, gray at the temples, clearly a wielder of power and an initiate of mysteries. He sat down beside Haldersen's bed. As usual, he made a big point of not looking at the row of computer outputs next to the bed that gave the latest details on Haldersen's condition.

"Nate?" he said. "How goes?"

"It goes," Haldersen muttered.

"Feel like talking a while?"

"Not specially. Get me a drink of water?"

"Sure," the shrink said. He fetched it and said, "It's a gorgeous day. How about a walk in the park?"

"I haven't left this room in two and a half years, Doctor. You know that."

"Always a time to break loose. There's nothing physically wrong with you, you know."

"I just don't feel like seeing people," Haldersen said. He handed back the empty glass. "More?"

"Want something stronger to drink?"

"Water's fine." Haldersen closed his eyes. Unwanted images danced behind the lids: the rocket liner blowing open over the pole, the passengers spilling out like autumn seeds erupting from a pod, Emily tumbling down, down, falling eighty thousand feet, her golden hair swept up by the thin cold wind, her short skirt flapping at her hips, her long lovely legs clawing at the sky for a place to stand. And the children falling beside her, angels dropping from heaven, down, down, down, toward the white soothing fleece of the polar ice. They sleep in peace, Haldersen thought, and I missed the plane, and I alone remain. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.

"It was eleven years ago," Dr. Bryce told him. "Won't you let go of it?"

"Stupid talk coming from a shrink. Why won't it let go of me?"

"You don't want it to. You're too fond of playing your role."

"Today is talking-tough day, eh? Get me some more water."

"Get up and get it yourself," said the shrink.

Haldersen smiled bitterly. He left the bed, crossing the room a little unsteadily, and filled his glass. He had had all sorts of therapy—sympathy therapy, antagonism therapy, drugs, shock, orthodox freuding, the works. They did nothing for him. He was left with the image of an opening pod, and falling figures against the iron-blue sky. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. My soul is weary of my life. He put the glass to his lips. Eleven years. I missed the plane. I sinned with Marie, and Emily died, and John, and Beth. What did it feel like to fall so far? Was it like flying? Was there ecstasy in it? Haldersen filled the glass again.

"Thirsty today, eh?"

"Yes," Haldersen said.

"Sure you don't want to take a little walk?"

"You know I don't." Haldersen shivered. He turned and caught the psychiatrist by the forearm. "When does it end, Tim? How long do I have to carry this thing around?"

"Until you're willing to put it down."

"How can I make a conscious effort to forget something? Tim, Tim, isn't there some drug I can take, something to wash away a memory that's killing me?"

"Nothing effective."

"You're lying," Haldersen murmured. "I've read about the amnesifacients. The enzymes that eat memory-RNA. The experiments with di-isopropyl fiuorophosphate. Puromycin. The—"

Dr. Bryce said, "We have no control over their operations. We can't simply go after a single block of traumatic memories while leaving the rest of your mind unharmed. We'd have to bash about at random, hoping we got the trouble spot, but never knowing what else we were blotting out. You'd wake up without your trauma, but maybe without remembering anything else that happened to you between, say, the ages of 14 and 40. Maybe in fifty years we'll know enough to be able to direct the dosage at a specific—"

"I can't wait fifty years."

"I'm sorry, Nate."

"Give me the drug anyway. I'll take my chances on what I lose."

"We'll talk about that some other time, all right? The drugs are experimental. There'd be months of red tape before I could get authorization to try them on a human subject. You have to realize—"

Haldersen turned him off. He saw only with his inner eye, saw the tumbling bodies, reliving his bereavement for the billionth time, slipping easily back into his self-assumed role of Job. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope hath he removed like a tree.

The shrink continued to speak. Haldersen continued not to listen. He poured himself one more glass of water with a shaky hand.

 

It was close to midnight on Wednesday before Pierre Gerard, his wife, their two sons, and their daughter had a chance to have dinner. They were the proprietors, chefs, and total staff of the Petit Pois Restaurant on Sansome Street, and business had been extraordinarily, exhaustingly good all evening. Usually they were able to eat about half past five, before the dinner rush began, but today people had begun coming in early—made more expansive by the good weather, no doubt—and there hadn't been a free moment for anybody since the cocktail hour. The Gerards were accustomed to brisk trade, for theirs was perhaps the most popular family-run bistro in the city, with a passionately devoted clientele. Still, a night like this was too much!

They dined modestly on the evening's miscalculations: an overdone rack of lamb, some faintly corky Chateau Beychevelle '97, a fallen souffle, and such. They were thrifty people. Their one extravagance was the Evian water that they imported from France. Pierre Gerard had not set foot in his native Lyons for thirty years, but he preserved many of the customs of the motherland, including the traditional attitude toward water. A Frenchman does not drink much water; but what he does drink comes always from the bottle, never from the tap. To do otherwise is to risk a diseased liver. One must guard one's liver.

 

That night Freddy Munson picked up Helene at her flat on Geary and drove across the bridge to Sausalito for dinner, as usual, at Ondine's. Ondine's was one of only four restaurants, all of them famous old ones, at which Munson ate in fixed rotation. He was a man of firm habits. He awakened religiously at six each morning, and was at his desk in the brokerage house by seven, plugging himself into the data channels to learn what had happened in the European finance markets while he slept. At half past seven local time the New York exchanges opened and the real day's work began. By half past eleven, New York was through for the day, and Munson went around the corner for lunch, always at the Petit Pois, whose proprietor he had helped to make a millionaire by putting him into Consolidated Nucleonics' several components two and a half years before the big merger. At half past one, Munson was back in the office to transact business for his own account on the Pacific Coast exchange; three days a week he left at three, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays he stayed as late as five in order to catch some deals on the Honolulu and Tokyo exchanges. Afterwards, dinner, a play or concert, always a handsome female companion. He tried to get to sleep, or at least to bed, by midnight.

A man in Freddy Munson's position had to be orderly. At any given time, his thefts from his clients ranged from six to nine million dollars, and he kept all the details of his jugglings in his head. He couldn't trust putting them on paper, because there were scanner eyes everywhere; and he certainly didn't dare employ the data net, since it was well known that anything you confided to one computer was bound to be accessible to some other computer somewhere, no matter how tight a privacy seal you slapped on it. So Munson had to remember the intricacies of fifty or more illicit transactions, a constantly changing chain of embezzlements, and a man who practices such necessary disciplines of memory soon gets into the habit of extending discipline to every phase of his life.

Helene snuggled close. Her faintly psychedelic perfume drifted toward his nostrils. He locked the car into the Sausalito circuit and leaned back comfortably as the traffic-control computer took over the steering. Helene said, "At the Bryce place last night I saw two sculptures by your bankrupt friend."

"Paul Mueller?"

"That's the one. They were very good sculptures. One of them buzzed at me."

"What were you doing at the Bryces?"

"I went to college with Lisa Bryce. She invited me over with Marty."

"I didn't realize you were that old," Munson said.

Helene giggled. "Lisa's a lot younger than her husband, dear. How much does a Paul Mueller sculpture cost?"

"Fifteen, twenty thousand, generally. More for specials."

"And he's broke, even so?"

"Paul has a rare talent for self-destruction," Munson said. "He simply doesn't comprehend money. But it's his artistic salvation, in a way. The more desperately in debt he is, the finer his work becomes. He creates out of his despair, so to speak. Though he seems to have overdone the latest crisis. He's stopped working altogether. It's a sin against humanity when an artist doesn't work."

"You can be so eloquent, Freddy," Helene said softly.

 

When The Amazing Montini woke Thursday morning, he did not at once realize that anything had changed. His memory, like a good servant, was always there when he needed to call on it, but the array of perfectly fixed facts he carried in his mind remained submerged until required. A librarian might scan shelves and see books missing; Montini could not detect similar vacancies of his synapses. He had been up for half an hour, had stepped under the molecular bath and had punched for his breakfast and had awakened Nadia to tell her to confirm the pod reservations to Vegas, and finally, like a concert pianist running off a few arpeggios to limber his fingers for the day's chores, Montini reached into his memory bank for a little Shakespeare and no Shakespeare came.

He stood quite still, gripping the astrolabe that ornamented his picture window, and peered out at the bridge in sudden bewilderment. It had never been necessary for him to make a conscious effort to recover data. He merely looked and it was there; but where was Shakespeare? Where was the left-hand column of page 136, and the right-hand column of page 654, and the right-hand column of page 806, sixteen lines down? Gone? He drew blanks. The screen of his mind showed him only empty pages.

Easy. This is unusual, but it isn't catastrophic. You must be tense, for some reason, and you're forcing it, that's all. Relax, pull something else out of storage—

The New York Times, Wednesday, October 3, 1973. Yes, there it was, the front page, beautifully clear, the story on the baseball game down in the lower right-hand corner, the headline about the jet accident big and black, even the photo credit visible. Fine. Now let's try—

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, April 19, 1987. Montini shivered. He saw the top four inches of the page, nothing else. Wiped clean.

He ran through the files of other newspapers he had memorized for his act. Some were there. Some were not. Some, like the Post-Dispatch, were obliterated in part. Color rose to his cheeks. Who had tampered with his memory?

He tried Shakespeare again. Nothing.

He tried the 1997 Chicago data-net directory. It was there.

He tried his third-grade geography textbook. It was there, the big red book with smeary print.

He tried last Friday's five-o'clock xerofax bulletin. Gone.

He stumbled and sank down on a divan he had purchased in Istanbul, he recalled, on the nineteenth of May, 1985, for 4,200 Turkish pounds. "Nadia!" he cried. "Nadia!" His voice was little more than a croak. She came running, her eyes only half frosted, her morning face askew.

"How do I look?" he demanded. "My mouth—is my mouth right? My eyes?"

"Your face is all flushed."

"Aside from that!"

"I don't know," she gasped. "You seem all upset, but—"

"Half my mind is gone," Montini said. "I must have had a stroke. Is there any facial paralysis? That's a symptom. Call my doctor, Nadia! A stroke, a stroke! It's the end for Montini!"

 

Paul Mueller, awakening at midnight on Wednesday and feeling strangely refreshed, attempted to get his bearings. Why was he fully dressed, and why had he been asleep? A nap, perhaps, that had stretched on too long? He tried to remember what he had been doing earlier in the day, but he was unable to find a clue. He was baffled but not disturbed; mainly he felt a tremendous urge to get to work. The images of five sculptures, fully planned and begging to be constructed, jostled in his mind. Might as well start right now, he thought. Work through till morning. That small twittering silvery one—that's a good one to start with. I'll block out the schematics, maybe even do some of the armature—

"Carole?" he called. "Carole, are you around?"

His voice echoed through the oddly empty apartment.

For the first time Mueller noticed how little furniture there was. A bed—a cot, really, not their double bed—and a table, and a tiny insulator unit for food, and a few dishes. No carpeting. Where were his sculptures, his private collection of his own best work? He walked into his studio and found it bare from wall to wall, all of his tools mysteriously swept away, just a few discarded sketches on the floor. And his wife? "Carole? Carole?"

He could not understand any of this. While he dozed, it seemed, someone had cleaned the place out, stolen his furniture, his sculptures, even the carpet. Mueller had heard of such thefts. They came with a van, brazenly, posing as moving men. Perhaps they had given him some sort of drug while they worked. He could not bear the thought that they had taken his sculptures; the rest didn't matter, but he had cherished those dozen pieces dearly. I'd better call the police, he decided, and rushed toward the handset of the data unit, but it wasn't there either. Would burglars take that too?

Searching for some answers, he scurried from wall to wall, and saw a note in his own handwriting. Call Freddy Munson in morning and borrow three bigs. Buy ticket to Caracas. Buy sculpting stuff.

Caracas? A vacation, maybe? And why buy sculpting stuff? Obviously the tools had been gone before he fell asleep, then. Why? And where was his wife? What was going on? He wondered if he ought to call Freddy right now, instead of waiting until morning. Freddy might know. Freddy was always home by midnight, too. He'd have one of his damned girls with him and wouldn't want to be interrupted, but to hell with that; what good was having friends if you couldn't bother them in a time of crisis?

Heading for the nearest public communicator booth, he rushed out of his apartment and nearly collided with a sleek dunning robot in the hallway. The things show no mercy, Mueller thought. They plague you at all hours. No doubt this one was on its way to bother the deadbeat Nicholson family down the hall.

The robot said, "Mr. Paul Mueller? I am a properly qualified representative of International Fabrication Cartel, Amalgamated. I am here to serve notice that there is an unpaid balance in your account to the extent of $9,150.55, which as of 0900 hours tomorrow morning will accrue compounded penalty interest at the rate of 5 percent per month, since you have not responded to our three previous requests for payment. I must further inform you—"

"You're off your neutrinos," Mueller snapped. "I don't owe a dime to I.F.C.! For once in my life I'm in the black, and don't try to make me believe otherwise."

The robot replied patiently, "Shall I give you a printout of the transactions? On the fifth of January, 2003, you ordered the following metal products from us: three 4-meter tubes of antiqued iridium, six 10-centimeter spheres of—"

"The fifth of January, 2003, happens to be three months from now," Mueller said, "and I don't have time to listen to crazy robots. I've got an important call to make. Can I trust you to patch me into the data net without garbling things?"

"I am not authorized to permit you to make use of my facilities."!

"Emergency override," said Mueller. "Human being in trouble. Go argue with that one!"

The robot's conditioning was sound. It yielded at once to his assertion of an emergency and set up a relay to the main communications net. Mueller supplied Freddy Munson's number. "I can provide audio only," the robot said, putting the call through. Nearly a minute passed. Then Freddy Munson's familiar deep voice snarled from the speaker grille in the robot's chest, "Who is it and what do you want?"

"It's Paul. I'm sorry to bust in on you, Freddy, but I'm in big trouble. I think I'm losing my mind, or else everybody else is."

"Maybe everybody else is. What's the problem?"

"All my furniture's gone. A dunning robot is trying to shake me down for nine bigs. I don't know where Carole is. I can't remember what I was doing earlier today. I've got a note here about getting tickets to Caracas that I wrote myself, and I don't know why. And—"

"Skip the rest," Munson said. "I can't do anything for you. I've got problems of my own."

"Can I come over, at least, and talk?"

"Absolutely not!" In a softer voice Munson said, "Listen, Paul, I didn't mean to yell, but something's come up here, something very distressing—"

"You don't need to pretend. You've got Helene with you and you wish I'd leave you alone. Okay."

"No. Honestly," Munson said. "I've got problems, suddenly. I'm in a totally ungood position to give you any help at all. I need help myself."

"What sort? Anything I can do for you?"

"I'm afraid not. And if you'll excuse me, Paul—"

"Just tell me one thing, at least. Where am I likely to find Carole? Do you have any idea?"

"At her husband's place, I'd say."

"I'm her husband."

There was a long pause. Munson said finally, "Paul, she divorced you last January and married Pete Castine in April."

"No," Mueller said.

"What, no?"

"No, it isn't possible."

"Have you been popping pills, Paul? Sniffing something? Smoking weed? Look, I'm sorry, but I can't take time now to—"

"At least tell me what day today is."

"Wednesday."

"Which Wednesday?"

"Wednesday the eighth of May. Thursday the ninth, actually, by this time of night."

"And the year?"

"For Christ's sake, Paul—"

"The year?"

"2003."

Mueller sagged. "Freddy, I've lost half a year somewhere! For me it's last October. 2002. I've got some weird kind of amnesia. It's the only explanation."

"Amnesia," Munson said. The edge of tension left his voice. "Is that what you've got? Amnesia? Can there be such a thing as an epidemic of amnesia? Is it contagious? Maybe you better come over here after all. Because amnesia's my problem too."

 

Thursday, May 9, promised to be as beautiful as the previous day had been. The sun once again beamed on San Francisco; the sky was clear, the air warm and tender. Commander Braskett awoke early as always, punched for his usual spartan breakfast, studied the morning xerofax news, spent an hour dictating his memoirs, and, about nine, went out for a walk. The streets were strangely crowded, he found, when he got down to the shopping district along Haight Street. People were wandering about aimlessly, dazedly, as though they were sleepwalkers. Were they drunk? Drugged? Three times in five minutes Commander Braskett was stopped by young men who wanted to know the date. Not the time, the date. He told them, crisply, disdainfully; he tried to be tolerant, but it was difficult for him not to despise people who were so weak that they were unable to refrain from poisoning their minds with stimulants and narcotics and psy-chedelics and similar trash. At the corner of Haight and Masonic a forlorn-looking pretty girl of about seventeen, with wide blank blue eyes, halted him and said, "Sir, this city is San Francisco, isn't it? I mean, I was supposed to move here from Pittsburgh in May, and if this is May, this is San Francisco, right?" Commander Braskett nodded brusquely and turned away, pained. He was relieved to see an old friend, Lou Sandler, the manager of the Bank of America office across the way. Sandler was standing outside the bank door. Commander Braskett crossed to him and said, "Isn't it a disgrace, Lou, the way this whole street is filled with addicts this morning? What is it, some historical pageant of the 1960's?" And Sandler gave him an empty smile and said, "Is that my name? Lou? You wouldn't happen to know the last name too, would you? Somehow it's slipped my mind." In that moment Commander Braskett realized that something terrible had happened to his city and perhaps to his country, and that the leftist takeover he had long dreaded must now be at hand, and that it was time for him to don his old uniform again and do what he could to strike back at the enemy.

 

In joy and in confusion, Nate Haldersen awoke that morning realizing that he had been transformed in some strange and wonderful way. His head was throbbing, but not painfully. It seemed to him that a terrible weight had been lifted from his shoulders, that the fierce dead hand about his throat had at last relinquished its grip.

He sprang from bed, full of questions.

Where am I? What kind of place is this? Why am I not at home? Where are my books? Why do I feel so happy?

This seemed to be a hospital room.

There was a veil across his mind. He pierced its filmy folds and realized that he had committed himself to—to Fletcher Memorial—last—August—no, the August before last—suffering with a severe emotional disturbance brought on by—brought on by-

He had never felt happier than at this moment.

He saw a mirror. In it was the reflected upper half of Nathaniel Haldersen, Ph.D. Nate Haldersen smiled at himself. Tall, stringy, long-nosed man, absurdly straw-colored hair, absurd blue eyes, thin lips, smiling. Bony body. He undid his pajama top. Pale, hairless chest; bump of bone like an epaulet on each shoulder. I have been sick a long time, Haldersen thought. Now

I must get out of here, back to my classroom. End of leave of absence. Where are my clothes?

"Nurse? Doctor?" He pressed his call button three times. "Hello? Anyone here?"

No one came. Odd; they always came. Shrugging, Haldersen moved out into the hall. He saw three orderlies, heads together, buzzing at the far end. They ignored him. A robot servitor carrying breakfast trays glided past. A moment later one of the younger doctors came running through the hall, and would not stop when Haldersen called to him. Annoyed, he went back into his room and looked about for clothing. He found none, only a little stack of magazines on the closet floor. He thumbed the call button three more times. Finally one of the robots entered the room.

"I am sorry," it said, "but the human hospital personnel is busy at present. May I serve you, Dr. Haldersen?"

"I want a suit of clothing. I'm leaving the hospital."

"I am sorry, but there is no record of your discharge. Without authorization from Dr. Bryce, Dr. Reynolds, or Dr. Kamakura, I am not permitted to allow your departure."

Haldersen sighed. He knew better than to argue with a robot. "Where are those three gentlemen right now?"

"They are occupied, sir. As you may know, there is a medical emergency in the city this morning, and Dr. Bryce and Dr. Kamakura are helping to organize the committee of public safety. Dr. Reynolds did not report for duty today and we are unable to trace him. It is believed that he is a victim of the current difficulty."

"What current difficulty?"

"Mass loss of memory on the part of the human population," the robot said.

"An epidemic of amnesia?"

"That is one interpretation of the problem."

"How can such a thing—" Haldersen stopped. He understood now the source of his own joy this morning. Only yesterday afternoon he had discussed with Tim Bryce the application of memory-destroying drugs to his own trauma, and Bryce had said—

Haldersen no longer knew the nature of his own trauma. "Wait," he said, as the robot began to leave the room. "I need information. Why have I been under treatment here?"

"You have been suffering from social displacements and dysfunctions whose origin, Dr. Bryce feels, lies in a situation of traumatic personal loss."

"Loss of what?"

"Your family, Dr. Haldersen."

"Yes. That's right. I recall, now—I had a wife and two children. Emily. And a little girl—Margaret, Elizabeth, something like that. And a boy named John. What happened to them?"

"They were passengers aboard Intercontinental Airways Flight 103, Copenhagen to San Francisco, September 5, 1991. The plane underwent explosive decompression over the Arctic Ocean and there were no survivors."

Haldersen absorbed the information as calmly as though he were hearing of the assassination of Julius Caesar. "Where was I when the accident occurred?"

"In Copenhagen," the robot replied. "You had intended to return to San Francisco with your family on Flight 103; however, according to your data file here, you became involved in an emotional relationship with a woman named Marie Rasmussen, whom you had met in Copenhagen, and failed to return to your hotel in time to go to the airport. Your wife, evidently aware of the situation, chose not to wait for you. Her subsequent death, and that of your children, produced a traumatic guilt reaction in which you came to regard yourself as responsible for their terminations."

"I would take that attitude, wouldn't I?" Haldersen said. "Sin and retribution. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I always had a harsh view of sin, even while I was sinning. I should have been an Old Testament prophet."

"Shall I provide more information, sir?"

"Is there more?"

"We have in the files Dr. Bryce's report headed, The Job Complex: A Study in the Paralysis of Guilt."

"Spare me that," Haldersen said. "All right, go."

He was alone. The Job Complex, he thought. Not really appropriate, was it? Job was a man without sin, and yet he was punished grievously to satisfy a whim of the Almighty. A little presumptuous, I'd say, to identify myself with him. Cain would have been a better choice. Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. But Cain was a sinner. I was a sinner. I sinned and Emily died for it. When, eleven, eleven-and-a-half years ago? And now I know nothing at all about it except what the machine just told me. Redemption through oblivion, I'd call it. I have expiated my sin and now I'm free. I have no business staying in this hospital any longer. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. I've got to get out of here. Maybe I can be of some help to others.

He belted his bathrobe, took a drink of water, and went out of the room. No one stopped him. The elevator did not seem to be running, but he found the stairs, and walked down, a little creakily. He had not been this far from his room in more than a year. The lower floors of the hospital were in chaos—doctors, orderlies, robots, patients, all milling around excitedly. The robots were trying to calm people and get them back to their proper places. "Excuse me," Haldersen said serenely. "Excuse me. Excuse me." He left the hospital, unmolested, by the front door. The air outside was as fresh as young wine; he felt like weeping when it hit his nostrils. He was free. Redemption through oblivion. The disaster high above the Arctic no longer dominated his thoughts. He looked upon it precisely as if it had happened to the family of some other man, long ago. Haldersen began to walk briskly down Van Ness, feeling vigor returning to his legs with every stride. A young woman, sobbing wildly, erupted from a building and collided with him. He caught her, steadied her, was surprised at his own strength as he kept her from toppling. She trembled and pressed her head against his chest. "Can I do anything for you?" he asked. "Can I be of any help?"

 

Panic had begun to enfold Freddy Munson during dinner at Ondine's Wednesday night. He had begun to be annoyed with Helene in the midst of the truffled chicken breasts, and so he had started to think about the details of business; and to his amazement he did not seem to have the details quite right in his mind; and so he felt the early twinges of terror.

The trouble was that Helene was going on and on about the art of sonic sculpture in general and Paul Mueller in particular. Her interest was enough to arouse faint jealousies in Munson. Was she getting ready to leap from his bed to Paul's? Was she thinking of abandoning the wealthy, glamorous, but essentially prosaic stockbroker for the irresponsible, impecunious, fascinatingly gifted sculptor? Of course, Helene kept company with a number of other men, but Munson knew them and discounted them as rivals; they were nonentities, escorts to fill her idle nights when he was too busy for her. Paul Mueller, however, was another case. Munson could not bear the thought that Helene might leave him for Paul. So he shifted his concentration to the day's maneuvers. He had extracted a thousand shares of the $5.87 convertible preferred of Lunar Transit from the Schaeffer account, pledging it as collateral to cover his shortage in the matter of the Comsat debentures, and then, tapping the Howard account for five thousand Southeast Energy Corporation warrants, he had—or had those warrants come out of the Brewster account? Brewster was big on utilities. So was Howard, but that account was heavy on Mid-Atlantic Power, so would it also be loaded with Southeast Energy? In any case, had he put those warrants up against the Zurich uranium futures, or were they riding as his markers in the Antarctic oil-lease thing? He could not remember.

He could not remember.

He could not remember.

Each transaction had been in its own compartment. The partitions were down, suddenly. Numbers were spilling about in his mind as though his brain were in free fall. All of today's deals were tumbling. It frightened him. He began to gobble his food, wanting now to get out of here, to get rid of Helene, to get home and try to reconstruct his activities of the afternoon. Oddly, he could remember quite clearly all that he had done yesterday—the Xerox switch, the straddle on Steel—but today was washing away minute by minute.

"Are you all right?" Helene asked.

"No, I'm not," he said. "I'm coming down with something."

"The Venus Virus. Everybody's getting it."

"Yes, that must be it. The Venus Virus. You'd better keep clear of me tonight."

They skipped dessert and cleared out fast. He dropped Helene off at her flat; she hardly seemed disappointed, which bothered him, but not nearly so much as what was happening to his mind. Alone, finally, he tried to jot down an outline of his day, but even more had left him now. In the restaurant he had known which stocks he had handled, though he wasn't sure what he had done with them. Now he couldn't even recall the specific securities. He was out on the limb for millions of dollars of other people's money, and every detail was in his mind, and his mind was falling apart. By the time Paul Mueller called, a little after midnight, Munson was growing desperate. He was relieved, but not exactly cheered, to learn that whatever strange thing had affected his mind had hit Mueller a lot harder. Mueller had forgotten everything since last October.

"You went bankrupt," Munson had to explain to him. "You had this wild scheme for setting up a central clearing house for works of art, a kind of stock exchange—the sort of thing only an artist would try to start. You wouldn't let me discourage you. Then you began signing notes, and taking on contingent liabilities, and before the project was six weeks old you were hit with half a dozen lawsuits and it all began to go sour."

"When did this happen, precisely?"

"You conceived the idea at the beginning of November. By Christmas you were in severe trouble. You already had a bunch of personal debts that had gone unpaid from before, and your assets melted away, and you hit a terrible bind in your work and couldn't produce a thing. You really don't remember a thing of this, Paul?"

"Nothing."

"After the first of the year the fastest-moving creditors started getting decrees against you. They impounded everything you owned except the furniture, and then they took the furniture. You borrowed from all of your friends, but they couldn't give you nearly enough, because you were borrowing thousands and you owed hundreds of thousands."

"How much did I hit you for?"

"Eleven bigs," Munson said. "But don't worry about that now."

"I'm not. I'm not worrying about a thing. I was in a bind in my work, you say?" Mueller chuckled. "That's all gone.

I'm itching to start making things. All I need are the tools—I mean, money to buy the tools."

"What would they cost?"

"Two-and-a-half bigs," Mueller said.

Munson coughed. "All right. I can't transfer the money to your account, because your creditors would lien it right away. I'll get some cash at the bank. You'll have three bigs tomorrow, and welcome to it."

"Bless you, Freddy." Mueller said, "This kind of amnesia is a good thing, eh? I was so worried about money that I couldn't work. Now I'm not worried at all. I guess I'm still in debt, but I'm not fretting. Tell me what happened to my marriage, now."

"Carole got fed up and turned off," said Munson. "She opposed your business venture from the start. When it began to devour you, she did what she could to untangle you from it, but you insisted on trying to patch things together with more loans, and she filed for a decree. When she was free, Pete Castine moved in and grabbed her."

"That's the hardest part to believe. That she'd marry an art dealer, a totally noncreative person, a—a parasite, really—"

"They were always good friends," Munson said. "I won't say they were lovers, because I don't know, but they were close. And Pete's not that horrible. He's got taste, intelligence, everything an artist needs except the gift. I think Carole may have been weary of gifted men, anyway."

"How did I take it?" Mueller asked.

"You hardly seemed to notice, Paul. You were so busy with your financial shenanigans."

Mueller nodded. He sauntered to one of his own works, a three-meter-high arrangement of oscillating rods that ran the whole sound spectrum into the high kilohertzes, and passed two fingers over the activator eye. The sculpture began to murmur. After a few moments Mueller said, "You sounded awfully upset when I called, Freddy. You say you have some kind of amnesia too?"

Trying to be casual about it, Munson said, "I find I can't remember some important transactions I carried out today. Unfortunately, my only record of them is in my head. But maybe the information will come back to me when I've slept on it."

"There's no way I can help you with that."

"No. There isn't."

"Freddy, where is this amnesia coming from?"

Munson shrugged. "Maybe somebody put a drug in the water supply, or spiked the food, or something. These days, you never can tell. Look, I've got to do some work, Paul. If you'd like to sleep here tonight—"

"I'm wide awake, thanks. I'll drop by again in the morning."

When the sculptor was gone, Mueller struggled for a feverish hour to reconstruct his data, and failed. Shortly before two he took a four-hour-sleep pill. When he awakened, he realized in dismay that he had no memories whatever for the period from April I to noon yesterday. During those five weeks he had engaged in countless securities transactions, using other people's property as his collateral, and counting on his ability to get each marker in his game back into its proper place before anyone was likely to go looking for it. He had always been able to remember everything. Now he could remember nothing. He reached his office at seven in the morning, as always, and out of habit plugged himself into the data channels to study the Zurich and London quotes, but the prices on the screen were strange to him, and he knew that he was undone.

 

At the same moment of Thursday morning Dr. Timothy Bryce's house computer triggered an impulse and the alarm voice in his pillow said quietly but firmly, "It's time to wake up, Dr. Bryce." He stirred but lay still. After the prescribed ten second interval the voice said, a little more sharply, "It's time to wake up, Dr. Bryce." Bryce sat up, just in time; the lifting of his head from the pillow cut off the third, much sterner, repetition, which would have been followed by the opening chords of the Jupiter Symphony. The psychiatrist opened his eyes.

He was surprised to find himself sharing his bed with a strikingly attractive girl.

She was a honey blonde, deeply tanned, with light-brown eyes, full pale lips, and a sleek, elegant body. She looked to be fairly young, a good twenty years younger than he was—perhaps twenty-five, twenty-eight. She wore nothing, and she was in a deep sleep, her lower lip sagging in a sort of involuntary pout. Neither her youth nor her beauty nor her nudity surprised him; he was puzzled simply because he had no notion who she was or how she had come to be in bed with him. He felt as though he had never seen her before. Certainly he didn't know her name. Had he picked her up at some party last night? He couldn't seem to remember where he had been last night. Gently he nudged her elbow.

She woke quickly, fluttering her eyelids, shaking her head.

"Oh," she said, as she saw him, and clutched the sheet up to her throat. Then, smiling, she dropped it again. "That's foolish. No need to be modest now, I guess."

"I guess. Hello."

"Hello," she said. She looked as confused as he was.

"This is going to sound stupid," he said, "but someone must have slipped me a weird weed last night, because I'm afraid I'm not sure how I happened to bring you home. Or what your name is."

"Lisa," she said. "Lisa—Falk." She stumbled over the second name. "And you're—"

"I'm Bryce."

"You don't remember where we met?"

"No," he said.

"Neither do I."

He got out of bed, feeling a little hesitant about his own nakedness, and fighting the inhibition off. "They must have given us both the same thing to smoke, then. You know"—he grinned shyly—"I can't even remember if we had a good time together last night. I hope we did."

"I think we did," she said. "I can't remember it either. But I feel good inside—the way I usually do after I've—" She paused. "We couldn't have met only just last night, Tim."

"How can you tell?"

"I've got the feeling that I've known you longer than that."

Bryce shrugged. "I don't see how. I mean, without being too coarse about it, obviously we were both high last night, really floating, and we met and came here and—"

"No. I feel at home here. As if I moved in with you weeks and weeks ago."

"A lovely idea. But I'm sure you didn't."

"Why do I feel so much at home here, then?"

"In what way?"

"In every way." She walked to the bedroom closet and let her hand rest on the touchplate. The door slid open; evidently he had keyed the house computer to her fingerprints. Had he done that last night too? She reached in. "My clothing," she said. "Look. All these dresses, coats, shoes. A whole wardrobe. There can't be any doubt. We've been living together and don't remember it!"

A chill swept through him. "What have they done to us? Listen, Lisa, let's get dressed and eat and go down to the hospital together for a checkup. We—"

"Hospital?"

"Fletcher Memorial. I'm in the neurological department.

Whatever they slipped us last night has hit us both with a lacunary retrograde amnesia—a gap in our memories—and it could be serious. If it's caused brain damage, perhaps it's not irreversible yet, but we can't fool around."

She put her hand to her lips in fear. Bryce felt a sudden warm urge to protect this lovely stranger, to guard and comfort her, and he realized he must be in love with her, even though he couldn't remember who she was. He crossed the room to her and seized her in a brief, tight embrace; she responded eagerly, shivering a little. By a quarter to eight they were out of the house and heading for the hospital through unusually light traffic. Bryce led the girl quickly to the staff lounge. Ted Kamakura was there already, in uniform. The little Japanese psychiatrist nodded curtly and said, "Morning, Tim." Then he blinked. "Good morning, Lisa. How come you're here?"

"You know her?" Bryce asked.

"What kind of question is that?"

"A deadly serious one."

"Of course I know her," Kamakura said, and his smile of greeting abruptly faded. "Why? Is something wrong about that?"

"You may know her, but I don't," said Bryce.

"Oh, God. Not you too!"

"Tell me who she is, Ted."

"She's your wife, Tim. You married her five years ago."

 

By half past eleven Thursday morning the Gerards had everything set up and going smoothly for the lunch rush at the Petit Pois. The soup caldron was bubbling, the escargot trays were ready to be popped in the oven, the sauces were taking form. Pierre Gerard was a bit surprised when most of the lunch-time regulars failed to show up. Even Mr. Munson, always punctual at half past eleven, did not arrive. Some of these men had not missed weekday lunch at the Petit Pois in fifteen years. Something terrible must have happened on the stock market, Pierre thought, to have kept all these financial men at their desks, and they were too busy to call him and cancel their usual tables. That must be the answer. It was impossible that any of the regulars would forget to call him. The stock market must be exploding. Pierre made a mental note to call his broker after lunch and find out what was going on.

 

About two Thursday afternoon, Paul Mueller stopped into Metchnikoff's Art Supplies in North Beach to try to get a welding pen, some raw metal, loudspeaker paint, and the rest of the things he needed for the rebirth of his sculpting career. Metchnikoff greeted him sourly with, "No credit at all, Mr. Mueller, not even a nickel!"

"It's all right. I'm a cash customer this time."

The dealer brightened. "In that case it's all right, maybe. You finished with your troubles?"

"I hope so," Mueller said.

He gave the order. It came to about $2,300; when the time came to pay, he explained that he simply had to run down to Montgomery Street to pick up the cash from his friend Freddy Munson, who was holding three bigs for him. Metchnikoff began to glower again. "Five minutes!" Mueller called. "I'll be back in five minutes!" But when he got to Munson's office, he found the place in confusion, and Munson wasn't there. "Did he leave an envelope for a Mr. Mueller?" he asked a distraught secretary. "I was supposed to pick something important up here this afternoon. Would you please check?" The girl simply ran away from him. So did the next girl. A burly broker told him to get out of the office. "We're closed, fellow," he shouted. Baffled, Mueller left.

Not daring to return to Metchnikoff's with the news that he hadn't been able to raise the cash after all, Mueller simply went home. Three dunning robots were camped outside his door, and each one began to croak its cry of doom as he approached. "Sorry," Mueller said, "I can't remember a thing about any of this stuff," and he went inside and sat down on the bare floor, angry, thinking of the brilliant pieces he could be turning out if he could only get his hands on the tools of his trade. He made sketches instead. At least the ghouls had left him with pencil and paper. Not as efficient as a computer screen and a light-pen, maybe, but Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini had managed to make out all right without computer screens and light-pens.

At four o'clock the doorbell rang.

"Go away," Mueller said through the speaker. "See my accountant! I don't want to hear any more dunnings, and the next time I catch one of you idiot robots by my door I'm going to—"

"It's me, Paul," a nonmechanical voice said.

Carole.

He rushed to the door. There were seven robots out there, surrounding her, and they tried to get in; but he pushed them back so she could enter. A robot didn't dare lay a paw on a human being. He slammed the door in their metal faces and locked it.

Carole looked fine. Her hair was longer than he remembered it, and she had gained about eight pounds in all the right places, and she wore an iridescent peekaboo wrap that he had never seen before, and which was really inappropriate for afternoon wear, but which looked splendid on her. She seemed at least five years younger than she really was; evidently a month and a half of marriage to Pete Castine had done more for her than nine years of marriage to Paul Mueller. She glowed. She also looked strained and tense, but that seemed superficial, the product of some distress of the last few hours.

"I seem to have lost my key," she said.

"What are you doing here?"

"I don't understand you, Paul."

"I mean, why'd you come here?"

"I live here."

"Do you?" He laughed harshly. "Very funny."

"You always did have a weird sense of humor, Paul." She stepped past him. "Only this isn't any joke. Where is everything? The furniture, Paul. My things." Suddenly she was crying. "I must be breaking up. I wake up this morning in a completely strange apartment, all alone, and I spend the whole day wandering in a sort of daze that I don't understand at all, and now I finally come home and I find that you've pawned every damn thing we own, or something, and—" She bit her knuckles. "Paul?"

She's got it too, he thought. The amnesia epidemic.

He said quietly, "This is a funny thing to ask, Carole, but will you tell me what today's date is?"

"Why—the fourteenth of September—or is it the fifteenth—"

"2002?"

"What do you think? 1776?"

She's got it worse than I have, Mueller told himself. She's lost a whole extra month. She doesn't remember my business venture. She doesn't remember my losing all the money. She doesn't remember divorcing me. She thinks she's still my wife.

"Come in here," he said, and led her to the bedroom. He pointed to the cot that stood where their bed had been. "Sit down, Carole. I'll try to explain. It won't make much sense, but I'll try to explain."

 

Under the circumstances, the concert by the visiting New York Philharmonic for Thursday evening was canceled. Nevertheless the orchestra assembled for its rehearsal at half past two in the afternoon. The union required so many rehearsals—with pay—a week; therefore the orchestra rehearsed, regardless of external cataclysms. But there were problems. Maestro Alvarez, who used an electronic baton and proudly conducted without a score, thumbed the button for a downbeat and realized abruptly, with a sensation as of dropping through a trapdoor, that the Brahms Fourth was wholly gone from his mind. The orchestra responded raggedly to his faltering leadership; some of the musicians had no difficulties, but the concertmaster stared in horror at his left hand, wondering how to finger the strings for the notes his violin was supposed to be yielding, and the second oboe could not find the proper keys, and the first bassoon had not yet even managed to remember how to put his instrument together.

 

By nightfall, Tim Bryce had managed to assemble enough of the story so that he understood what had happened, not only to himself and to Lisa, but to the entire city. A drug, or drugs, almost certainly distributed through the municipal water supply, had leached away nearly everyone's memory. The trouble with modern life, Bryce thought, is that technology gives us the potential for newer and more intricate disasters every year, but doesn't seem to give us the ability to ward them off. Memory drugs were old stuff, going back thirty, forty years. He had studied several types of them himself. Memory is partly a chemical and partly an electrical process; some drugs went after the electrical end, jamming the synapses over which brain transmissions travel, and some went after the molecular substrata in which long-term memories are locked up. Bryce knew ways of destroying short-term memories by inhibiting synapse transmission, and he knew ways of destroying the deep long-term memories by washing out the complex chains of ribonucleic acid, brain-RNA, by which they are inscribed in the brain. But such drugs were experimental, tricky, unpredictable; he had hesitated to use them on human subjects; he certainly had never imagined that anyone would simply dump them into an aqueduct and give an entire city a simultaneous lobotomy.

His office at Fletcher Memorial had become an improvised center of operations for San Francisco. The mayor was there, pale and shrunken; the chief of police, exhausted and confused, periodically turned his back and popped a pill; a dazed-looking representative of the communications net hovered in a corner, nervously monitoring the hastily rigged system through which the committee of public safety that Bryce had summoned could make its orders known throughout the city.

The mayor was no use at all. He couldn't even remember having run for office. The chief of police was in even worse shape; he had been up all night because he had forgotten, among other things, his home address, and he had been afraid to query a computer about it for fear he'd lose his job for drunkenness. By now the chief of police was aware that he wasn't the only one in the city having memory problems today, and he had looked up his address in the files and even telephoned his wife, but he was close to collapse. Bryce had insisted that both men stay here as symbols of order; he wanted only their faces and their voices, not their fumble-headed official services.

A dozen or so miscellaneous citizens had accumulated in Bryce's office too. At five in the afternoon he had broadcast an all-media appeal, asking anyone whose memory of recent events was unimpaired to come to Fletcher Memorial. "If you haven't had any city water in the past twenty-four hours, you're probably all right. Come down here. We need you." He had drawn a curious assortment. There was a ramrod-straight old space hero, Taylor Braskett, a pure-foods nut who drank only mountain water. There was a family of French restaurateurs, mother, father, three grown children, who preferred mineral water flown in from their native land. There was a computer salesman named McBurney who had been in Los Angeles on business and hadn't had any of the drugged water. There was a retired cop named Adler who lived in Oakland, where there were no memory problems; he had hurried across the bay as soon as he heard that San Francisco was in trouble. That was before all access to the city had been shut off at Bryce's orders. And there were some others, of doubtful value but of definitely intact memory. The three screens that the communications man had mounted provided a relay of key points in the city. Right now one was monitoring the Fisherman's Wharf district from a camera atop Ghirardelli Square, one was viewing the financial district from a helicopter over the old Ferry Building Museum, and one was relaying a pickup from a mobile truck in Golden Gate Park. The scenes were similar everywhere: people milling about, asking questions, getting no answers. There wasn't any overt sign of looting yet. There were no fires. The police, those of them able to function, were out in force, and antiriot robots were cruising the bigger streets, just in case they might be needed to squirt their stifling blankets of foam at suddenly panicked mobs. Bryce said to the mayor, "At half past six I want you to go on all media with an appeal for calm. We'll supply you with everything you have to say." The mayor moaned.

Bryce said, "Don't worry. I'll feed you the whole speech by bone relay. Just concentrate on speaking clearly and looking straight into the camera. If you come across as a terrified man, it can be the end for all of us. If you look cool, we may be able to pull through."

The mayor put his face in his hands.

Ted Kamakura whispered, "You can't put him on the channels, Tim! He's a wreck, and everyone will see it!"

"The city's mayor has to show himself," Bryce insisted. "Give him a double jolt of bracers. Let him make this one speech and then we can put him to pasture."

"Who'll be the spokesman, then?" Kamakura asked. "You? Me? Police Chief Dennison?"

"I don't know," Bryce muttered. "We need an authority-image to make announcements every half hour or so, and I'm damned if I'll have time. Or you. And Dennison—"

"Gentlemen, may I make a suggestion?" It was the old spaceman, Braskett. "I wish to volunteer as spokesman. You must admit I have a certain look of authority. And I'm accustomed to speaking to the public."

Bryce rejected the idea instantly. That right-wing crackpot, that author of passionate nut letters to every news medium in the state, that latter-day Paul Revere? Him, spokesman for the committee? But in the moment of rejection came acceptance. Nobody really paid attention to far-out political activities like that; probably nine people out of ten in San Francisco thought of Braskett, if at all, simply as the hero of the First Mars Expedition. He was a handsome old horse, too, elegantly upright and lean. Deep voice; unwavering eyes. A man of strength and presence.

Bryce said, "Commander Braskett, if we were to make you chairman of the committee of public safety—"

Ted Kamakura gasped.

"—would I have your assurance that such public announcements as you would make would be confined entirely to statements of the policies arrived at by the entire committee?"

Commander Braskett smiled glacially. "You want me to be a figurehead, is that it?"

"To be our spokesman, with the official title of chairman."

"As I said: to be a figurehead. Very well, I accept. I'll mouth my lines like an obedient puppet, and I won't attempt to inject any of my radical, extremist ideas into my statements. Is that what you wish?"

"I think we understand each other perfectly," Bryce said, and smiled, and got a surprisingly warm smile in return.

He jabbed now at his data board. Someone in the path lab eight stories below his office answered, and Bryce said, "Is there an up-to-date analysis yet?"

"I'll switch you to Dr. Madison."

Madison appeared on the screen. He ran the hospital's radio-isotope department, normally: a beefy, red-faced man who looked as though he ought to be a beer salesman. He knew his subject. "It's definitely the water supply, Tim," he said at once. "We tentatively established that an hour and a half ago, of course, but now there's no doubt. I've isolated traces of two different memory-suppressant drugs, and there's the possibility of a third. Whoever it was was taking no chances."

"What are they?" Bryce asked.

"Well, we've got a good jolt of acetylcholine terminase," Madison said, "which will louse up the synapses and interfere with short-term memory fixation. Then there's something else, perhaps a puromycin-derivative protein dissolver, which is going to work on the brain-RNA and smashing up older memories. I suspect also that we've been getting one of the newer experimental amnesifacients, something that I haven't isolated yet, capable of working its way deep and cutting out really basic motor patterns. So they've hit us high, low, and middle."

"That explains a lot. The guys who can't remember what they did yesterday, the guys who've lost a chunk out of their adult memories, and the ones who don't even remember their names—this thing is working on people at all different levels."

"Depending on individual metabolism, age, brain structure, and how much water they had to drink yesterday, yes."

"Is the water supply still tainted?" Bryce asked.

"Tentatively, I'd say no. I've had water samples brought me from the upflow districts, and everything's okay there. The water department has been running its own check; they say the same. Evidently the stuff got into the system early yesterday, came down into the city, and is generally gone by now. Might be some residuals in the pipes; I'd be careful about drinking water even today."

"And what does the pharmacopoeia say about the effectiveness of these drugs?"

Madison shrugged. "Anybody's guess. You'd know that better than I. Do they wear off?"

"Not in the normal sense," said Bryce. "What happens is the brain cuts in a redundancy circuit and gets access to a duplicate set of the affected memories, eventually—shifts to another track, so to speak—provided a duplicate of the sector in question was there in the first place, and provided that the duplicate wasn't blotted out also. Some people are going to get chunks of their memories back, in a few days or a few weeks. Others won't."

"Wonderful," Madison said. "I'll keep you posted, Tim."

Bryce cut off the call and said to the communications man, "You have that bone relay? Get it behind His Honor's ear."

The mayor quivered. The little instrument was fastened in place.

Bryce said, "Mr. Mayor, I'm going to dictate a speech, and you're going to broadcast it on all media, and it's the last thing I'm going to ask of you until you've had a chance to pull yourself together. Okay? Listen carefully to what I'm saying, speak slowly, and pretend that tomorrow is election day and your job depends on how well you come across now. You won't be going on live. There'll be a fifteen-second delay, and we have a wipe circuit so we can correct any stumbles, and there's absolutely no reason to be tense. Are you with me? Will you give it all you've got?"

"My mind is all foggy."

"Simply listen to me and repeat what I say into the camera's eye. Let your political reflexes take over. Here's your chance to make a hero of yourself. We're living history right now, Mr. Mayor. What we do here today will be studied the way the events of the 1906 fire were studied. Let's go, now. Follow me. People of the wonderful city of San Francisco—"

The words rolled easily from Bryce's lips, and, wonder of wonders, the mayor caught them and spoke them in a clear, beautifully resonant voice. As he spun out his speech, Bryce felt a surging flow of power going through himself, and he imagined for the moment that he were the elected leader of the city, not merely a self-appointed emergency dictator. It was an interesting, almost ecstatic feeling. Lisa, watching him in action, gave him a loving smile.

He smiled at her. In this moment of glory he was almost able to ignore the ache of knowing that he had lost his entire memory archive of his life with her. Nothing else gone, apparently. But, neatly, with idiot selectivity, the drug in the water supply had sliced away everything pertaining to his five years of marriage. Kamakura had told him, a few hours ago, that it was the happiest marriage of any he knew. Gone. At least Lisa had suffered an identical loss, against all probabilities. Somehow that made it easier to bear; it would have been awful to have one of them remember the good times and the other know nothing. He was almost able to ignore the torment of loss, while he kept busy. Almost.

 

"The mayor's going to be on in a minute," Nadia said. "Will you listen to him? He'll explain what's been going on."

"I don't care," said The Amazing Montini dully.

"It's some kind of epidemic of amnesia. When I was out before, I heard all about it. Everyone's got it. It isn't just you! And you thought it was a stroke, but it wasn't. You're all right."

"My mind is a ruin."

"It's only temporary." Her voice was shrill and unconvincing. "It's something in the air, maybe. Some drug they were testing that drifted in. We're all in this together. I can't remember last week at all."

"What do I care?" Montini said. "Most of these people, they have no memories even when they are healthy. But me? Me? I am destroyed. Nadia, I should lie down in my grave now. There is no sense in continuing to walk around."

The voice from the loudspeaker said, "Ladies and gentlemen, His Honor Elliot Chase, the Mayor of San Francisco."

"Let's listen," Nadia said.

The mayor appeared on the wallscreen, wearing his solemn face, his we-face-a-grave-challenge-citizens face. Montini glanced at him, shrugged, looked away.

The mayor said, "People of the wonderful city of San Francisco, we have just come through the most difficult day in nearly a century, since the terrible catastrophe of April, 1906. The earth has not quaked today, nor have we been smitten by fire, yet we have been severely tested by sudden calamity.

"As all of you surely know, the people of San Francisco have been afflicted since last night by what can best be termed an epidemic of amnesia. There has been mass loss of memory, ranging from mild cases of forgetfulness to near-total obliteration of identity. Scientists working at Fletcher Memorial Hospital have succeeded in determining the cause of this unique and sudden disaster.

"It appears that criminal saboteurs contaminated the municipal water supply with certain restricted drugs that have the ability to dissolve memory structures. The effect of these drugs is temporary. There should be no cause for alarm. Even those who are most severely affected will find their memories gradually beginning to return, and there is every reason to expect full recovery in a matter of hours or days."

"He's lying," said Montini.

"The criminals responsible have not yet been apprehended, but we expect arrests momentarily. The San Francisco area is the only affected region, which means the drugs were introduced into the water system just beyond city limits. Everything is normal in Berkeley, in Oakland, in Marin County, and other outlying areas.

"In the name of public safety I have ordered the bridges to San Francisco closed, as well as the Bay Area Rapid Transit and other means of access to the city. We expect to maintain these restrictions at least until tomorrow morning. The purpose of this is to prevent disorder and to avoid a possible influx of undesirable elements into the city while the trouble persists. We San Franciscans are self-sufficient and can look after our own needs without outside interference. However, I have been in contact with the President and with the Governor, and they both have assured me of all possible assistance.

"The water supply is at present free of the drug, and every precaution is being taken to prevent a recurrence of this crime against one million innocent people. However, I am told that some lingering contamination may remain in the pipes for a few hours. I recommend that you keep your consumption of water low until further notice, and that you boil any water you wish to use.

"Lastly. Police Chief Dennison, myself, and your other city officials will be devoting full time to the needs of the city so long as the crisis lasts. Probably we will not have the opportunity to go before the media for further reports. Therefore,

I have taken the step of appointing a committee of public safety, consisting of distinguished laymen and scientists of San Francisco, as a coordinating body that will aid in governing the city and reporting to its citizens. The chairman of this committee is the well-known veteran of so many exploits in space, Commander Taylor Braskett. Announcements concerning the developments in the crisis will come from Commander Braskett for the remainder of the evening, and you may consider his words to be those of your city officials. Thank you."

Braskett came on the screen. Montini grunted. "Look at the man they find! A maniac patriot!"

"But the drug will wear off," Nadia said. "Your mind will be all right again."

"I know these drugs. There is no hope. I am destroyed." The Amazing Montini moved toward the door. "I need fresh air. I will go out. Good-bye, Nadia."

She tried to stop him. He pushed her aside. Entering Marina Park, he made his way to the yacht club; the doorman admitted him, and took no further notice. Montini walked out on the pier. The drug, they say, is temporary. It will wear off. My mind will clear. I doubt this very much. Montini peered at the dark, oily water, glistening with light reflected from the bridge. He explored his damaged mind, scanning for gaps. Whole sections of memory were gone. The walls had crumbled, slabs of plaster falling away to expose bare lath. He could not live this way. Carefully, grunting from the exertion, he lowered himself via a metal ladder into the water, and kicked himself away from the pier. The water was terribly cold. His shoes seemed immensely heavy. He floated toward the island of the old prison, but he doubted that he would remain afloat much longer. As he drifted, he ran through an inventory of his memory, seeing what remained to him and finding less than enough. To test whether even his gift had survived, he attempted to play back a recall of the mayor's speech, and found the words shifting and melting. It is just as well, then, he told himself, and drifted on, and went under.

 

Carole insisted on spending Thursday night with him.

"We aren't man and wife any more," he had to tell her. "You divorced me."

"Since when are you so conventional? We lived together before we were married, and now we can live together after we were married. Maybe we're inventing a new sin, Paul. Post-marital sex."

"That isn't the point. The point is that you came to hate me because of my financial mess, and you left me. If you try to come back to me now, you'll be going against your own rational and deliberate decision of last January."

"For me last January is still four months away," she said. "I don't hate you. I love you. I always have and always will. I can't imagine how I would ever have come to divorce you, but in any case I don't remember divorcing you, and you don't remember being divorced by me, and so why can't we just keep going from the point where our memories leave off?"

"Among other things, because you happen to be Pete Castine's wife now."

"That sounds completely unreal to me. Something you dreamed."

"Freddy Munson told me, though. It's true."

"If I went back to Pete now," Carole said, "I'd feel sinful. Simply because I supposedly married him, you want me to jump into bed with him? I don't want him. I want you. Can't I stay here?"

"If Pete—" :

"If Pete, if Pete, if Pete! In my mind I'm Mrs. Paul Mueller, and in your mind I am too, and to hell with Pete, and with whatever Freddy Munson told you, and everything else. This is a silly argument, Paul. Let's quit it. If you want me to get out, tell me so right now in that many words. Otherwise let me stay."

He couldn't tell her to get out.

He had only the one small cot, but they managed to share it. It was uncomfortable, but in an amusing way. He felt twenty years old again for a while. In the morning they took a long shower together, and then Carole went out to buy some things for breakfast, since his service had been cut off and he couldn't punch for food. A dunning robot outside the door told him, as Carole was leaving, "The decree of personal service due has been requested, Mr. Mueller, and is now pending a court hearing."

"I know you not," Mueller said. "Be gone!"

Today, he told himself, he would hunt up Freddy Munson somehow and get that cash from him, and buy the tools he needed, and start working again. Let the world outside go crazy; so long as he was working, all was well. If he couldn't find Freddy, maybe he could swing the purchase on Carole's credit. She was legally divorced from him and none of his credit taint would stain her; as Mrs. Peter Castine she should surely be able to get hold of a couple of bigs to pay Metchnikoff. Possibly the banks were closed on account of the memory crisis today, Mueller considered; but Metchnikoff surely wouldn't demand cash from Carole. He closed his eyes and imagined how good it would feel to be making things once more.

Carole was gone an hour. When she came back, carrying groceries, Pete Castine was with her.

"He followed me," Carole explained. "He wouldn't let me alone."

He was a slim, poised, controlled man, quite athletic, several years older than Mueller—perhaps into his fifties already—but seemingly very young. Calmly he said, "I was sure that Carole had come here. It's perfectly understandable, Paul. She was here all night, I hope?"

"Does it matter?" Mueller asked.

"To some extent. I'd rather have had her spending the night with her former husband than with some third party entirely."

"She was here all night, yes," Mueller said wearily.

"I'd like her to come home with me now. She is my wife, after all."

"She has no recollection of that. Neither do I."

"I'm aware of that." Castine nodded amiably. "In my own case, I've forgotten everything that happened to me before the age of twenty-two. I couldn't tell you my father's first name. However, as a matter of objective reality, Carole's my wife, and her parting from you was rather bitter, and I feel she shouldn't stay here any longer."

"Why are you telling all this to me?" Mueller asked. "If you want your wife to go home with you, ask her to go home with you."

"So I did. She says she won't leave here unless you direct her to go."

"That's right," Carole said. "I know whose wife I think I am. If Paul throws me out, I'll go with you. Not otherwise."

Mueller shrugged. "I'd be a fool to throw her out, Pete. I need her and I want her, and whatever breakup she and I had isn't real to us. I know it's tough on you, but I can't help that. I imagine you'll have no trouble getting an annulment once the courts work out some law to cover cases like this."

Castine was silent for a long moment.

At length he said, "How has your work been going, Paul?"

"I gather that I haven't turned out a thing all year."

"That's correct."

"I'm planning to start again. You might say that Carole has inspired me."

"Splendid," said Castine without intonation of any kind. "I trust this little mixup over our—ah—shared wife won't interfere with the harmonious artist-dealer relationship we used to enjoy?"

"Not at all," Mueller said. "You'll still get my whole output. Why the hell should I resent anything you did? Carole was a free agent when you married her. There's only one little trouble."

"Yes?"

"I'm broke. I have no tools, and I can't work without tools, and I have no way of buying tools."

"How much do you need?"

"Two and a half bigs."

Castine said, "Where's your data pickup? I'll make a credit transfer."

"The phone company disconnected it a long time ago."

"Let me give you a check, then. Say, three thousand even? An advance against future sales." Castine fumbled for a while before locating a blank check. "First one of these I've written in five years, maybe. Odd how you get accustomed to spending by telephone. Here you are, and good luck. To both of you." Me made a courtly, bitter bow. "I hope you'll be happy together. And call me up when you've finished a few pieces, Paul. I'll send the van. I suppose you'll have a phone again by then." He went out.

 

"There's a blessing in being able to forget," Nate Haldersen said. "The redemption of oblivion, I call it. What's happened to San Francisco this week isn't necessarily a disaster. For some of us, it's the finest thing in the world."

They were listening to him—at least fifty people, clustering near his feet. He stood on the stage of the bandstand in the park, just across from the De Young Museum. Shadows were gathering. Friday, the second full day of the memory crisis, was ending. Haldersen had slept in the park last night, and he planned to sleep there again tonight; he had realized after his escape from the hospital that his apartment had been shut down long ago and his possessions were in storage. It did not matter. He would live off the land and forage for food. The flame of prophecy was aglow in him.

"Let me tell you how it was with me," he cried. "Three days ago I was in a hospital for mental illness. Some of you are smiling, perhaps, telling me I ought to be back there now, but no! You don't understand. I was incapable of facing the world. Wherever I went, I saw happy families, parents and children, and it made me sick with envy and hatred, so that I couldn't function in society. Why? Why? Because my own wife and children were killed in an air disaster in 1991, that's why, and I missed the plane because I was committing sin that day, and for my sin they died, and I lived thereafter in unending torment! But now all that is flushed from my mind. I have sinned, and I have suffered, and now I am redeemed through merciful oblivion!"

A voice in the crowd called, "If you've forgotten all about it, how come you're telling the story to us?"

"A good question! An excellent question!" Haldersen felt sweat bursting from his pores, adrenalin pumping in his veins. "I know the story only because a machine in the hospital told it to me, yesterday morning. But it came to me from the outside, a secondhand tale. The experience of it within me, the scars, all that has been washed away. The pain of it is gone. Oh, yes, I'm sad that my innocent family perished, but a healthy man learns to control his grief after eleven years, he accepts his loss and goes on. I was sick, sick right here, and I couldn't live with my grief, but now I can, I look on it objectively, do you see? And that's why I say there's a blessing in being able to forget. What about you, out there? There must be some of you who suffered painful losses too, and now can no longer remember them, now have been redeemed and released from anguish. Are there any? Are there? Raise your hands. Who's been bathed in holy oblivion? Who out there knows that he's been cleansed, even if he can't remember what it is he's been cleansed from?"

Hands were starting to go up.

They were weeping, now, they were cheering, they were waving at him. Haldersen felt a little like a charlatan. But only a little. He had always had the stuff of a prophet in him, even while he was posing as a harmless academic, a stuffy professor of philosophy. He had had what every prophet needs, a sharp sense of contrast between guilt and purity, an awareness of the existence of sin. It was that awareness that had crushed him for eleven years. It was that awareness that now drove him to celebrate his joy in public, to seek for companions in liberation—no, for disciples—to found the Church of Oblivion here in Golden Gate Park. The hospital could have given him these drugs years ago and spared him from agony. Bryce had refused, Kamakura, Reynolds, all the smooth-talking doctors; they were waiting for more tests, experiments on chimpanzees, God knows what. And God had said, Nathaniel Haldersen has suffered long enough for his sin, and so He had thrust a drug into the water supply of San Francisco, the same drug that the doctors had denied him, and down the pipes from the mountains had come the sweet draught of oblivion.

"Drink with me!" Haldersen shouted. "All you who are in pain, you who live with sorrow! We'll get this drug ourselves! We'll purify our suffering souls! Drink the blessed water, and sing to the glory of God who gives us oblivion!"

 

Freddy Munson had spent Thursday afternoon, Thursday night, and all of Friday holed up in his apartment with every communications link to the outside turned off. He neither took nor made calls, ignored the telescreens, and had switched on the xerofax only three times in the thirty-six hours.

He knew that he was finished, and he was trying to decide how to react to it.

His memory situation seemed to have stabilized. He was still missing only five weeks of market maneuvers. There wasn't any further decay—not that that mattered; he was in trouble enough—and, despite an optimistic statement last night by Mayor Chase, Munson hadn't seen any evidence that the memory loss was reversing itself. He was unable to reconstruct any of the vanished details.

There was no immediate peril, he knew. Most of the clients whose accounts he'd been juggling were wealthy old bats who wouldn't worry about their stocks until they got next month's account statements. They had given him discretionary powers, which was how he had been able to tap their resources for his own benefit in the first place. Up to now, Munson had always been able to complete each transaction within a single month, so the account balanced for every statement. He had dealt with the problem of the securities withdrawals that the statements ought to show by gimmicking the house computer to delete all such withdrawals provided there was no net effect from month to month; that way he could borrow 10,000 shares of United Spaceways or Comsat or IBM for two weeks, use the stock as collateral for a deal of his own, and get it back into the proper account in time with no one the wiser. Three weeks from now, though, the end-of-the-month statements were going to go out showing all of his accounts peppered by inexplicable withdrawals, and he was going to catch hell.

The trouble might even start earlier, and come from a different direction. Since the San Francisco trouble had begun, the market had gone down sharply, and he would probably be getting margin calls on Monday. The San Francisco exchange was closed, of course; it hadn't been able to open Thursday morning because so many of the brokers had been hit hard by amnesia. But New York's exchanges were open, and they had reacted badly to the news from San Francisco, probably out of fear that a conspiracy was afoot and the whole country might soon be pushed into chaos. When the local exchange opened again on Monday, if it opened, it would most likely open at the last New York prices, or near them, and keep on going down. Munson would be asked to put up cash or additional securities to cover his loans. He certainly didn't have the cash, and the only way he could get additional securities would be to dip into still more of his accounts, compounding his offense; on the other hand, if he didn't meet the margin calls they'd sell him out and he'd never be able to restore the stock to the proper accounts, even if he succeeded in remembering which shares went where.

He was trapped. He could stick around for a few weeks, waiting for the ax to fall, or he could get out right now. He preferred to get out right now.

And go where?

Caracas? Reno? Sao Paulo? No, debtor sanctuaries wouldn't do him any good, because he wasn't an ordinary debtor. He was a thief, and the sanctuaries didn't protect criminals, only bankrupts. He had to go farther, all the way to Luna Dome. There wasn't any extradition from the Moon. There'd be no hope of coming back, either.

Munson got on the phone, hoping to reach his travel agent. Two tickets to Luna, please. One for him, one for Helene; if she didn't feel like coming, he'd go alone. No, not round trip. But the agent didn't answer. Munson tried the number several times. Shrugging, he decided to order direct, and called United Space ways next. He got a busy signal. "Shall we wait-list your call?" the data net asked. "It will be three days, at the present state of the backlog of calls, before we can put it through."

"Forget it," Munson said.

He had just realized that San Francisco was closed off, anyway. Unless he tried to swim for it, he couldn't get out of the city to go to the spaceport, even if he did manage to buy tickets to Luna. He was caught here until they opened the transit routes again. How long would that be? Monday, Tuesday, next Friday? They couldn't keep the city shut forever—could they?

What it came down to, Munson saw, was a contest of probabilities. Would someone discover the discrepancies in his accounts before he found a way of escaping to Luna, or would his escape access become available too late? Put on those terms, it became an interesting gamble instead of a panic situation. He would spend the weekend trying to find a way out of San Francisco, and if he failed, he would try to be a stoic about facing what was to come.

Calm, now, he remembered that he had promised to lend Paul Mueller a few thousand dollars, to help him equip his studio again. Munson was unhappy over having let that slip his mind. He liked to be helpful. And, even now, what were two or three bigs to him? He had plenty of recoverable assets. Might as well let Paul have a little of the money before the lawyers start grabbing it.

One problem. He had less than a hundred in cash on him—who bothered carrying cash?—and he couldn't telephone a transfer of funds to Mueller's account, because Paul didn't have an account with the data net any more, or even a phone. There wasn't any place to get that much cash, either, at this hour of evening, especially with the city paralyzed. And the weekend was coming. Munson had an idea, though. What if he went shopping with Mueller tomorrow, and simply charged whatever the sculptor needed to his own account? Fine. He reached for the phone to arrange the date, remembered that Mueller could not be called, and decided to tell Paul about it in person. Now. He could use some fresh air, anyway.

He half expected to find robot bailiffs outside, waiting to arrest him. But of course no one was after him yet. He walked to the garage. It was a fine night, cool, starry, with perhaps just a hint of fog in the east. Berkeley's lights glittered through the haze, though. The streets were quiet. In time of crisis people stay home, apparently. He drove quickly to Mueller's place. Four robots were in front of it. Munson eyed them edgily, with the wary look of the man who knows that the sheriff will be after him too, in a little while. But Mueller, when he came to the door, took no notice of the dunners.

Munson said, "I'm sorry I missed connections with you. The money I promised to lend you—"

"It's all right, Freddy. Pete Castine was here this morning and I borrowed the three bigs from him. I've already got my studio set up again. Come in and look."

Munson entered. "Pete Castine?"

"A good investment for him. He makes money if he has work of mine to sell, right? It's in his best interest to help me get started again. Carole and I have been hooking things up all day."

"Carole?" Munson said. Mueller showed him into the studio. The paraphernalia of a sonic sculptor sat on the floor—a welding pen, a vacuum bell, a big texturing vat, some ingots and strands of wire, and such things. Carole was feeding discarded packing cases into the wall disposal unit. Looking up, she smiled uncertainly and ran her hand through her long dark hair.

"Hello, Freddy."

"Everybody good friends again?" he asked, baffled. "Nobody remembers being enemies," she said. She laughed. "Isn't it wonderful to have your memory blotted out like this?"

"Wonderful," Munson said bleakly.

 

Commander Braskett said, "Can I offer you people any water?"

Tim Bryce smiled. Lisa Bryce smiled. Ted Kamakura smiled. Even Mayor Chase, that poor empty husk, smiled. Commander Braskett understood those smiles. Even now, after three days of close contact under pressure, they thought he was nuts.

He had had a week's supply of bottled water brought from his home to the command post here at the hospital. Everybody kept telling him that the municipal water was safe to drink now, that the memory drugs were gone from it; but why couldn't they comprehend that his aversion to public water dated back to an era when memory drugs were unknown? There were plenty of other chemicals in the reservoir, after all.

He hoisted his glass in a jaunty toast and winked at them.

Tim Bryce said, "Commander, we'd like you to address the city again at half past ten this morning. Here's your text."

Braskett scanned the sheet. It dealt mostly with the relaxation of the order to boil water before drinking it. "You want me to go on all media," he said, "and tell the people of San Francisco that it's now safe for them to drink from the taps, eh? That's a bit awkward for me. Even a figurehead spokesman is entitled to some degree of personal integrity."

Bryce looked briefly puzzled. Then he laughed and took the text back. "You're absolutely right, Commander. I can't ask you to make this announcement, in view of—ah—your particular beliefs. Let's change the plan. You open the spot by introducing me, and I'll discuss the no-boiling thing. Will that be all right?"

Commander Braskett appreciated the tactful way they deferred to his special obsession. "I'm at your service, Doctor," he said gravely.

 

Bryce finished speaking and the camera lights left him. He said to Lisa, "What about lunch? Or breakfast, or whatever meal it is we're up to now."

"Everything's ready, Tim. Whenever you are."

They ate together in the holograph room, which had become the kitchen of the command post. Massive cameras and tanks of etching fluid surrounded them. The others thoughtfully left them alone. These brief shared meals were the only fragments of privacy he and Lisa had had, in the fifty-two hours since he had awakened to find her sleeping beside him.

He stared across the table in wonder at this delectable blond girl who they said was his wife. How beautiful her soft brown eyes were against that backdrop of golden hair! How perfect the line of her lips, the curve of her earlobes! Bryce knew that no one would object if he and Lisa went off and locked themselves into one of the private rooms for a few hours. He wasn't that indispensable; and there was so much he had to begin relearning about his wife. But he was unable to leave his post. He hadn't been out of the hospital or even off this floor for the duration of the crisis; he kept himself going by grabbing the sleep wire for half an hour every six hours. Perhaps it was an illusion born of too little sleep and too much data, but he had come to believe that the survival of the city depended on him. He had spent his career trying to heal individual sick minds; now he had a whole city to tend to.

"Tired?" Lisa asked.

"I'm in that tiredness beyond feeling tired. My mind is so clear that my skull wouldn't cast a shadow. I'm nearing nirvana."

"The worst is over, I think. The city's settling down."

"It's still bad, though. Have you seen the suicide figures?"

"Bad?"

"Hideous. The norm in San Francisco is 220 a year. We've had close to five hundred in the last two and a half days. And that's just the reported cases, the bodies discovered, and so on. Probably we can double the figure. Thirty suicides reported Wednesday night, about two hundred on Thursday, the same on Friday, and about fifty so far this morning. At least it seems as if the wave is past its peak."

"But why, Tim?"

"Some people react poorly to loss. Especially the loss of a segment of their memories. They're indignant—they're crushed—they're scared—and they reach for the exit pill. Suicide's too easy now, anyway. In the old days you reacted to frustration by smashing the crockery; now you go a deadlier route. Of course, there are special cases. A man named Montini they fished out of the bay—a professional mnemonist, who did a trick act in nightclubs, total recall. I can hardly blame him for caving in. And I suppose there were a lot of others who kept their business in their heads—gamblers, stock-market operators, oral poets, musicians—who might decide to end it all rather than try to pick up the pieces."

"But if the effects of the drug wear off—"

"Do they?" Bryce asked.

"You said so yourself."

"I was making optimistic noises for the benefit of the citizens. We don't have any experimental history for these drugs and human subjects. Hell, Lisa, we don't even know the dosage that was administered; by the time we were able to get water samples most of the system had been flushed clean, and the automatic monitoring devices at the city pumping stations were rigged as part of the conspiracy so they didn't show a thing out of the ordinary. I've got no idea at all if there's going to be any measurable memory recovery."

"But there is, Tim. I've already started to get some things back."

"What?"

"Don't scream at me like that! You scared me."

He clung to the edge of the table. "Are you really recovering?"

"Around the edges. I remember a few things already. About us."

"Like what?"

"Applying for the marriage license. I'm standing stark naked inside a diagnostat machine and a voice on the loudspeaker is telling me to look straight into the scanners. And I remember the ceremony, a little. Just a small group of friends, a civil ceremony. Then we took the pod to Acapulco."

He stared grimly. "When did this start to come back?"

"About seven this morning, I guess."

"Is there more?"

"A bit. Our honeymoon. The robot bellhop who came blundering in on our wedding night. You don't—"

"Remember it? No. No. Nothing. Blank."

"That's all I remember, this early stuff."

"Yes, of course," he said. "The older memories are always the first to return in any form of amnesia. The last stuff in is the first to go." His hands were shaking, not entirely from fatigue. A strange desolation crept over him. Lisa remembered. He did not. Was it a function of her youth, or of the chemistry of her brain, or—?

He could not bear the thought that they no longer shared an oblivion. He didn't want the amnesia to become one-sided for them; it was humiliating not to remember his own marriage when she did. You're being irrational, he told himself. Physician, heal thyself!

"Let's go back inside," he said.

"You haven't finished your—"

"Later."

He went into the command room. Kamakura had phones in both hands and was barking data into a recorder. The screens were alive with morning scenes, Saturday in the city, crowds in Union Square. Kamakura hung up both calls and said, "I've got an interesting report from Dr. Klein at Letterman General. He says they're getting the first traces of memory recovery this morning. Women under thirty, only."

"Lisa says she's beginning to remember too," Bryce said.

"Women under thirty," said Kamakura. "Yes. Also the suicide rate is definitely tapering. We may be starting to come out of it."

"Terrific," Bryce said hollowly.

 

Haldersen was living in a ten-foot-high bubble that one of his disciples had blown for him in the middle of Golden Gate Park, just west of the Arboretum. Fifteen similar bubbles had gone up around his, giving the region the look of an up-to-date Eskimo village in plastic igloos. The occupants of the camp, aside from Haldersen, were men and women who had so little memory left that they did not know who they were or where they lived. He had acquired a dozen of these lost ones on Friday, and by late afternoon on Saturday he had been joined by some forty more. The news somehow was moving through the city that those without moorings were welcome to take up temporary residence with the group in the park. It had happened that way during the 1906 disaster, too.

The police had been around a few times to check on them.

The first time, a portly lieutenant had tried to persuade the whole group to move to Fletcher Memorial. "That's where most of the victims are getting treatment, you see. The doctors give them something, and then we try to identify them and find their next of kin—"

"Perhaps it's best for these people to remain away from their next of kin for a while," Haldersen suggested. "Some meditation in the park—an exploration of the pleasures of having forgotten—that's all we're doing here." He would not go to Fletcher Memorial himself except under duress. As for the others, he felt he could do more for them in the park than anyone in the hospital could.

The second time the police came, Saturday afternoon when his group was much larger, they brought a mobile communications system. "Dr. Bryce of Fletcher Memorial wants to talk to you," a different lieutenant said.

Haldersen watched the screen come alive. "Hello, Doctor. Worried about me?"

"I'm worried about everyone, Nate. What the hell are you doing in the park?"

"Founding a new religion, I think."

"You're a sick man. You ought to come back here."

"No, Doctor. I'm not sick any more. I've had my therapy and I'm fine. It was a beautiful treatment: selective obliteration, just as I prayed for. The entire trauma is gone."

Bryce appeared fascinated by that; his frowning expression of official responsibility vanished a moment, giving place to a look of professional concern. "Interesting," he said. "We've got people who've forgotten only nouns, and people who've forgotten who they married, and people who've forgotten how to play the violin. But you're the first one who's forgotten a trauma. You still ought to come back here, though. You aren't the best judge of your fitness to face the outside environment."

"Oh, but I am," Haldersen said. "I'm doing fine. And my people need me."

"Your people?"

"Waifs. Strays. The total wipeouts."

"We want those people in the hospital, Nate. We want to get them back to their families."

"Is that necessarily a good deed? Maybe some of them can use a spell of isolation from their families. These people look happy, Dr. Bryce. I've heard there are a lot of suicides, but not here. We're practicing mutually supportive therapy. Looking for the joys to be found in oblivion. It seems to work."

Bryce stared silently out of the screen for a long moment. Then he said impatiently, "All right, have it your own way for now. But I wish you'd stop coming on like Jesus and Freud combined, and leave the park. You're still a sick man, Nate, and the people with you are in serious trouble. I'll talk to you later."

The contact broke. The police, stymied, left.

Haldersen spoke briefly to his people at five o'clock. Then he sent them out as missionaries to collect other victims. "Save as many as you can," he said. "Find those who are in complete despair and get them into the park before they can take their own lives. Explain that the loss of one's past is not the loss of all things."

The disciples went forth. And came back leading those less fortunate than themselves. The group grew to more than one hundred by nightfall. Someone found the extruder again and blew twenty more bubbles as shelters for the night. Haldersen preached his sermon of joy, looking out at the blank eyes, the slack faces of those whose identities had washed away on Wednesday. "Why give up?" he asked them. "Now is your chance to create new lives for yourself. The slate is clean! Choose the direction you will take, define your new selves through the exercise of free will—you are reborn in holy oblivion, all of you.

Rest, now, those who have just come to us. And you others, go forth again, seek out the wanderers, the drifters, the lost ones hiding in the corners of the city—"

As he finished, he saw a knot of people bustling toward him from the direction of the South Drive. Fearing trouble, Haider-sen went out to meet them; but as he drew close he saw half a dozen disciples, clutching a scruffy, unshaven, terrified little man. They hurled him at Haldersen's feet. The man quivered like a hare ringed by hounds. His eyes glistened; his wedge of a face, sharp-chinned, sharp of cheekbones, was pale.

"It's the one who poisoned the water supply!" someone called. "We found him in a rooming house on Judah Street. With a stack of drugs in his room, and the plans of the water system, and a bunch of computer programs. He admits it. He admits it!"

Haldersen looked down. "Is this true?" he asked. "Are you the one?"

The man nodded.

"What's your name?"

"Won't say. Want a lawyer."

"Kill him now!" a woman shrieked. "Pull his arms and legs off!"

"Kill him!" came an answering cry from the other side of the group. "Kill him!"

The congregation, Haldersen realized, might easily turn into a mob.

He said, "Tell me your name, and I'll protect you. Otherwise I can't be responsible."

"Skinner," the man muttered miserably.

"Skinner. And you contaminated the water supply."

Another nod.

"Why?"

"To get even."

"With whom?"

"Everyone. Everybody."

Classic paranoid. Haldersen felt pity. Not the others; they were calling out for blood.

A tall man bellowed, "Make the bastard drink his own drug!"

"No, kill him! Squash him!"

The voices became more menacing. The angry faces came closer.

"Listen to me," Haldersen called, and his voice cut through the murmurings. "There'll be no killing here tonight."

"What are you going to do, give him to the police?"

"No," said Haldersen. "We'll hold communion together. We'll teach this pitiful man the blessings of oblivion, and then we'll share new joys ourselves. We are human beings. We have the capacity to forgive even the worst of sinners. Where are the memory drugs? Did someone say you had found the memory drugs? Here. Here. Pass it up here. Yes. Brothers, sisters, let us show this dark and twisted soul the nature of redemption. Yes. Yes. Fetch some water, please. Thank you. Here, Skinner. Stand him up, will you? Hold his arms. Keep him from falling down. Wait a second, until I find the proper dose. Yes. Yes. Here, Skinner. Forgiveness. Sweet oblivion."

 

It was so good to be working again that Mueller didn't want to stop. By early afternoon on Saturday his studio was ready; he had long since worked out the sketches of the first piece; now it was just a matter of time and effort, and he'd have something to show Pete Castine. He worked on far into the evening, setting up his armature and running a few tests of the sound sequences that he proposed to build into the piece. He had some interesting new ideas about the sonic triggers, the devices that would set off the sound effects when the appreciator came within range. Carole had to tell him, finally, that dinner was ready. "I didn't want to interrupt you," she said, "but it looks like I have to, or you won't ever stop."

"Sorry. The creative ecstasy."

"Save some of that energy. There are other ecstasies. The ecstasy of dinner, first."

She had cooked everything herself. Beautiful. He went back to work again afterward, but at half past one in the morning Carole again interrupted him. He was willing to stop, now. He had done an honest day's work, and he was sweaty with the noble sweat of a job well done. Two minutes under the molecular cleanser and the sweat was gone, but the good ache of virtuous fatigue remained. He hadn't felt this way in years.

He woke to Sunday thoughts of unpaid debts.

"The robots are still there," he said. "They won't go away, will they? Even though the whole city's at a standstill, nobody's told the robots to quit."

"Ignore them," Carole said.

"That's what I've been doing. But I can't ignore the debts. Ultimately there'll be a reckoning."

"You're working again, though! You'll have an income coming in."

"Do you know what I owe?" he asked. "Almost a million. If I produced one piece a week for a year, and sold each piece for twenty bigs, I might pay everything off. But I can't work that fast, and the market can't possibly absorb that many Muellers, and Pete certainly can't buy them all for future sale."

He noticed the way Carole's face darkened at the mention of Pete Castine.

He said, "You know what I'll have to do? Go to Caracas, like I was planning before this memory thing started. I can work there, and ship my stuff to Pete. And maybe in two or three years I'll have paid off my debt, a hundred cents on the dollar, and I can start fresh back here. Do you know if that's possible?

I mean, if you jump to a debtor sanctuary, are you blackballed for credit forever, even if you pay off what you owe?"

"I don't know," Carole said distantly.

"I'll find that out later. The important thing is that I'm working again, and I've got to go someplace where I can work without being hounded. And then I'll pay everybody off. You'll come with me to Caracas, won't you?"

"Maybe we won't have to go," Carole said.

"But how—"

"You should be working now, shouldn't you?"

He worked, and while he worked he made lists of creditors in his mind, dreaming of the day when every name on every list was crossed off. When he got hungry he emerged from the studio and found Carole sitting gloomily in the living room. Her eyes were red and puffy-lidded.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "You don't want to go to Caracas?"

"Please, Paul—let's not talk about it—"

"I've really got no alternative. I mean, unless we pick one of the other sanctuaries. Sao Paolo? Spalato?"

"It isn't that, Paul."

"What, then?"

"I'm starting to remember again."

The air went out of him. "Oh," he said.

"I remember November, December, January. The crazy things you were doing, the loans, the financial juggling. And the quarrels we had. They were terrible quarrels."

"Oh."

"The divorce. I remember, Paul. It started coming back last night, but you were so happy I didn't want to say anything. And this morning it's much clearer. You still don't remember any of it?"

"Not a thing past last October."

"I do," she said, shakily. "You hit me, do you know that? You cut my lip. You slammed me against that wall, right over there, and then you threw the Chinese vase at me and it broke."

"Oh. Oh."

She went on, "I remember how good Pete was to me, too. I think I can almost remember marrying him, being his wife. Paul, I'm scared. I feel everything fitting into place in my mind, and it's as scary as if my mind was breaking into pieces. It was so good, Paul, these last few days. It was like being a newlywed with you again. But now all the sour parts are coming back, the hate, the ugliness, it's all alive for me again. And I feel so bad about Pete. The two of us, Friday, shutting him out. He was a real gentleman about it. But the fact is that he saved me when I was going under, and I owe him something for that."

"What do you plan to do?" he asked quietly.

"I think I ought to go back to him. I'm his wife. I've got no right to stay here."

"But I'm not the same man you came to hate," Mueller protested. "I'm the old Paul, the one from last year and before. The man you loved. All the hateful stuff is gone from me."

"Not from me, though. Not now."

They were both silent.

"I think I should go back, Paul."

"Whatever you say."

"I think I should. I wish you all kinds of luck, but I can't stay here. Will it hurt your work if I leave again?"

"I won't know until you do."

She told him three or four more times that she felt she ought to go back to Castine, and then, politely, he suggested that she should go back right now, if that was how she felt, and she did. He spent half an hour wandering around the apartment, which seemed so awfully empty again. He nearly invited one of the dunning robots in for company. Instead, he went back to work.

To his surprise, he worked quite well, and in an hour he had ceased thinking about Carole entirely.

 

Sunday afternoon, Freddy Munson set up a credit transfer and managed to get most of his liquid assets fed into an old account he kept at the Bank of Luna. Toward evening, he went down to the wharf and boarded a three-man hovercraft owned by a fisherman willing to take his chances with the law. They slipped out into the bay without running lights and crossed the bay on a big diagonal, landing some time later a few miles north of Berkeley. Munson found a cab to take him to the Oakland airport, and caught the midnight shuttle to L.A., where, after a lot of fancy talking, he was able to buy his way aboard the next Luna-bound rocket, lifting off at ten o'clock Monday morning. He spent the night in the spaceport terminal. He had taken with him nothing except the clothes he wore; his fine possessions, his paintings, his suits, his Mueller sculptures, and all the rest remained in his apartment, and ultimately would be sold to satisfy the judgments against him. Too bad. He knew that he wouldn't be coming back to Earth again, either, not with a larceny warrant or worse awaiting him. Also too bad. It had been so nice for so long, here, and who needed a memory drug in the water supply? Munson had only one consolation. It was an article of his philosophy that sooner or later, no matter how neatly you organized your life, fate opened a trapdoor underneath your feet and catapulted you into something unknown and unpleasant. Now he knew that it was true, even for him.

Too, too bad. He wondered what his chances were of starting over up there. Did they need stockbrokers on the Moon?

 

Addressing the citizenry on Monday night, Commander Braskett said, "The committee of public safety is pleased to report that we have come through the worst part of the crisis. As many of you have already discovered, memories are beginning to return. The process of recovery will be more swift for some than others, but great progress has been made. Effective at six A.M. tomorrow, access routes to and from San Francisco will reopen. There will be normal mail service and many businesses will return to normal. Fellow citizens, we have demonstrated once again the real fiber of the American spirit. The Founding Fathers must be smiling down upon us today! How superbly we avoided chaos, and how beautifully we pulled together to help one another in what could have been an hour of turmoil and despair!

"Dr. Bryce requests me to remind you that anyone still suffering severe impairment of memory—especially those experiencing loss of identity, confusion of vital functions, or other disability—should report to the emergency ward at Fletcher Memorial Hospital. Treatment is available there, and computer analysis is at the service of those unable to find their homes and loved ones. I repeat—"

Tim Bryce wished that the good commander hadn't slipped in that plug for the real fiber of the American spirit, especially in view of the necessity to invite the remaining victims to the hospital with his next words. But it would be uncharitable to object. The old spaceman had done a beautiful job all weekend as the Voice of the Crisis, and some patriotic embellishments now were harmless.

The crisis, of course, was nowhere near as close to being over as Commander Braskett's speech had suggested, but public confidence had to be buoyed.

Bryce had the latest figures. Suicides now totaled 900 since the start of trouble on Wednesday; Sunday had been an unexpectedly bad day. At least 40,000 people were still unaccounted for, although they were tracing 1,000 an hour and getting them back to their families or else into an intensive-care section. Probably 750,000 more continued to have memory difficulties. Most children had fully recovered, and many of the women were mending; but older people, and men in general, had experienced scarcely any memory recapture. Even those who were nearly healed had no recall of events of Tuesday and Wednesday, and probably never would; for large numbers of people, though, big blocks of the past would have to be learned from the outside, like history lessons.

Lisa was teaching him their marriage that way.

The trips they had taken—the good times, the bad—the parties, the friends, the shared dreams—she described everything, as vividly as she could, and he fastened on each anecdote, trying to make it a part of himself again. He knew it was hopeless, really. He'd know the outlines, never the substance. Yet it was probably the best he could hope for.

He was so horribly tired, suddenly.

He said to Kamakura, "Is there anything new from the park yet? That rumor that Haldersen's actually got a supply of the drug?"

"Seems to be true, Tim. The word is that he and his friends caught the character who spiked the water supply, and relieved him of a roomful of various amnesifacients."

"We've got to seize them," Bryce said.

Kamakura shook his head. "Not just yet. Police are afraid of any actions in the park. They say it's a volatile situation."

"But if those drugs are loose—"

"Let me worry about it, Tim. Look, why don't you and Lisa go home for a while? You've been here without a break since Thursday."

"So have—"

"No. Everybody else has had a breather. Go on, now. We're over the worst. Relax, get some real sleep, make some love. Get to know that gorgeous wife of yours again a little."

Bryce reddened. "I'd rather stay here until I feel I can afford to leave."

Scowling, Kamakura walked away from him to confer with Commander Braskett. Bryce scanned the screens, trying to figure out what was going on in the park. A moment later, Braskett walked over to him.

"Dr. Bryce?"

"What?"

"You're relieved of duty until sundown Tuesday."

"Wait a second—"

"That's an order, Doctor. I'm chairman of the committee of public safety, and I'm telling you to get yourself out of this hospital. You aren't going to disobey an order, are you?"

"Listen, Commander—"

"Out. No mutiny, Bryce. Out! Orders."

Bryce tried to protest, but he was too weary to put up much of a fight. By noon, he was on his way home, soupy-headed with fatigue. Lisa drove. He sat quite still, struggling to remember details of his marriage. Nothing came.

She put him to bed. He wasn't sure how long he slept; but then he felt her against him, warm, satin-smooth.

"Hello," she said. "Remember me?"

"Yes," he lied gratefully. "Oh, yes, yes, yes!"

 

Working right through the night, Mueller finished his armature by dawn on Monday. He slept a while, and in early afternoon began to paint the inner strips of loudspeakers on: a thousand speakers to the inch, no more than a few molecules thick, from which the sounds of his sculpture would issue in resonant fullness. When that was done, he paused to contemplate the needs of his sculpture's superstructure, and by seven that night was ready to move to the next phase. The demons of creativity possessed him; he saw no reason to eat and scarcely any to sleep.

At eight, just as he was getting up momentum for the long night's work, he heard a knock at the door. Carole's signal. He had disconnected the doorbell, and robots didn't have the sense to knock. Uneasily, he went to the door. She was there.

"So?" he said.

"So I came back. So it starts all over."

"What's going on?"

"Can I come in?" she asked.

"I suppose. I'm working, but come in."

She said, "I talked it all over with Pete. We both decided I ought to go back to you."

"You aren't much for consistency, are you?" he asked.

"I have to take things as they happen. When I lost my memory, I came to you. When I remembered things again, I felt I ought to leave. I didn't want to leave. I felt I ought to leave. There's a difference."

"Really," he said.

"Really. I went to Pete, but I didn't want to be with him. I wanted to be here."

"I hit you and made your lip bleed. I threw the Ming vase at you."

"It wasn't Ming, it was K'ang-hsi."

"Pardon me. My memory still isn't so good. Anyway, I did terrible things to you, and you hated me enough to want a divorce. So why come back?"

"You were right, yesterday. You aren't the man I came to hate. You're the old Paul."

"And if my memory of the past nine months returns?"

"Even so," she said. "People change. You've been through hell and come out the other side. You're working again. You aren't sullen and nasty and confused. We'll go to Caracas, or wherever you want, and you'll do your work and pay your debts, just as you said yesterday."

"And Pete?"

"He'll arrange an annulment. He's being swell about it."

"Good old Pete," Mueller said. He shook his head. "How long will the neat happy ending last, Carole? If you think there's a chance you'll be bouncing back in the other direction by Wednesday, say so now. I'd rather not get involved again, in that case."

"No chance. None."

"Unless I throw the Ch'ien-lung vase at you."

"K'ang-hsi," she said.

"Yes. K'ang-hsi." He managed to grin. Suddenly he felt the accumulated fatigue of these days register all at once. "I've been working too hard," he said. "An orgy of creativity to make up for lost time. Let's go for a walk."

"Fine," she said.

They went out, just as a dunning robot was arriving. "Top of the evening to you, sir," Mueller said.

"Mr. Mueller, I represent the accounts receivable department of the Acme Brass and—"

"See my attorney," he said.

Fog was rolling in off the sea now. There were no stars. The downtown lights were invisible. He and Carole walked west, toward the park. He felt strangely light-headed, not entirely from lack of sleep. Reality and dream had merged; these were unusual days. They entered the park from the Panhandle and strolled toward the museum area, arm in arm, saying nothing much to one another. As they passed the conservatory Mueller became aware of a crowd up ahead, thousands of people staring in the direction of the music shell. "What do you think is going on?" Carole asked. Mueller shrugged. They edged through the crowd.

Ten minutes later they were close enough to see the stage. A tall, thin, wild-looking man with unruly yellow hair was on the stage. Beside him was a small, scrawny man in ragged clothing, and there were a dozen others flanking them, carrying ceramic bowls.

"What's happening?" Mueller asked someone in the crowd.

"Religious ceremony."

"Eh?"

"New religion. Church of Oblivion. That's the head prophet up there. You haven't heard about it yet?"

"Not a thing."

"Started around Friday. You see that ratty-looking character next to the prophet?"

"Yes."

"He's the one that put the stuff in the water supply. He confessed and they made him drink his own drug. Now he doesn't remember a thing, and he's the assistant prophet. Craziest damn stuff!"

"And what are they doing up there?"

"They've got the drug in those bowls. They drink and forget some more. They drink and forget some more."

The gathering fog absorbed the sounds of those on the stage. Mueller strained to listen. He saw the bright eyes of fanaticism; the alleged contaminator of the water looked positively radiant. Words drifted out into the night.

"Brothers and sisters… the joy, the sweetness of forgetting… come up here with us, take communion with us… oblivion… redemption… even for the most wicked… forget… forget…"

They were passing the bowls around on stage, drinking, smiling. People were going up to receive the communion, taking a bowl, sipping, nodding happily. Toward the rear of the stage the bowls were being refilled by three sober-looking functionaries.

Mueller felt a chill. He suspected that what had been born in this park during this week would endure, somehow, long after the crisis of San Francisco had become part of history; and it seemed to him that something new and frightening had been loosed upon the land.

"Take… drink… forget…" the prophet cried.

And the worshipers cried, "Take… drink… forget…"

The bowls were passed.

"What's it all about?"' Carole whispered.

"Take… drink… forget…"

"Take… drink… forget…"

"Blessed is sweet oblivion."

"Blessed is sweet oblivion."

"Sweet it is to lay down the burden of one's soul."

"Sweet it is to lay down the burden of one's soul."

"Joyous it is to begin anew."

"Joyous it is to begin anew."

The fog was deepening. Mueller could barely see the aquarium building just across the way. He clasped his hand tightly around Carole's and began to think about getting out of the park.

He had to admit, though, that these people might have hit on something true. Was he not better off for having taken a chemical into his bloodstream, and thereby shedding a portion of his past? Yes, of course. And yet—to mutilate one's mind this way, deliberately, happily, to drink deep of oblivion—

"Blessed are those who are able to forget," the prophet said.

"Blessed are those who are able to forget," the crowd roared in response.

"Blessed are those who are able to forget," Mueller heard his own voice cry. And he began to tremble. And he felt sudden fear. He sensed the power of this strange new movement, the gathering strength of the prophet's appeal to unreason. It was time for a new religion, maybe, a cult that offered emancipation from all inner burdens. They would synthesize this drug and turn it out by the ton, Mueller thought, and repeatedly dose cities with it, so that everyone could be converted, so that everyone might taste the joys of oblivion. No one will be able to stop them. After a while, no one will want to stop them. And so we'll go on, drinking deep, until we're washed clean of all pain and all sorrow, of all sad recollection, we'll sip a cup of kindness and part with auld lang syne, we'll give up the griefs we carry around, and we'll give up everything else, identity, soul, self, mind. We will drink sweet oblivion. Mueller shivered. Turning suddenly, tugging roughly at Carole's arm, he pushed through the joyful worshiping crowd, and hunted somberly in the fogwrapped night, trying to find some way out of the park.

 


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The Eve of RUMOKO
BY
ROGER ZELAZNY

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Roger Zelazny is one of the most popular members of the new generation of science-fiction writers. His work began appearing professionally in 1962 and quickly attracted attention for the vigor and eloquence of its style and the excitement of its pace. He collected the first in a long series of honors by winning two Nebula awards and a Hugo in 1966, adding another Hugo in 1968 for his novel, Lord of Light. His other books include This Immortal, The Dream Master, and Four for Tomorrow. He was Secretary-Treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1967-68, and edited the organization's 1968 anthology, Nebula Award Stories.


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The Eve of RUMOKO
I was in the control room when the J-9 unit flaked out on us. I was there for purposes of doing some idiot maintenance work, among other things.

There were two men below in the capsule, inspecting the Highway to Hell, that shaft screwed into the ocean's bottom thousands of fathoms beneath us and soon to be opened for traffic. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have worried, as there were two J-9 technicians on the payroll. Only, one of them was on leave in Spitzbergen and the other had entered sick bay just that morning. As a sudden combination of wind and turbulent waters rocked the Aquina, and I reflected that it was now the Eve of RUMOKO, I made my decision. I crossed the room and removed a side panel.

"Schweitzer! You're not authorized to fool around with that!" said Doctor Asquith.

I studied the circuits, and, "Do you want to work on it?" I asked him.

"Of course not. I wouldn't know how to begin. But—"

"Do you want to see Martin and Demmy die?"

"You know I don't. Only you're not—"

"Then tell me who is," I said. "That capsule down there is controlled from up here, and we've just blown something. If you know somebody better fit to work on it, then you'd better send for him. Otherwise, I'll try to repair the J-9 myself."

He shut up then, and I began to see where the trouble was. They had been somewhat obvious about things. They had even used solder. Four circuits had been rigged, and they had fed the whole mess back through one of the timers…

So I began unscrewing the thing. Asquith was an oceanographer and so should know little about electronic circuits. So I guessed that he couldn't tell that I was undoing sabotage. I worked for about ten minutes, and the drifting capsule hundreds of fathoms beneath us began to function once again.

As I worked, I had reflected upon the powers soon to be invoked, the forces that would traverse Hell's Highway for a brief time, and then like the Devil's envoy—or the Devil himself, perhaps—be released, there in the mid-Atlantic. The bleak weather that prevails in these latitudes at this time of year did little to improve my mood. A deadly force was to be employed, atomic energy, to release an even more powerful phenomenon—live magma—which seethed and bubbled now miles beneath the sea itself. That anyone should play senseless games with something like this was beyond my comprehension. Once again, the ship was shaken by the waves.

"Okay," I said. "There were a few shorts and I straightened them out." I replaced the side panel. "There shouldn't be any more trouble."

He regarded the monitor. "It seems to be functioning all right now. Let me check…"

He flipped the toggle and said, "Aquina, to capsule. Do you read me?"

"Yes," came the reply. "What happened?"

"Short circuit in the J-9," he answered. "It has been repaired. What is your condition?"

"All systems returned to normal.—Instructions?"

"Proceed with your mission," he said, then turned to me.

"I'll recommend you for something or other," he said. "I'm sorry I snapped at you. I didn't know you could service the J-9."

"I'm an electrical engineer," I replied, "and I've studied this thing. I know it's restricted. If I hadn't been able to figure out what was wrong, I wouldn't have touched it."

"I take it you'd rather not be recommended for something or other?"

"That is correct."

"Then I will not do it."

Which was a very good thing, for the nonce, as I'd also disconnected a small bomb, which then resided in my left-hand jacket pocket and would soon be tossed overboard. It had had another five to eight minutes to go and would have blotted the record completely. As for me, I didn't even want a record; but if there had to be one, it would be mine, not the enemy's.

I excused myself and departed. I disposed of the evidence. I thought upon the day's doings.

Someone had tried to sabotage the project. So Don Walsh had been right. The assumed threat had been for real. Consume that and digest it. It meant that there was something big involved. The main question was, "what?" The second was, "what next?"

I lit a cigarette and leaned on the Aquinas rail. I watched the cold north sea attack the hull. My hands shook. It was a decent, humanitarian project. Also, a highly dangerous one. Even forgetting the great risks, though, I could not come up with a good counterinterest. Obviously, however, there was one.

Would Asquith report me? Probably. Though he would not realize what he was doing. He would have to explain the discontinuance of function in the capsule in order to make his report jibe with the capsule's log. He would say that I had repaired a short circuit. That's all.

That would be enough.

I had already decided that the enemy had access to the main log. They would know about the disconnected bomb not being reported. They would also know who had stopped them; and they might be interested enough, at a critical time like this, to do something rash. Good. That was precisely what I wanted.

… Because I had already wasted an entire month waiting for this break. I hoped they would come after me soon and try to question me. I took a deep drag on the cigarette and watched a distant iceberg glisten in the sun. This was going to be a strange one—I had that feeling. The skies were gray and the oceans were dark. Somewhere, someone disapproved of what was going on here, but for the life of me I could not guess why.

Well, the hell with them all. I like cloudy days. I was born on one. I'd do my best to enjoy this one.

I went back to my cabin and mixed myself a drink, as I was then officially off duty.

After a time, there came a knocking on my door.

"Turn the handle and push," I said.

It opened and a young man named Rawlings entered.

"Mister Schweitzer," he said, "Carol Deith would like to speak with you."

"Tell her I'm on my way," I said.

"All right," and he departed.

I combed my sort of blond hair and changed my shirt, because she was pretty and young. She was also the ship's Security Officer, though, so I had a good idea as to what she was really after.

I walked to her office and knocked twice on the door.

As I entered, I bore in mind the fact that it probably involved the J-9 and my doings of a half hour before. This would tend to indicate that she was right on top of everything.

"Hello," I said. "I believe you sent for me?"

"Schweitzer? Yes, I did. Have a seat, huh?" and she gestured at one on the other side of her expensive desk.

I took it.

"What do you want?"

"You repaired the J-9 this afternoon."

I shrugged.

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"You are not authorized to touch the thing."

"If you want, I can go back and screw it up and leave it the way I found it."

"Then you admit you worked on it?"

"Yes."

She sighed.

"Look, I don't care," she said. "You probably saved two lives today, so I'm not about to fault you for a security violation. What I want to know is something different."

"What?"

"Was it sabotage?"

And there it was. I had felt it coming.

"No," I said. "It was not. There were some short circuits—"

"Bull," she told me.

"I'm sorry. I don't understand—"

"You understand, all right. Somebody gimmicked that thing. You undid it, and it was trickier than a couple short circuits. And there was a bomb. We monitored its explosion off the port bow about half an hour ago."

"You said it," I said. "I didn't."

"What's your game?" she asked me. "You cleaned up for us, and now you're covering up for somebody else. What do you want?"

"Nothing," I said.

I studied her. Her hair was sort of reddish and she had freckles, lots of them. Her eyes were green. They seemed to be set quite far apart beneath the ruddy line of her bangs. She was fairly tall—like five-ten—though she was not standing at the moment. I had danced with her once at a shipboard party.

"Well?"

"Quite well," I said. "And yourself?"

"I want an answer."

"To what?"

"Was it sabotage?"

"No," I said. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

"There have been other attempts, you know."

"No, I didn't know."

She blushed suddenly, highlighting her freckles. What had caused that?

"Well, there have been. We stopped all of them, obviously. But they were there."

"Who did it?"

"We don't know."

"Why not?"

"We never got hold of the people involved."

"How come?"

"They were clever."

I lit a cigarette.

"Well, you're wrong," I said. "There were some short circuits. I'm an electrical engineer and I spotted them. That was all, though."

She found one someplace, and I lit it for her.

"Okay," she said. "I guess I've got everything you want to tell me."

I stood then.

"… By the way, I ran another check on you."

"Yes?"

"Nothing. You're clean as snow and swansdown."

"Glad to hear it."

"Don't be, Mister Schweitzer. I'm not finished with you yet."

"Try everything," I said. "You'll find nothing else."

… And I was sure of that.

So I left her, wondering when they would reach me.

 

I send one Christmas card each year, and it is unsigned. All it bears—in block print—is a list of four bars and the cities in which they exist. On Easter, May Day, the first day of summer, and Halloween, I sit in those bars and sip drinks from nine until midnight, local time. Then I go away. Each year, they're different bars.

Always, I pay cash, rather than using the Universal Credit Card which most people carry these days. The bars are generally dives, located in out-of-the-way places.

Sometimes Don Walsh shows up, sits down next to me and orders a beer. We strike up a conversation, then take a walk. Sometimes he doesn't show up. He never misses two in a row, though. And the second time he always brings me some cash.

A couple months ago, on the day when summer came bustling into the world, I was seated at a table in the back of the Inferno, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. It was a cool evening, as they all are in that place, and the air had been clean and the stars very bright as I walked up the flagstone streets of that National Monument. After a time, I saw Don enter, wearing a dark, fake-wool suit and yellow sport shirt, opened at the neck. He moved to the bar, ordered something, turned and let his eyes wander about the tables. I nodded when he grinned and waved. He moved toward me with a glass in one hand and a Carta Blanca in the other.

"I know you," he said.

"Yeah, I think so. Have a seat?"

He pulled out a chair and seated himself across from me at the small table. The ash tray was filled to overflowing, but not because of me. The odor of tequila was on the breeze—make that "draft"—from the opened front of the narrow barroom, and all about us two-dimensional nudes fought with bullfight posters for wall space.

"Your name is…?"

"Frank," I said, pulling it out of the air. "Wasn't it in New Orleans…?"

"Yeah, at Mardi Gras—a couple years ago."

"That's right. And you're…?"

"George."

"Right. I remember now. We went drinking together. Played poker all night long. Had a hell of a good time."

"… And you took me for about two hundred bucks."

I grinned.

"So what've you been up to?" I asked him.

"Oh, the usual business. There are big sales and small sales. I've got a big one going now."

"Congratulations. I'm glad to hear that. Hope it works out."

"Me too."

So we made small talk while he finished his beer; then, "Have you seen much of this town?" I asked.

"Not really. I hear it's quite a place."

"Oh, I think you'll like it. I was here for their Festival once. Everybody takes bennies to stay awake for the whole three days. Indios come down from the hills and put on dances. They still hold paseos here, too, you know? And they have the only Gothic cathedral in all of Mexico. It was designed by an illiterate Indian, who had seen pictures of the things on postcards from Europe. They didn't think it would stay up when they took the scaffolding down, but it did and has done so for a long time."

"I wish I could stick around, but I'm only here for a day or so. I thought I'd buy some souvenirs to take home to the family."

"This is the place. Stuff is cheap here. Jewelry, especially."

"I wish I had more time to see some of the sights."

"There is a Toltec ruin atop a hill to the northeast, which you might have noticed because of the three crosses set at its summit. It is interesting because the government still refuses to admit it exists. The view from up there is great."

"I'd like to see it. How do you get in?"

"You just walk out there and climb it. It doesn't exist, so there are no restrictions."

"How long a hike?"

"Less than an hour, from here."

"Okay."

"Then finish your beer, and we'll take a walk."

He did, and we walked.

He was breathing heavily in a short time. But then, he lived near sea level and this was like 6,500 feet elevation.

We made it up to the top, though, and wandered amid cacti. We seated ourselves on some big stones.

"So, this place doesn't exist," he said, "the same as you."

"That's right."

"Then it's not bugged—no, it couldn't be—the way most bars are these days."

"It's still a bit of wilderness."

"I hope it stays this way."

"Me, too."

"Thanks for the Christmas card. You looking for a job?"

"You know it."

"All right. I've got one for you."

And that's how this one started.

"Do you know about the Leeward and Windward Islands?" he asked me. "Or Surtsey?"

"No. Tell me."

"Down in the West Indies—in the Lesser Antilles system-starting in an arc heading southeasterly from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands toward South America, are those islands north of Guadeloupe which represent the high points of a subterranean ridge ranging from forty to two hundred miles in width. These are oceanic islands, built up from volcanic materials. Every peak is a volcano—extinct or otherwise."

"So?"

"The Hawaiians grew up in the same fashion.—Surtsey, though, was a twentieth-century phenomenon: a volcanically created island which grew up in a very brief time, somewhat to the west of the Vestmanna Islands, near Iceland. That was in 1963. Capelinhos, in the Azores, was the same way, and had its origin undersea."

"So?" But I already knew, as I said it. I already knew about Project RUMOKO—after the Maori god of volcanoes and earthquakes. Back in the twentieth century, there had been an aborted Mohole Project and there had been natural-gas-mining deals which had involved deep drilling and the use of "shaped" atomic charges.

"RUMOKO," he said. "Do you know about it?"

"Somewhat. Mainly from the Times Science Section."

"That's enough. We're involved."

"How so?"

"Someone is attempting to sabotage the thing. I have been retained to find out who and how and why, and to stop him. I've tried, and have been eminently unsuccessful to date. In fact, I lost two of my men under rather strange circumstances. Then I received your Christmas card."

I turned toward him, and his green eyes seemed to glow in the dark. He was about four inches shorter than me and perhaps forty pounds lighter, which still made him a pretty big man. But he had straightened into a nearly military posture, so that he seemed bigger and stronger than the guy who had been wheezing beside me on the way up.

"You want me to move in?"

"Yes."

"What's in it for me?"

"Fifty thousand. Maybe a hundred fifty—depending on the results."

I lit a cigarette.

"What will I have to do?" I finally asked.

"Get yourself assigned as a crewman on the Aquina—better yet. a technician of some kind. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"Well, do it, then. Then find out who is trying to screw the thing up. Then report back to me—or else take them out of the picture any way you see fit. Then report it back to me."

I chuckled.

"It sounds like a big job. Who is your client?"

"A U.S. Senator," he said, "who shall remain nameless."

"With that I can guess," I said, "but I won't."

"You'll do it?"

"Yes. I could use the money."

"It will be dangerous."

"They all are."

We regarded the crosses, with the packs of cigarettes and other various goodies tied to them in the way of religious offerings.

"Good," he said. "When will you start?"

"Before the month is out."

"Okay. When will you report to me?"

I shrugged, under starlight.

"When I've got something to say."

"That's not good enough, this time. September 15 is the target date."

"… If it goes off without a hitch?"

"Fifty grand."

"If it gets tricky, and I have to dispose of a corpus or three?"

"Like I said."

"Okay. You're on. Before September 15."

"No reports?"

"… Unless I need help, or have something important to say."

"You may, this time."

I extended my hand.

"You've got yourself a deal, Don."

He bowed his head, nodding to the crosses.

"Give me this one," he finally said. "Please. I want this one. The men I lost were very good men."

"I'll try. I'll give you as much as I can."

"I don't understand you, mister. I wish I knew how you—"

"Good. I'd be crushed if you ever knew how I."

And we walked back down the hill, and I left him off at the place where he was staying that night.

 

"Let me buy you a drink," said Martin, as I passed him on the foredeck on my way out of Carol Deith's cabin.

"All right," and we walked to the ship's lounge and had one.

"I've got to thank you for what you did while Demmy and I were down there. It—"

"It was nothing," I said. "You could have fixed it yourself in a minute if somebody else had been down and you'd been up here."

"It didn't work out that way, though, and we're happy you were handy."

"I consider myself thanked," I said, raising the plastic beer stein—they're all plastic these days. Damn it!

"What kind of shape was the shaft in?" I asked him.

"Excellent," he said, furrowing his wide, ruddy forehead and putting lots of wrinkles around his bluish eyes.

"You don't look as confident as you sound."

He chuckled then, took a small sip.

"Well, it's never been done before. Naturally, we're all a little scared…"

I took that as a mild appraisal of the situation.

"But, top to bottom, the shaft was in good shape?" I asked.

He looked around him, probably wondering whether the place was bugged. It was, but he wasn't saying anything that could hurt him, or me. If he had been, I'd have shut him up.

"Yes," he agreed.

"Good," and I thought back on the sayings of the short man with the wide shoulders. "Very good."

"That's a strange attitude," he said. "You're just a paid technician."

"I take a certain pride in my workmanship."

He gave me a look I did not understand, then, "That sounds strangely like a twentieth-century attitude."

I shrugged.

"I'm old-fashioned.—Can't get away from it."

"I like that," he said. "I wish more people were that way, these days."

"What's Demmy up to, now?"

"He's sleeping."

"Good."

"They ought to promote you."

"I hope not."

"Why not?"

"I don't like responsibilities."

"But you take them on yourself, and you handle them well."

"I was lucky—once. Who knows what will happen, next time…?"

He gave me a furtive look.

"What do you mean, 'next time'?"

"I mean, if it happens again," I said. "I just happened to be in the control room…"

I knew then that he was trying to find out what I knew—so neither of us knew much, though we both knew that something was wrong.

He stared at me, sipped his beer, kept staring at me, then nodded.

"You're trying to say that you're lazy?"

"That's right."

"Crap."

I shrugged and sipped mine.

Back around 1957—fifty years ago—there was a thing called AMSOC, and it was a joke. It was a takeoff on the funny names of alphabetized scientific organizations. It stood for the American Miscellaneous Society. It represented something other than a joke on the organization man, however. This was because Doctor Walter Munk of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Doctor Harry Hess of Princeton were members, and they had come up with a strange proposal which later died for lack of funds. Like John Brown, however, while it lay moldering in its grave, its soul went marching on.

It is true that the Mohole Project died stillborn, but that which eventually came of the notion was even grander and more creative.

Most people know that the crust of the Earth is twenty-five or more miles thick under the continents, and that it would be rough drilling there. Many also know that under the oceans the crust is much thinner. It would be quite possible to drill there, into the top of the mantle, penetrating the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, however. They had talked about all kinds of data that could be picked up. Well, okay. But consider something else: sure, it's true that a sampling of the mantle would provide some answers to questions involving radioactivity and heat flow, geological structure and the age of the Earth. Working with natural materials, we would know boundaries, thicknesses of various layers within the crust; and we could check these against what we had learned from the seismic waves of earthquakes gone by. All that and more. A sample of the sediments would give us a complete record of the Earth's history, before man ever made the scene. But there is more involved than that, a lot more.

"Another one?" Martin asked me.

"Yeah. Thanks."

If you study the International Union of Geology and Geophysics publication, Active Volcanoes of the World, and if you map out all those which are no longer active, you will note certain volcanic and seismic belts. There is the "Ring of Fire" surrounding the Pacific Ocean. Start along the Pacific coast of South America, and you can follow it up north through Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Central America, Mexico, the western United States, Canada, and Alaska, then around and down through Kamchatka, the Kuriles, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and New Zealand. Forgetting about the Mediterranean, there is also an area in the Atlantic, near Iceland.

We sat there.

I raised mine and took a sip.

There are over six hundred volcanoes in the world which could be classified as active, though actually they don't do much most of the time. They just sort of sit there and fume.

We were going to add one more.

Yeah. We were going to create a volcano in the Atlantic Ocean. More specifically, a volcanic island, like Surtsey. This was Project RUMOKO.

"I'm going down again," said Martin. "Sometime during the next few hours, I guess. I'd appreciate it if you would do me the favor of keeping an eye on that goddamn machine next time around. I'd make it up to you, some way."

"Okay," I said. "Let me know when the next time is, as soon as you know it, and I'll try to hang around the control room. If something does go wrong, I'll try to do what I did earlier, if there's no one around who can do any better."

He slapped me on the shoulder.

"That's good enough for me. Thanks."

"You're scared."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"This damned thing seems jinxed. You've been my good-luck charm. I'll buy you beers from here to hell and back again, just to hang around. I don't know what's wrong. Just bad luck, I guess."

"Maybe," I said.

I stared at him for a second, then turned my attention to my drink.

"The isothermic maps show that this is the right place, the right part of the Atlantic," I said. "The only thing I'm scared about is none of my business."

"What's that?" he asked.

"There are various things about magma," I said, "and some of them frighten me."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"You don't know what it's going to do, once it's released. It could be anything from a Krakatoa to an Etna. The magma itself may be of any composition. Its exposure to water and air could produce any results."

"I thought we had a guarantee it was safe?"

"A guess. An educated guess, but only a guess. That's all."

"You're scared?"

"You bet your ass."

"We're in danger…?"

"Not us so much, since we'll be the hell out of the way. But this thing could affect world temperatures, tides, weather. I'm a little leery, I'll admit it."

He shook his head.

"I don't like it."

"You probably had all your bad luck already," I said. "I wouldn't lose any sleep…"

"I guess you're right.—Yeah, I guess."

We finished our beers and I stood.

"I've got to be running."

"Can I buy you another?"

"No, thanks. I've got some work to do."

"Well, I'll be seeing you."

"Yes. Take it easy," and I left the lounge and moved back to the upper decks.

The moon spilled sufficient light to make shadows about me, and the evening was chilly enough for me to button my collar.

I watched the waves for a little while, then returned to my cabin.

I took a shower, listened to the late news, read for a time. Finally, I turned in and took the book to bed with me. After a while, I got drowsy, set the book on the bedside table, turned out the lamp, and let the ship rock me to sleep.

… Had to get a good night's sleep. After all, tomorrow was RUMOKO.

How long? A few hours, I guess. Then I was awakened by something.

My door was quietly unlocked, and I heard a light footfall.

I lay there, wide awake, with my eyes closed, waiting.

I heard the door close, lock.

Then the light came on, and there was a piece of steel near to my head, and a hand was upon my shoulder.

"Wake up, mister!" someone said.

I pretended to do so, slowly.

There were two of them, and I blinked and rubbed my eyes, regarding the gun about twenty inches away from my head.

"What the hell is this?" I said.

"No," said the man holding the metal. "We ask. You answer. It is not the other way around."

I sat up, leaned back against the headboard.

"Okay. You've got me with my pants down," I said. (I sleep that way.) "What do you want?"

"Who are you?"

"Albert Schweitzer," I replied.

"We know the name you're using. Who are you—really?"

"That's it," I said.

"We don't think so."

"I'm sorry."

"So are we."

"So?"

"You will tell us about yourself and your mission."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Get up!"

"Then please give me my robe. It's hanging on the hook inside the bathroom door."

The gunsel leaned toward the other. "Get it, check it, give it to him," he said.

And I regarded him.

He had a handkerchief over the lower part of his face. So did the other guy. Which was kind of professional. Amateurs tend to wear masks. Upper type. Masks of this sort conceal very little. The lower part of the face is the most easily identifiable. These guys knew that. Therefore, they were possibly pros.

"Thanks," I said, when the one guy handed me my blue terrycloth robe.

He nodded, and I threw it about my shoulders, put my arms into the sleeves, whipped it about me, and sat up on the edge of the bed.

"Okay," I said. "What do you want?"

"Who are you working for?" said the first.

"Project RUMOKO," I replied.

He slapped me, lightly, with his left hand, still holding the gun steady.

"No," he said. "The whole story, please."

"I don't know what you're talking about, but may I have a cigarette?"

"All right.—No. Wait. Take one of mine. I don't know what might be in your pack.

I took a Winston, despite the fact that I dig menthol. I lit it, inhaled, breathed smoke.

"I don't understand you," I said. "Give me a better clue as to what you want to know and maybe I can help you. I'm not looking for trouble."

This seemed to relax them slightly, because they both sighed. The man asking the questions was about five foot eight in height, the other about five-ten. The taller man was heavy, though. Around two hundred pounds, I'd say.

They seated themselves in two nearby chairs. The gun was leveled at my breast.

"Relax, then, Mister Schweitzer. We don't want trouble either," said the talkative one.

"Great," said I. "Ask me anything and I'll give you honest answers," prepared to lie my head off. "Ask away."

"You repaired the J-9 unit today."

"I guess everybody knows that."

"Why did you do it?"

"Because two men were going to die, and I knew how."

"How did you acquire this expertise?"

"For Chrissakes, I'm an electrical engineer!" I said. "I know how to figure circuits! Lots of people do!"

The taller guy looked at the shorter one. He nodded.

"Then why did you try to silence Asquith?" the taller one asked me.

"Because I broke a regulation by touching the unit," I said. "I'm not authorized to service it."

He nodded again. Both of them had very black and clean-looking hair and well-developed pectorals and biceps, as seen through their light shirts.

"You seem to be an ordinary, honest citizen," said the tall one, "who went to the school of his choice, graduated, remained unmarried, took this job. Perhaps everything is as you say, in which case we do you wrong. However, the circumstances are very suspicious. You repaired a complex machine which you had no right to repair…"

I nodded.

"Why?" he asked.

"I've got a funny thing about death: I don't like to see people do it," I said.

Then, "Who do you work for?" I asked, hoping to throw them off my track. "Some sort of intelligence agency?"

The shorter one smiled. The other said, "We are not permitted to say. You obviously understand these things, however. Our interest is only a certain curiosity as to why you kept quiet with respect to what was obviously sabotage."

"So, I've told you."

"Yes, but you are lying. People do not disobey orders the way you did."

"Crap! There were lives at stake!"

"Nevertheless, people do not disobey orders. Therefore, I fear that we must question you further, and in a different manner."

Whenever I am awaiting the outcome of peril or reflecting upon the few lessons that can be learned in the course of a misspent life, a few bubbles of memory appear before me, are struck by all the color changes the skin of a bubble undergoes in the space of an instant, burst then, having endured no longer than a bubble, and persist as feelings for a long while after.

Bubbles… There is one down in the Caribbean called New Eden. Depth, approximately 175 fathoms. As of the most recent census, it was home to over 100,000 people. A huge, illuminated geodesic dome it is, providing an overhead view with which Euclid would have been pleased. For great distances about this dome, strung lights like street lamps line avenues among rocks, bridges over canyons, thoroughfares through mountains. The bottom-going seamobiles move like tanks along these ways; minisubs hover or pass at various altitudes; slick-seeming swimmers in tight and colorful garb come and go, entering and departing the bubble or working about it.

I vacationed there for a couple weeks one time, and although I discovered claustrophobic tendencies of which I had previously been unaware (perhaps the imminent tons of water had something to do with it), I must confess that it was the most pleasant vacation in my life. The people were different from surface dwellers. They were rather like what I fancy the old explorers and frontiersmen to have been. Somewhat more individualistic and independent than the average topside citizen, but with a certain sense of community and the feelings of responsibility attendant thereto. This is doubtless because they are frontiersmen, having volunteered for combinations of programs involving both the relief of minor population pressures and the exploitation of the ocean's resources. Whatever, they accept tourists. They accepted me, and I went there and swam with them, toured on their subs, viewed their mines and hydroponic gardens, their homes and their public buildings. I remember the beauty of it, I remember the people, I remember the way the sea hung overhead like the night sky as seen through the faceted eye of some insect. Or maybe like a giant insect on the other side, looking in. Yes, that seems more likely. Perhaps the personality of the place appealed to a certain rebellious tendency which I occasionally feel stirring fathoms deep within my own psyche.

While it was not really an Eden Under Glass, and while those crazy and delightful little bubble cities are definitely not for me, there was something there that turned it into one of those funny, colorful things that sometimes come to me, bubblelike, whenever I am awaiting the outcome of peril or reflecting upon the few lessons that can be learned in the course of a misspent life.

I sighed, took a final drag on my cigarette and crushed it out, knowing that in a moment my bubble would burst.

 

What is it like to be the only man in the world who does not exist? It is difficult to say. It is not easy to generalize when you are only sure of the particulars in one case—your own. With me, it was a kind of unusual deal, and I doubt there is a parallel one, anywhere. I used to bitch and moan over progressive mechanization. No more.

It was strange, the way that it happened—

Once I wrote programs for computers. That is how the whole thing got started.

One day, I learned an unusual and frightening piece of news…

I learned that the whole world was going to exist on tape.

How?

Well, it's tricky.

Everybody, nowadays, has a birth certificate, academic record, credit rating, a history of all his travels and places of residence and, ultimately, there is a death certificate somewhere on file.

Once, all things of this sort existed in separate places. Then, some jokers set out to combine them. They called it a Central Data Bank. It resulted in massive changes in the order of human existence. Not all of these changes, I am now certain, were for the better.

I was one of those jokers, and it was not until things were well along that I began to have second thoughts on the matter. By then, it was too late to do anything about it, I'd supposed.

What the people in my project were doing was linking every data bank in existence, so that public records, financial records, medical records, specialized technical records all existed and were available from one source—through key stations whose personnel had access to this information at various levels of confidentiality.

I have never considered anything to be wholly good or wholly evil. But this time, I came close to the former feeling. I had thought that it was going to be a very good thing indeed. I had thought that in the wonderful, electrified fin de siècle of McLuhan in which we lived, a thing like this was necessary: every home with closed-circuit access to any book ever written, or any play ever recorded on tape or in a crystal, or any college lecture in the past couple decades, or any bits of general statistical knowledge desired (you can't lie with statistics, theoretically, if everybody has access to your source, and can question it directly); every commercial and government outfit with access to your assets, your income, and a list of every expenditure you've ever made; every attorney with a court order with access to a list of every place you've ever resided, and with whom, and every commercial vehicle on which you've ever traveled, and with whom. Your whole life, all your actions, laid out like a chart of the nervous system in a neurology class—this impressed me as good.

For one thing, it seemed that it would eliminate crime. Only a crazy man, I thought, would care to err with all that to stand against him; and since medical records were all on file, even the psychopath could be stopped.

… And speaking of medicine, how fine if the computer and medical people diagnosing you for anything had instant access to all your past medical history! Think of all the cures which could be effected! Think of the deaths prevented!

Think of the status of the world economy, when it is known where every dime exists and where it is headed.

Think of the solving of traffic-control problems—land, sea, and air—when everything is regulated.

Think of… Oh, hell! If you don't have any imagination, I've named enough.

I foresaw the coming of a Golden Era.

Crap!

A friend of mine having peripheral connections with the Mafia, it was, laughed at me, all starry in my eyes and just up from the university and into the federal service.

"Do you seriously believe that every asset will be registered? Every transaction recorded?" he'd asked me.

"Eventually."

"They haven't pierced Switzerland yet; and if they do, other places will be found."

"There will be a certain allowance for residuals."

"Then don't forget mattresses, and holes in the back yard. Nobody knows how much money there really is in the world, and no one ever will."

So I stopped and thought and read up on economics. He was right. The things for which we were writing programs in this area were, basically, estimates and approximates, vis-à-vis that which got registered—a reconciliation factor included.

So I thought about travel. How many unregistered vessels? Nobody knew. You can't keep statistics on items for which you have no data. And if there is to be unregistered money, more vessels could be constructed. There is a lot of coastline in the world. So traffic control might not be as perfect as I had envisioned.

Medical? Doctors are as human and lazy as the rest of us. I suddenly realized that all medical reports might not get filed—especially if someone wanted to pocket the cash and not pay taxes on it, and was not asked for a receipt.

When it came to people, I had forgotten the human factor.

There were the shady ones, there were people who just liked their privacy, and there were those who would honestly foul up the reporting of necessary information. All of them people who would prove that the system was not perfect.

Which meant that the thing might not work in precisely the fashion anticipated. There might also be some resentment, some resistance, along with actual evasion. And perhaps these might even be warranted…

But there was not much overt resistance, so the project proceeded. It occurred over a period of three years. I worked in the centra] office, starting out as a programmer. After I'd devised a system whereby key weather stations and meteorological observation satellites fed their reports directly into the central system, I was promoted to the position of senior programmer and given some supervisory responsibility.

By then, I had learned sufficient of the project so that my doubts had picked up a few small fears as companions. I found myself beginning to dislike the work, which made me study it all the more intensely. They kidded me about taking work home with me. No one seemed to realize that it was not dedication, but rather a desire, born of my fears, to learn all that I could about the project. Since my superiors misread my actions, they saw that I was promoted once more.

This was fine, because it gave me access to more information, at the policy level. Then, for a variety of reasons, there came a spate of deaths, promotions, resignations, retirements. This left things wide open for fair-haired boys, and I rose higher within the group.

I came to be an adviser to old John Colgate, who was in charge of the entire operation.

One day, when we had just about achieved our mission, I told him of my fears and my doubts. I told the gray-haired, sallow-faced, spaniel-eyed old man that I felt we might be creating a monster and committing the ultimate invasion of human privacy.

He stared at me for a long while, fingering the pink coral paperweight on his desk; then, "You may be right," he said. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know," I replied. "I just wanted to tell you my feelings on the matter."

He sighed then and turned in his swivel chair and stared out the window.

After a time, I thought he had gone to sleep, as he sometimes did right after lunch.

Finally, though, he spoke: "Don't you think I've heard those arguments a thousand times before?"

"Probably," I replied, "and I've always wondered how you might have answered them."

"I have no answers," he said abruptly. "I feel it is for the better, or I would not be associated with it. I could be wrong, though. I will admit that. But some means has to be found to record and regulate all the significant features of a society as complex as ours has become. If you can think of a better way of running the show, tell me about it."

I was silent. I lit a cigarette and waited for his next words. I did not know at the time that he only had about six months of life remaining to him. He did, though.

"Did you ever consider buying out?" he finally asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Resigning. Quitting the system."

"I'm not sure that I understand…"

"We in the system will be the last to have our personal records programmed in."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted it that way, in case anyone came to me as you have today and asked me what you have asked me."

"Has anyone else done it?"

"I would not say if they had, to keep the intended purity of the thing complete."

"'Buying out.' By this, I take it that you mean destroying my personal data before someone enters it into the system?"

"That is correct," he said.

"But I would not be able to get another job, with no academic record, no past work history…"

"That would be your problem."

"I couldn't purchase anything with no credit rating."

"I suppose you would have to pay cash."

"It's all recorded."

He swiveled back and gave me a smile. "Is it?" he asked me. "Is it really?"

"Well, not all of it," I admitted.

"So?"

I thought about it while he lit his pipe, smoke invading wide, white sideburns. Was he just kidding me along, being sarcastic? Or was he serious?

As if in answer to my thought, he rose from his chair, crossed the room, opened a file cabinet. He rummaged around in it for a time, then returned holding a sheaf of punchcards like a poker hand. He dropped them onto the desk in front of me.

"That's you," he said. "Next week, you go into the system, like everybody else," and he puffed a smoke ring and reseated himself.

"Take them home with you and put them under your pillow," he said. "Sleep on them. Decide what you want to do with them."

"I don't understand."

"I am leaving it up to you."

"What if I tore them up? What would you do?"

"Nothing."

"Why not?"

"Because I do not care."

"That's not true. You're head of this thing."

He shrugged.

"Don't you believe in the value of the system yourself?"

He dropped his eyes and drew on his pipe.

"I am no longer so certain as once I was," he stated.

"If I did this thing I would cease to exist, officially," I said.

"Yes."

"What would become of me?"

"That would be your problem."

I thought about it for a moment; then, "Give me the cards," I said.

He did, with a gesture.

I picked them up, placed them in my inside coat pocket.

"What are you going to do now?"

"Sleep on them, as you suggested," I said.

"Just see that you have them back by next Tuesday morning."

"Of course."

And he smiled, nodded, and that was it.

I took them, went home with them. But I didn't sleep.

No, that's not it. I wouldn't sleep, couldn't sleep.

I thought about it for centuries—well, all night long—pacing and smoking. To exist outside the system… How could I do anything if it did not recognize my existence?

Then, about four in the morning, I decided that I should have phrased that question the other way around.

How could the system recognize me, no matter what I did?

I sat down then and made some very careful plans. In the morning, I tore my cards through the middle, burned them, and stirred the ashes.

 

"Sit in that chair," the taller one said, gesturing with his left hand.

I did so.

They moved around and stood behind me.

I regulated my breathing and tried to relax.

Over a minute must have gone by; then, "All right, tell us the whole story," he said.

"I obtained this job through a placement bureau," I told him. "I accepted it, came to work, performed my duties, met you. That's it."

"It has been said for some time, and we believe it to be true, that the government can obtain permission—for security reasons—to create a fictitious individual in the central records. An agent is then fitted into that slot in life. If anyone is able to check on him, his credentials appear to be bona fide."

I didn't answer him.

"Is that true?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "It has been said that this can be done. I don't know whether it's true or not, though."

"You do not admit to being such an agent?"

"No."

Then they whispered to one another for a time. Finally, I heard a metal case click open.

"You are lying."

"No, I'm not. I maybe save a couple guys' lives and you start calling me names. I don't know why, though I'd like to. What have I done that's wrong?"

"I'll ask the questions, Mister Schweitzer."

"I'm just curious. Perhaps if you would tell me—"

"Roll up your sleeve. Either one, it doesn't matter."

"Why?"

"Because I told you to."

"What are you going to do?"

"Administer an injection."

"Are you an M.D.?"

"That is none of your business."

"Well, I refuse it—for the record. After the cops get hold of you, for a variety of reasons, I'll even see to it that the Medical Association is on your back."

"Your sleeve, please."

"Under protest," I observed, and I rolled up the left one. "If you're to kill me when you've finished playing games," I added, "murder is kind of serious. If you are not, I'll be after you. I may find you one day…"

I felt a sting behind my bicep.

"Mind telling me what you gave me?" I asked.

"It's called TC-6," he replied. "Perhaps you've read about it. You will retain consciousness, as I might need your full reasoning abilities. But you will answer me honestly."

I chuckled, which they doubtless attributed to the effects of the drug, and I continued practicing my yoga breathing techniques. These could not stop the drug, but they made me feel better. Maybe they gave me a few extra seconds, also, along with the detached feeling I had been building up.

I keep up on things like TC-6. This one, I knew, left you rational, unable to lie and somewhat literal-minded. I figured on making the most of its weak points by flowing with the current. Also, I had a final trick remaining.

The thing that I disliked most about TC-6 was that it sometimes had a bad side effect, cardiac-wise.

I did not exactly feel myself going under. I was just suddenly there, and it did not feel that different from the way I always feel. I knew this to be an illusion. I wished I had had prior access to the antidote kit I kept within a standard-looking first-aid kit hidden in my dresser.

"You hear me, don't you?" he asked.

"Yes," I heard myself saying.

"What is your name?"

"Albert Schweitzer," I replied.

There were a couple quick breaths taken behind me, and my questioner silenced the other fellow, who had started to say something.

Then, "What do you do?" he asked me.

"I'm a technician."

"I know that much. What else?"

"I do many things. I do not understand—"

"Do you work for the government—any government?"

"I pay taxes, which means I work for the government, part of the time. Yes."

"I did not mean it in that sense. Are you a secret agent in the employ of any government?"

"No."

"A known agent?"

"No."

"Then why are you here?"

"I am a technician. I service the machines."

"What else?"

"I do not—"

"What else? Who else do you work for, besides the Project?"

"Myself."

"What do you mean?"

"My activities are directed to maintaining my personal economic status and physical well-being."

"I am talking about other employers. Have you any?"

"No."

From the other man, I heard, "He sounds clean."

"Maybe." Then, to me, "What would you do if you met me somewhere and recognized me?"

"Bring you to law."

"…And failing that?"

"If I were able, I would hurt you severely. Perhaps I would kill you, if I were able to give it the appearance of self-defense or make it seem to be an accident."

"Why?"

"Because I wish to preserve my own physical well-being. The fact that you have disturbed it once means that you might attempt it again. I will not permit this access to me."

"I doubt that I will attempt it again."

"Your doubts mean nothing to me."

"So you saved two lives today, yet you are willing to take one."

I did not reply.

"Answer me."

"You did not ask me a question."

"Could he have drug-consciousness?" asked the other.

"I never thought of that.—Do you?"

"I do not understand the question."

"This drug allows you to remain oriented in all three spheres. You know who you are, where you are, and when you are. It saps that thing called the will, however, which is why you must answer my questions. A person with a lot of experience with truth drugs can sometimes beat them, by rephrasing the questions to himself and giving a literally honest reply. Is this what you are doing?"

"That's the wrong question," said the other.

"What's right?"

"Have you had any prior experience with drugs?" that one asked me.

"Yes."

"What ones?"

"I've had aspirin, nicotine, caffeine, alcohol—"

"Truth serums," he said. "Things like this, things that make you talk. Have you had them before?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"At Northwestern University."

"Why?"

"I volunteered for a series of experiments."

"What did they involve?"

"The effects of drugs on consciousness."

"Mental reservations," he said to the other. "It could take days. I think he has primed himself."

"Can you beat a truth drug?" the other one asked me.

"I do not understand."

"Can you lie to us—now?"

"No."

"Wrong question, again," said the shorter. "He is not lying. Anything he says is literally true."

"So how do we get an answer out of him?"

"I'm not sure."

So they continued to hit me with questions. After a time, things began to wane.

"He's got us," said the shorter one. "It would take days to beat him down."

"Should we…?"

"No. We've got the tape. We've got his answers. Let's let a computer worry about it."

But by then it was near morning, and I had the funny feeling, accompanied by cold flashes on the back of my neck, that I might be able to manage a fib or three once again. There was some light on the other side of my portholes. They had been going at me for what seemed to be many hours. Perhaps six. I decided to try.

"I think this place is bugged," I said.

"What? What do you mean?"

"Ship's Security," I stated. "I believe all technicians are so monitored."

"Where is it?"

"I don't know."

"We've got to find it," said the one.

"What good will it do?" said the other, in a whisper, for which I respected him, as whispers do not often get recorded. "They'd have been here long before this, if it were."

"Unless they're waiting, letting us hang ourselves."

The first began looking, however, and I rose, met with no objections, and staggered across the room to collapse upon the bed.

My right hand slipped down around the headboard, as though by accident. It found the gun.

I flipped off the safety as I withdrew it. I sat upon the bed and pointed it at them.

"All right, morons," I said. "Now you answer my questions."

The big one made a move toward his belt and I shot him in the shoulder.

"Next?" I asked, tearing away the silencer, which had done its work, and replacing it with a pillow.

The other man raised his hands and looked at his buddy.

"Let him bleed," I said.

He nodded and stepped back.

"Sit down," I told them both.

They did.

I moved over behind the two of them.

"Give me that arm," and I took it. I cleaned it and dressed it, as the bullet had gone on through. I had placed their weapons on the dresser. I tore off their hankies and studied their faces. I did not know them from anywhere.

"Okay, why are you here?" I asked. "And why do you want to know what you want to know?"

There were no replies.

"I don't have as much time as you did," I said. "So I'm about to tape you in place. I don't think I can afford to fool around with drugs."

I fetched the adhesive tape from the medicine chest and did it. Then I chained the door.

"These places are pretty soundproof," I remarked, putting the gun aside, "and I lied about them being bugged.—So you can do a bit of screaming if you want. I caution you against it, however. Each one earns you one broken bone.

"So who do you work for?" I repeated.

"I'm a maintenance man on the shuttler," said the shorter one, "My friend is a pilot."

He received a dirty look for this.

"Okay," I said. "I'll buy that, because I've never seen you around here before. Think carefully over your answer to the next one: who do you really work for?"

I asked this knowing that they did not have the advantages that I had had. I work for myself because I am self-employed—an independent contractor. My name is Albert Schweitzer right now, so that's what it is, period. I always become the person I must. Had they asked me who I had been before, they might have gotten a different answer. It's a matter of conditioning and mental attitudes.

"Who pulls the strings?" I asked.

No replies.

"All right," I said. "I guess I'll have to ask you in a different fashion."

Heads turned toward me.

"You were willing to violate my physiology for the sake of a few answers," I said. "Okay. I guess I'll return the favor upon your anatomy. I'll get an answer or three, I promise. Only I'll be a little more basic about it. I'll simply torture you until you talk."

"You wouldn't do that," said the taller man. "You have a low violence index."

I chuckled, without mirth.

"Let's see," I said.

 

How do you go about ceasing to exist while continuing your existence? I found it quite easy. But then, I was in on the project from the first, was trusted, had been given an option…

After I tore up my cards, I returned to work as usual. There, I sought and located the necessary input point.

It was Thule, way up where it's cold, a weather station…

An old guy who liked rum ran the place. I can still remember the day when I took my ship, the Proteus, into his harbor and complained of rough seas.

"I'll put you up," he said to me.

The computer had not let me down.

"Thanks."

He led me in, fed me, talked to me about the seas, the weather. I brought in a case of Bacardi and turned him loose on it.

"Ain't things pretty much automatic here?" I asked.

"That's right."

"Then what do they need you for?"

He laughed a little and said, "My uncle was a Senator. I needed a place to go. He fixed me up.—Let's see your ship.—So what if it's raining?"

So we did.

It was a decent-sized cabin cruiser with powerful engines—and way out of its territory.

"It's a bet," I told him. "I wanted to hit the Arctic Circle and get proof that I did."

"Kid, you're nuts."

"I know, but I'll win."

"Prob'ly," he agreed. "I was like you once—all full of the necessary ingredients and ready to go.—Gettin' much action these days?" And he stroked his pepper-and-salt beard and gave me an evil grin from inside it.

"Enough," I said, and, "Have a drink," because he had made me think of Eva.

He did, and I left it at, "Enough," for a time. She was not like that, though. I mean, it was not something he would really want to hear about.

It had been about four months earlier that we had broken up. It was not religion or politics; it was much more basic.

So I lied to him about an imaginary girl and made him happy.

I had met her in New York, back when I was doing the same things she was—vacationing and seeing plays and pix.

She was a tall girl, with close-cropped blond hair. I helped her find a subway station, got on with her, got off with her, asked her to dinner, was told to go to hell.

Scene:

"I'm not like that."

"Neither am I. But I'm hungry.—So will you?"

"What are you looking for?"

"Someone to talk to," I said. "I'm lonesome."

"I think you're looking in the wrong place."

"Probably."

"I don't know you from anywhere."

"That makes two of us, but I could sure use some spaghetti with meat sauce and a glass of Chianti."

"Will you be hard to get rid of?"

"No. I go quietly."

"Okay. I'll eat spaghetti with you."

And we did.

That month we kept getting closer and closer until we were there. The fact that she lived in one of those crazy little bubble cities under the sea meant nothing. I was liberal enough to appreciate the fact that the Sierra Club had known what it was doing in pushing for their construction.

I probably should have gone along with her when she went back. She had asked me.

She had been on vacation—seeing the Big Place—and so had I. I didn't get into New York that often.

"Marry me," though, I'd said.

But she would not give up her bubble and I would not give up my dream. I wanted the big, above-the-waves world—all of it—and I had just about figured it by then, except for the Christmas cards. They came later. I loved that blue-eyed bitch from five hundred fathoms, though, and I realize now that I probably should have taken her on her own terms. I'm too damned independent, though. If either of us had been normal… Well, we weren't, and that's that.

Eva, wherever you are, I'll never talk that way about you. I hope you and Jim are happy.

"Yeah—with Coke," I said. "It's good that way," and I drank Cokes and he drank doubles with Cokes until he announced his weariness.

"It's starting to get to me, Mister Hemingway," he said.

"Well, let's sack out."

"Okay. You can have the couch there."

"Great."

"I showed you where the blankets are?"

"Yes."

"Then good night, Ernie. See you in the morning."

"You bet, Bill. I'll make breakfast for us."

"Thanks."

And he yawned and stretched and went away.

I gave him half an hour and went to work.

His weather station had a direct line into the central computer. I was able to provide for a nice little cut-in. Actuated by short wave. Little-used band. I concealed my tamperings well.

When I was finished, I knew that I had it made.

I could tell Central anything through that thing, from hundreds of miles away, and it would take it as fact.

I was damn near a god.

Eva, maybe I should have gone the other way. Probably. I'll never know.

I helped Bill Mellings over his hangover the following morning, and he didn't suspect a thing. He was a very decent old guy, and I was comforted by the fact that he would never get into trouble over what I had done. This was because nobody would ever catch me, I was sure. And even if they do, I don't think he'll get into trouble. After all, his uncle is a retired Senator.

I had the ability to make it as anybody I cared to. I'd have to whip up the entire past history—birth, name, academics and et cet—and I could then fit myself in anywhere I wanted in modern society. All I had to do was tell Central via the weather station via short wave. The record would be created and I would have existence in any incarnation I desired. Ab initio, like.

But Eva, I wanted you. I'm sorry it never was. Well…

I think the government does occasionally play the same tricks. But I am positive they don't suspect the existence of an independent contractor.

I know most of that which is worth knowing—more than is necessary, in fact—with respect to lie detectors and truth serums. I hold my name sacred. Nobody gets it. Do you know that the Keeler polygraph can be beaten in no fewer than seventeen different ways? It has not been improved since the mid-twentieth century. A lower-chest strap plus some fingertip perspiration detectors could do it wonders. But things like this never get the appropriations. Maybe a few universities play around with it from this standpoint—but that's about it. I could design one today that damn near nobody could beat, but its record still wouldn't be worth much in court. Drugs, now, they're another matter.

A pathological liar can beat Amytal and Pentothal. So can a drug-conscious guy.

What is drug-consciousness?

Ever go looking for a job and get an intelligence test or an aptitude test or a personality inventory for your pains? Sure. Everybody has by now. (They're all on file in Central, by the way.) You get used to taking them after a time. They start you in early, and throughout your life you learn about taking the goddamn things. You get to be what psychologists refer to as "test-conscious." What it means is that you get so damned used to them that you know what kind of asininity is right, according to the book.

So okay. You learn to give them the answers they're looking for. You learn all the little time-saving tricks. You feel secure, you know it is a game and you are game-conscious.

It's the same thing.

If you do not get scared, and if you have tried a few drugs before for this express purpose, you can beat them.

Drug-consciousness is nothing more than knowing how to handle yourself under that particular kind of fire.

 

"Go to hell. You answer my questions," I said. 

I think that the old tried-and-true method of getting answers is the best: pain, threatened and actual. 

I used it.

 

I got up early in the morning and made breakfast. I took him a glass of orange juice and shook him by the shoulder.

"What the goddamn—!"

"Breakfast," I said. "Drink this."

He did, and then we went out to the kitchen and ate.

"The sea looks pretty good today," I said. "I guess I can be moving on."

He nodded above his eggs.

"You ever up this way, you stop in again. Hear?"

"I will," I said, and I have—several times since—because I came to like him. It was funny.

We talked all that morning, going through three pots of coffee. He was an M.D. who had once had a fairly large practice going for him. (At a later date, he dug a few bullets out of me and kept quiet about their having been there.) He had also been one of the early astronauts. Now, he said, he just wanted to be a dirty old man. I learned subsequently that his wife had died of cancer some six years earlier. He gave up his practice at that time, and he had never remarried. He had looked for a way to retire from the world, found one, did it.

Though we are very close friends now, I have never told him that he's harboring a bastard input unit. I may, one day, as I know he is one of the few guys I can trust. On the other hand, I do not want to make him a genuine accomplice to what I do. Why trouble your friends and make them morally liable for your strange doings?

So I became the man who did not exist. But I had acquired the potential for becoming anybody I chose. All I had to do was write the program and feed it to Central via that station. All I needed then was a means of living. This latter was a bit tricky.

I wanted an occupation where payment would always be made to me in cash. Also, I wanted one where payment would be large enough for me to live as I desired; i.e., nicely.

This narrowed the field considerably and threw out lots of legitimate things. I could provide myself with a conventional-seeming background in any area that amused me, and work as an employee there. Why should I, though?

I told Central that I was dead, and this fact was duly noted. Since I lacked close relatives, being dead was an easy adjustment to make. I died without assets, as I had turned everything I owned into cash and stuffed my pockets with it.

Then I created a new personality and moved into it. Those little things you always toy with and dismiss as frivolous whims—I did them then. I lived aboard the Proteus, which I kept anchored in the cove of a small island off the New Jersey coast. The Proteus did not exist, so no one bothered me there. I worked hard and succeeded in becoming one of the most silly-assed soldiers of fortune who had ever lived.

I studied judo. There are three schools of it, you know: there is the Kodokon, or the pure Japanese style, and there are the Budo Kwai and the French Federation systems. The latter two have pretty much adopted the rules of the former, with this exception: while they use the same chokes, throws, bone-locks, and such, they're sloppier about it. They feel that the pure style was designed to accommodate the needs of a smaller race, with reliance upon speed, leverage, and agility, rather than strength. So they attempted to adapt the basic techniques to the needs of a larger race. They allowed for the use of strength and let the techniques be a little less than perfect. This was fine so far as I was concerned, because I'm a big, sloppy guy. Only, I may be haunted one day because of my laxity. If you learn it the Kodokon way, you can be eighty years old and still off a nage-no-kata perfectly. This is because there is very little effort involved; it's all technique. My way, though, when you start pushing fifty, it gets rougher and rougher because you're not as strong as you once were. Well, that still gave me a couple decades in which to refine my form. Maybe I'll make it. I made Nidan with the French Federation, so I'm not a complete slouch. And I try to stay in shape.

While I was going for all this physical activity I took a locksmith course. It took me months to learn how to pick even the simplest lock, and I still think that the most efficient way, in a pinch, is to kick the door in, get what you want, and run like hell.

I was not cut out to be a criminal, I guess. Some guys have it and some don't.

I studied every little thing I could think of that I thought would help me get by. I still do. While I am probably not an expert in anything, except perhaps for my own peculiar mode of existence, I know a little bit about lots of esoteric things. And I have the advantage of not existing going for me.

When I ran low on cash, I went to see Don Walsh. I knew who he was, although he knew nothing about me, and I hoped that he never would. I'd chosen him as my modus vivendi.

That was over ten years ago, and I still can't complain. Maybe I am even a little better with the locks and nages these days, as a result thereof—not to mention the drugs and bugs. Anyhow, that is a part of it, and I send Don a card every Christmas.

 

I couldn't tell whether they thought I was bluffing. They had said I had a low violence index, which meant they had had access to my personnel file or to Central. Which meant I had to try keeping them off balance for the time I had remaining, there on the eve of RUMOKO. But my bedside alarm showed five till six, and I went on duty at eight o'clock. If they knew as much as they seemed to know, they probably had access to the duty rosters also.

So here was the break I had spent the entire month seeking, right in the palm of my hand on the eve of RUMOKO's rumble. Only, if they knew how much time I actually had in which to work them over, they might—probably could—be able to hold out on me. I was not about to leave them in my cabin all day; and the only alternative was to turn them over to Ship's Security before I reported for duty. I was loath to do this, as I did not know whether there were any others aboard—whoever they were—or if they had anything more planned, since the J-9 trouble had not come off as they had expected. Had it succeeded, it would surely have postponed the September 15 target date.

I had a fee to earn, which meant I had a package to deliver. The box was pretty much empty, so far.

"Gentlemen," I said, my voice sounding strange to me and my reflexes seeming slow. I therefore attempted to restrict my movements as much as possible, and to speak slowly and carefully. "Gentlemen, you've had your turn. Now it is mine." I turned a chair backward and seated myself upon it, resting my gun hand on my forearm and my forearm on the back of the chair. "I will, however," I continued, "preface my actions with that which I have surmised concerning yourselves.

"You are not government agents," I said, glancing from one to the other. "No. You represent a private interest of some sort. If you are agents, you should doubtless have been able to ascertain that I am not one. You resorted to the extreme of questioning me in this fashion, however, so my guess is that you are civilians and perhaps somewhat desperate at this point. This leads me to link you with the attempted sabotage of the J-9 unit this previous afternoon.—Yes, let's call it sabotage. You know that it was, and you know that I know it was—since I worked on the thing and it didn't come off as planned. This obviously prompted your actions of this evening. Therefore, I shan't even ask you the question.

"Next, and predicated upon my first assumption, I know that your credentials are genuine. I could fetch them from your pockets in a moment, if they are there, but your names would mean nothing to me. So I will not even go looking. There is really only one question that I want answered, and it probably won't even hurt your employer or employers, who will doubtless disavow any knowledge of you.

"I want to know who you represent," I said.

"Why?" asked the larger man, his frown revealing a lip-side scar which I had not noticed at his unmasking.

"I want to know who put you up to being so casual with my person," I said.

"To what end?"

I shrugged.

"Personal vengeance, perhaps."

He shook his head.

"You're working for somebody, too," he said. "If it is not the government, it is still somebody we wouldn't like."

"So you admit you are not independent operators. If you will not tell me who you work for, will you tell me why you want to stop the project?"

"You are really going to resort to physical violence?"

"I'm afraid so," I said. "And don't worry. I expected a hangover this morning, so I signed for sick leave last night. I have all day. You already have a painful flesh wound, so I'll give you a break this time around."

Then I stood, cautiously, and the room swayed, but I did not let it show. I crossed to the smaller guy's chair and seized its arms and his together and raised them up from off the floor. Woozy, I was; but not weak.

I carried him off to the bathroom and set him, chair and all, in the shower stall, avoiding the while many forward thrustings of his head.

Then I returned to the other.

"Just to keep you abreast of what is going on," I said, "it all depends on the time of day. I have measured the temperature of the hot water in that stall at various times, and it can come out of there at anything from 140° to 180° Fahrenheit. Your buddy is about to get it, hot and full blast, as soon as I open his shirt and trousers and expose as much bare flesh as possible. You understand?"

"I understand."

I went back inside and opened him up and turned the shower on, using the hot water only. Then I went back to the main room. I studied the features of his buddy, who I then noted bore him something of a resemblance. It struck me that they might be relatives.

When the screaming began, he sought to compose his features. But I could see I was getting through to him. He tested his restraints once again, looked at my clock, looked at me.

"Turn it off, God damn you!" he cried.

"Your cousin?" I asked him.

"My half brother! Shut it down, you baboon!"

"Only if you've got something to say to me."

"Okay! But leave him in there and close the door!" I dashed and did it. My head was beginning to clear, though I still felt like hell.

I burned my right hand shutting the thing down. I left my chosen victim slouched there in the steam, and I shut the door behind me as I returned to the main room. "What do you have to say?"

"Could you give me one free hand and a cigarette?"

"No, but you can have a cigarette."

"How about the right one? I can hardly move it." I considered, and said, "Okay," picking up my gun again. I lit the stick, stuck it in his mouth, then cut the tape and tore it off his right forearm. He dropped the cigarette when I did it, and I picked it up and restored it to him.

"All right," I said, "take ten seconds and enjoy yourself. After that, we talk cases."

He nodded, looked around the room, took a deep drag, and exhaled.

"I guess you do know how to hurt," he said. "If you are not government, I guess your file is very much off."

"I am not government."

"Then I wish you were on our side, because it is a pretty bad thing. Whatever you are, or do," he stated, "I hope you are aware of the full implications."

… And he glanced at my clock, again. Six twenty-five.

He had done it several times, and I had dismissed it. But now it seemed something more than a desire to know the time. "When does it go off?" I asked, on chance. Buying that, on chance, he replied, "Bring my brother back, where I can see him."

"When does it go off?" I repeated.

"Too soon," he replied, "and then it will not matter. You are too late."

"I don't think so," I said. "But now that I know, I'll have to move, fast. So… Don't lose any sleep over it. I think I am going to turn you in now."

"What if I could offer you more money?"

"Don't. You'd only embarrass me. And I'd still say, 'No.'"

"Okay. But bring him back, please—and take care of his burns."

So I did.

"You guys will remain here for a brief while," I finally said, snuffing the older one's cigarette and retaping his wrist. Then I moved toward the door.

"You don't know, you really don't know!" I heard from behind me.

"Don't fool yourself," I said, over my shoulder.

 

I didn't know. I really didn't know.

But I could guess.

I stormed through the corridors until I reached Carol Deith's cabin. There I banged upon the door until I heard some muffled cursing and a "Wait a minute!" Then the door opened and she stared out at me, her eyes winking at the light, a slumber cap of sorts upon her head and a bulky robe about her.

"What do you want?" she asked me.

"Today is the day indeed," I said. "I've got to talk to you. May I come in?"

"No," she said. "I'm not accustomed to—"

"Sabotage," I said. "I know. That's what it's all about, and it isn't finished yet.—Please…"

"Come in." The door was suddenly wide open and she was standing to one side.

I entered.

She closed the door behind me, leaned back against it and said, "All right, what is it?"

There was a feeble light glowing, and a messed-up bed from which I had obviously aroused her.

"Look, maybe I didn't give you the whole story the other day," I told her. "Yes, it was sabotage—and there was a bomb, and I disposed of it. That's over and done with. Today is the big day, though, and the final attempt is in the offing. I know that for a fact. I think I know what it is and where it is. Can you help me? Can I help you? Help."

"Sit down," she said.

"There isn't much time."

"Sit down, please. I have to get dressed."

"Please hurry."

She stepped into the next room and left the door open. I was around the corner from it, though, so it should not have bothered her if she trusted me—and I guess she did, because she did.

"What is it?" she asked me, amidst the rustle of clothing.

"I believe that one or more of our three atomic charges has been booby-trapped, so that the bird will sing a bit prematurely within its cage."

"Why?" she said.

"Because there are two men back in my cabin, both of them taped to chairs, who tried to make me talk earlier this evening, with respect to my servicing of the J-9."

"What does that prove?"

"They were kind of rough on me."

"So?"

"When I got the upper hand, I got the same way with them. I made them talk."

"How?"

"None of your business. But they talked. I think RUMOKO's ignitors need another check."

"I can pick them up in your cabin?"

"Yes."

"How did you apprehend them?"

"They didn't know I had a gun."

"I see. Neither did I.—We'll get them, don't worry. But you are telling me that you took both of them and beat some answers out of them?"

"More or less," I said, "and yes and no, and off the record—in case this place is bugged. Is it?"

She came in, nodded her head and put a finger to her lips.

"Well, let's go do something," I said.

"Go to hell," she said, looking all pretty in her black stretch pants and checkered blouse, and I realized then that it had sounded like a proposition, and I did not mean it that way—-as any idiot, except maybe a government idiot listening to a tape, could have guessed.

"I mean, we'd better act quickly," I told her. "I don't want these guys fouling the project all up."

"They won't. Us Intelligence types have met with some rara avis in our day—yes, I work New York Times crosswords—and I consider you one of these strange birds. Okay. I'll give it to you that you know what you are doing. I will take you at face value as a strange creature. You did something which nobody expected of you. This does happen occasionally. We sometimes meet up with a guy who knows his job thoroughly and can see when something is going wrong—and who cares enough about it to proceed from there and damn the torpedoes. You say an atomic bomb will soon be going off aboard this ship. Right?"

"Yes."

"You think one of the charges has been attached, and has a timer cued in?"

"Right," and I looked at my wristwatch and saw that it was going on seven.

"I'd bet less than an hour from now."

"They're going down in a few minutes," she told me.

"What are you going to do about it?"

She picked up the telephone on the little table next to her bed.

"Operations," she said. "Stop the countdown." Then, "Give me the barracks.

"Sergeant," she then said, "I want you to make some arrests."

She looked at me. "What is your room number?" she asked.

"Six-forty," I replied.

"Six-forty," she said. "Two men.—Right.—Yes.—Thank you." And she hung up.

"They're taken care of," she told me. "So, you think a charge might go off prematurely?"

"That's what I said—twice."

"Could you stop it?"

"With the proper equipment—though I'd rather you send in a service—"

"Get it," she said to me.

"Okay," and I went and did that thing.

I came back to her cabin around five minutes later, with a heavy pack slung over my shoulder.

"I had to sign my name in blood," I told her. "But I've got what I need.—Why don't you get yourself a good physicist?"

"I want you," she said. "You were in from the beginning. You know what you're doing. Let's keep the group small and tight."

"Tell me where to go to do it," I said, and she led the way.

It was pushing seven by then.

It took me ten minutes to find out which one they had done it to.

It was child's play. They had used the motor from an advanced kid's erector set—with self-contained power unit. It was to be actuated by a standard clock-type timer, which would cause it to pull the lead shielding. The damned thing would go off while it was on the way down.

It took me less than ten minutes to disarm it.

We stood near the railing, and I leaned upon it.

"Good," I said.

"Very good," she said.

"While you're at it," she continued, "get on your guard. You are about to be the subject of the biggest security investigation I have ever set off."

"Go ahead. I'm pure as snow and swansdown."

"You aren't real," she told me. "They don't make people like that."

"So touch me," I said. "I am sorry if you don't like the way I go about existing."

"If you don't turn into a frog come midnight, a girl could learn to like a guy like you."

"That would require a very stupid girl," I said.

And she gave me a strange look which I did not really care to try interpreting.

Then she stared me straight in the eyes.

"You've got some kind of secret I do not quite understand yet," she said. "You seem like a leftover from the Old Days."

"Maybe I am. Look, you've already said that I've been of help. Why not leave it at that? I haven't done anything wrong."

"I've got a job to do. But, on the other hand, you're right. You have helped, and you haven't really broken any regs.—Except with reference to the J-9, for which I'm sure nobody is going to cause you trouble. On the opposite hand, I've got a report to write. Of necessity, your actions will figure in it prominently. I can't very well leave you out."

"I wasn't asking that," I said.

"What do you want me to do?"

Once it got into Central, I knew, I could kill it. But prior to that, it would be filtered through a mess of humans. They could cause trouble. "You kept the group small and tight," I said. "You could drop one."

"No."

"Okay. I could be a draftee, from the beginning."

"That's better."

"Then maybe we could let it be that way."

"I see no great problems."

"You'll do it?"

"I will see what I can do."

"That's enough. Thanks."

"What will you do when your job here is finished?"

"I don't know. Take a vacation, maybe."

"All alone?"

"Maybe."

"Look, I like you. I'll do things to keep you out of trouble."

"I'd appreciate that."

"You seem to have answers for everything."

"Thank you."

"What about a girl?"

"What do you mean?"

"Could you use one, in whatever you do?"

"I thought you had a pretty good job here."

"I do. That's not what I'm talking about.—Do you have one?"

"One what?"

"Stop playing the stupid role.—A girl, is what I mean."

"No."

"Well?"

"You're nuts," I said. "What the hell could I do with an Intelligence-type girl? Do you mean that you would actually take the chance of teaming up with a stranger?"

"I've watched you in action, and I'm not afraid of you. Yes, I would take the chance."

"This is the strangest proposal I've ever received."

"Think quick," she said.

"You don't know what you're asking," I told her.

"What if I like you—an awful lot?"

"Well, I disarmed your bomb…"

"I'm not talking about being grateful.—But thanks, anyway.—The answer, I take it, is, No."

"Stop that! Can't you give a man a chance to think?"

"Okay," she said, and turned away.

"Wait. Don't be that way. You can't hurt me, so I can talk honestly. I do have a crush on you. I have been a confirmed bachelor for many years, though. You are a complication."

"Let's look at it this way," she told me. "You're different, I know that. I wish I could do different things."

"Like what?"

"Lie to computers and get away with it."

"What makes you say that?"

"It's the only answer, if you're real."

"I'm real."

"Then you know how to beat the system."

"I doubt it."

"Take me along," she said. "I'd like to do the same thing."

And I looked at her. A little wisp of hair was touching her cheek, and she looked as if she wanted to cry.

"I'm your last chance, aren't I? You met me at a strange moment in your life, and you want to gamble."

"Yes."

"You're nuts, and I can't promise you security unless you want to quit the game—and I can't. I play it by my own rules, though—and they're kind of strange. If you and I got together, you would probably be a young widow.—So you would have that going for you."

"You're tough enough to disarm bombs."

"I will meet an early grave. I do lots of stupid things when I have to."

"I think I might be in love with you."

"Then, for gods' sakes, let me talk to you later. I have lots of things to think about, now."

"All right."

"You're a dumb broad."

"I don't think so."

"Well, we'll see."

 

After I woke up from one of the deepest sleeps in my life, I went and signed for duty.

"You're late," said Morrey.

"So have them dock me."

I went then and watched the thing itself begin to occur.

RUMOKO was in the works.

They went down, Martin and Demmy, and planted the charge. They did the necessary things, and we got out of there. Everything was set, and waiting for our radio signal. My cabin had been emptied of intruders, and I was grateful.

We got far enough away, and the signal was given.

All was silent for a time. Then the bomb went off.

Over the port bow, I saw the man stand up. He was old and gray and wore a wide-brimmed hat. He stood, slouched, fell on his face.

"We've just polluted the atmosphere some more," said Martin.

"Hell," said Demmy.

The oceans rose and assailed us. The ship held anchor.

For a time, there was nothing. Then, it began.

The ship shook, like a wet dog. I clung to the rail and watched.

Next came a mess of waves, and they were bastards, but we rode them out.

"We've got the first reading," said Carol. "It's beginning to build."

I nodded and did not say anything. There wasn't much to say.

"It's getting bigger," she said, after a minute, and I nodded again.

Finally, later on that morning, the whole thing that had come loose made its scene upon the surface.

The waters had been bubbling for a long while by then. The bubbles grew larger. The temperature readings rose. There came a glow.

Then there was one fantastic spout. It was blasted into the air to a great height, golden in the morning sunshine, like Zeus when he had visited one of his girlfriends or other. It was accompanied by a loud roar. It hung there for a few brief moments, then descended in a shower of sparks.

Immediately thereafter, there was greater turbulence.

It increased and I watched, the regular way and by means of the instruments.

The waters frothed and glistened. The roaring came and went. There came another spout, and another. The waters burned beneath the waves. Four more spouts, each larger than its predecessor…

Then an ocean-riving blast caught the Aquina in something close to a tidal wave…

We were ready, though—built that way—and faced into it.

We rode with it, and there was no letup.

We were miles away, and it seemed as if but an arm's distance separated us.

The next spout just kept going up, until it became a topless pillar. It pierced the sky, and a certain darkness began at that point. It began to swell, and there were fires all about its base.

After a time, the entire sky was fading over into a false twilight, and a fine dust filled the air, the eyes, the lungs. Occasionally, a crowd of ashes passed in the distance, like a covey of dark birds. I lit a cigarette to protect my lungs against pollution, and watched the fires rise.

With our early evening, the seas darkened. The Kraken himself, disturbed, might have been licking our hull. The glow continued, and a dark form appeared.

RUMOKO.

It was the cone. An artificially created island. A piece of long-sunk Atlantis itself, perhaps, was rising in the distance. Man had succeeded in creating a landmass. One day it would be habitable. Now, if we made a chain of them…

Yes. Perhaps another Japan. More room for the expanding human race. More space. More places in which to live.

Why had I been questioned? Who had opposed this? It was a good thing, as I saw it.

I went away. I went and had dinner.

 

Carol came into the commissary and joined me, as if by accident. I nodded, and she seated herself across from me and ordered.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Maybe you've done some of your thinking by now?" she said, between the salad and the ersatz beef.

"Yes," I replied.

"What are the results?"

"I still don't know. It was awfully quick and, frankly, I'd like the opportunity to get to know you a little better."

"Signifying what?"

"There is an ancient custom known as 'dating.' Let's do it for a little while."

"You don't like me? I've checked our compatibility indices. They show that we would be okay together.—Buying you at face value, that is—but I think I know more of you than that."

"Outside of the fact that I'm not for sale, what does that mean?"

"I've made lots of guesses and I think I could also get along with an individualist who knows how to play the right games with machines."

I knew that the commissary was bugged, and I guessed that she didn't know that I did. Therefore, she had a reason for saying what she had said—and she didn't think I knew about it.

"Sorry. Too quick," I told her. "Give a man a chance, will you?"

"Why don't we go someplace and discuss it?"

We were ready for dessert at that point.

"Where?"

"Spitzbergen."

I thought about it, then, "Okay," I said.

"I'll be ready in about an hour and a half."

"Whoa!" I said. "I thought you meant, like—perhaps this weekend. There are still tests to run, and I'm scheduled for duty."

"But your job here is finished, isn't it?"

I started in on my dessert—apple pie, and pretty good, too, with a chunk of cheddar—and I sipped coffee along with it. Over the rim of the cup, I cocked my head at her and shook it, slowly, from one side to the other.

"I can get you off duty for a day," she told me. "There will be no harm done."

"Sorry. I'm interested in the results of the tests. Let's make it this weekend."

She seemed to think about this for a while.

"All right," she said finally, and I nodded and continued with my dessert.

The "all right" instead of a "yes" or an "okay" or a "sure" must have been a key word of some sort. Or perhaps it was something else that she did or said. I don't know. I don't care any more.

When we left the commissary, she was slightly ahead of me—as I had opened the door for her—and a man moved in from either side.

She stopped and turned.

"Don't bother saying it," I said. "I wasn't quick enough, so I'm under arrest. Please don't recite my rights. I know what they are," and I raised my hands when I saw the steel in one man's hand. "Merry Christmas," I added.

But she recited my rights anyway, and I stared at her all the while. She didn't meet my eyes.

Hell, the whole proposition had been too good to be true. I didn't think she was very used to the role she had played, though—and I wondered, idly, whether she would have gone through with it, if circumstances dictated. She had been right about my job aboard the Aquina, being ended, however. I would have to be moving along, and seeing that Albert Schweitzer died within the next twenty-four hours.

"You are going to Spitzbergen tonight," she said, "where there are better facilities for questioning you."

How was I going to manage it? Well—

As if reading my thoughts, she said, "Since you seem to be somewhat dangerous, I wish to advise you that your escorts are highly trained men."

"Then you won't be coming with me, after all?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Too bad. Then this is going to have to be 'Good-bye.' I'd like to have gotten to know you somewhat better."

"That meant nothing!" she said. "It was just to get you there."

"Maybe. But you will always wonder, and now you will never know."

"I am afraid we are going to have to handcuff you," said one of the men.

"Of course."

I held my hands out and he said, almost apologetically, "No, sir. Behind your back, please."

So I did, but I watched the men move in and I got a look at the cuffs. They were kind of old-fashioned. Government budgets generally produce such handy savings. If I bent over backward, I could step over them, and then they would be in front of me. Give me, say, twenty seconds…

"One thing," I asked. "Just for the sake of curiosity and because I told it to you straight. Did you ever find out why those two guys broke into my room to question me, and what they really wanted? If you're allowed to tell me, I would like to know, because it made for some rough sleeping."

She bit her lip, thought a moment, I guess, then said, "They were from New Salem—a bubble city off the North American continental shelf. They were afraid that RUMOKO would crack their dome."

"Did it?" I asked.

She paused.

"We don't know yet," she said. "The place has been silent for a while. We have tried to get through to them, but there seems to be some interference."

"What do you mean by that?"

"We have not yet succeeded in reestablishing contact."

"You mean to say that we might have killed a city?"

"No. The chances were minimal, according to the scientists."

"Your scientists," I said. "Theirs must have felt differently about it."

"Of course," she told me. "There are always obstructionists. They sent saboteurs because they did not trust our scientists. The inference—"

"I'm sorry," I said.

"For what?"

"That I put a guy into a shower.—Okay. Thanks. I can read all about it in the papers. Send me to Spitzbergen now."

"Please," she said. "I do what I must. I think it's right. You are probably clean as snow and swansdown. If that is the case, they will know in a very short time, Al. Then—then I'd like you to bear in mind that what I said before may still be good."

I chuckled.

"Sure, and I've already said, 'Good-bye.' Thanks for answering my question, though."

"Don't hate me."

"I don't. But I could never trust you."

She turned away.

"Good night, lady. It's sad to leave you now."

And they escorted me to the helicopter. They helped me aboard. There were just the two of them and the pilot.

"She liked you," said the man with the gun.

"No kidding. You're very perceptive."

"If she's right and you're clean, will you see her again?"

"I'll never see her again," I said. "Neither will you."

He seated me, to the rear of the craft. Then he and his buddy took window seats and gave a signal.

The engines throbbed, and suddenly we rose.

In the distance, RUMOKO rumbled, burned, and spat.

Eva, I am sorry. I didn't know. I'd never guessed it might have done what it did.

"You're supposed to be dangerous," said the man on my right. "Please don't try anything."

Ave, atque, avatque, I said, in my heart of hearts, like. 

Twenty-four hours, I told Schweitzer.

 

After I collected my money from Walsh, I returned to the Proteus and studied Zen Buddhism for ten days. Since it did not produce the desired results, I went up and got drunk with Bill Mellings. After all, I had used his equipment to kill Schweitzer. I didn't tell him anything, except for a made-up story about a ni-hi girl with large mammaries.

Then we went fishing, two weeks' worth.

I did not exist any longer. I had erased Albert Schweitzer from the world. I kept telling myself that I did not want to exist any longer.

If you have to murder a man—have to, I mean, like no choice in the matter—I feel that it should be a bloody and horrible thing, so that it burns itself into your soul and gives you a better appreciation of the value of human existence.

It had not been that way, however.

It had been quiet and viral. It was a thing to which I have immunized myself, but which very few other persons have even heard of. I had opened my ring and released the spores. That was all. I had never known the names of my escorts or the pilot. I had not even had a good look at their faces.

It had killed them within two minutes, and I had the cuffs off in less than the twenty seconds I'd guessed.

I crashed the 'copter on the beach, sprained my right wrist doing it, got the hell out of the vehicle, and started walking.

They'd look like myocardial infarcts or arteriosclerotic brain syndromes—depending on how it hit them.

Which meant I should lay low for a while. I value my own existence slightly more than that of anyone who wishes to disturb it. This does not mean that I didn't feel like hell, though.

Carol will suspect, I think, but Central only buys facts. And I saw that there was enough sea water in the plane to take care of the spores. No test known to man could prove that I had murdered them.

The body of Albert Schweitzer had doubtless been washed out to sea through the sprung door.

If I ever meet with anybody who had known Al, so briefly, I'd be somebody else by then—with appropriate identification—and that person would be mistaken.

Very neat. But maybe I'm in the wrong line of work. I still feel like hell.

RUMOKO From All Those Fathoms fumed and grew like those Hollywood monsters that used to get blamed on science fiction.—In a few months, it was predicted, its fires would desist. A layer of soil would then be imported, spread, and migrating birds would be encouraged to stop and rest, maybe nest, and to use the place as a lavatory. The red mangrove would be rooted there, linking the sea and the land. Insects would even be brought aboard. One day, according to theory, it would be a habitable island. One other day, it would be one of a chain of habitable islands.

A double-pronged answer to the population problem, you might say: create a new place for men to live, and in doing so kill off a crowd of them living elsewhere.

Yes, the seismic shocks had cracked New Salem's dome. Many people had died.

And RUMOKO's second son is nevertheless scheduled for next summer.

The people in Baltimore II are worried, but the Congressional investigation showed that the fault lay with the constructors of New Salem, who should have provided against the vicissitudes. The courts held several of the contractors liable, and two of them went into receivership despite the connections that had gotten them the contracts in the first place.

It ain't pretty, and it's big, and I sort of wish I had never put that guy into the shower. He is all alive and well, I understand—a New Salem man—but I know that he will never be the same.

More precautions are supposed to be taken with the next one—whatever that means. I do not trust these precautions worth a damn. But then, I do not trust anything any more.

If another bubble city goes, as yours did, Eva, I think it will slow things down. But I do not believe it will stop the RUMOKO Project. I think they will find another excuse then. I think they will try for a third one after that.

While it has been proved that we can create such things, I do not believe that the answer to our population problem lies in the manufacturing of new lands. No.

Offhand, I would say that since everything else is controlled these days, we might as well do it with the population, too. I will even get myself an identity—many identities, in fact—and vote for it, if it ever comes to a referendum. And I submit that there should be more bubble cities, and increased appropriations with respect to the exploration of outer space. But no more RUMOKO's. No. People got hurt that way, girl, and this one almost killed me, too.

This is why I, Francis S. Fitzgerald, have determined that The Son of RUMOKO will never rear its ugly head above the innumerable fathoms.

Despite past reservations, I am taking on a free one. Walsh will never know. Hopefully, no one will. I am no altruist, but I guess I owe something to the race that I leech off of. After all, I was once a member…

Taking advantage of my nonexistence, I am going to sabotage that bastard so well that there will never be another RUMOKO.

How?

I will see that it is a Krakatoa, at least. As a result of the last one, Central knows a lot more about magma—and as a result of this, so do I.

I will manipulate the charge.

When that baby goes off, I will have arranged for it to be the worst seismic disturbance in the memory of man. It should not be too difficult to do.

I could possibly murder thousands of people by this action—and certainly I will kill some. However, RUMOKO in its shattering of New Salem scared the hell out of so many folks that I think RUMOKO II will scare even more. I am hoping that there will be a lot of topside vacations about that time. Add to this the fact that I know how rumors get started, and I can do it myself. I will.

I am at least going to clear the decks as much as I can.

They will get results, all right—the planners—like a Mount Everest in the middle of the Atlantic and some fractured domes. Laugh that off, and you are a good man.

And don't kid yourself. It can be done. It will be.

I baited the line and threw it overboard. Bill took a drink of orange juice and I took a drag on my cigarette.

"You're a consulting engineer these days?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"What are you up to now?"

"I've got a job in mind. Kind of tricky."

"Will you take it?"

"Yes."

"I sometimes wish I had something going for me now—the way you do."

"Don't. It's not worth it."

I looked out over the dark waters, able to bear prodigies. The morning sun was just licking the waves, and my decision was, like, solid. The wind was chilly and pleasant. The sky was going to be beautiful. I could tell from the breaks in the cloud cover.

"It sounds interesting. This is demolition work, you say?"

And I, Judas Iscariot, turned a glance his way and said, "Pass me the bait can, please. I think I've got something on the line."

"Me, too. Wait a minute."

The day, like a mess of silver dollars, fell upon the deck.

I landed mine and hit it on the back of the head with the stick, to be merciful.

I kept telling myself that I did not exist. I hope it is true, even though I feel that it is not. I seem to see old Colgate's face beneath an occasional whitecap.

Eva, Eva …

Forgive me, my Eva. I would welcome your hand on my brow.

It is pretty, the silver. The waves are blue and green this morning, and God! how lovely the light!

Forgive me …

"Here's the bait."

'Thanks."

I took it and we drifted.

Eventually, everybody dies, I noted. But it did not make me feel any better.

But nothing, really, could.

The next card will be for Christmas, as usual, Don, one year late this time around.

Never ask me why.

 


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We All Die Naked
BY
JAMES BLISH
The name of James Blish first appeared on the contents page of a science-fiction magazine in 1940; he published a scattering of stories in the early war years, then returned to writing in 1948 and quickly established himself as one of the outstanding authors in the field. His novel, A Case of Conscience, received the 1959 Hugo as best book of the year; among his many other novels are Black Easter, The Seedling Stars, Doctor Mirabilis, and Earthman, Come Home. He served as Vice President of the Science Fiction Writers of America for two terms beginning in 1966.


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[This story is dedicated to Philip K. Dick, who once suggested that something like it would be the logical successor to such novels as The Space Merchants, Gladiator at Law and Preferred Risk—to say nothing of If This Goes On. At the time, I thought he was kidding.—JB]


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We All Die Naked
 

The good is oft interred with their bones; 

So let it be with Caesar.

When Alexei-Aub Kehoe Salvia Sun-Moon-Lake Stewart, San. D., went out for lunch, he found half a dozen men with jackhammers tearing up the street in front of the building, the chisel blades of their drills cutting the slowly bubbling asphalt into sagging rectangular chunks. The din was fearsome, and a sizable necklace of teen-agers was dancing to it, protected from the traffic by the police barricades across both ends of the block. In their gas masks they reminded him, after a moment's assiduous mental groping, of some woodcut from the Totentanz of Hans Holbein the Younger.

Not that he was any beauty himself, even out of a gas mask, as he had long ago resigned himself. He was fair-haired, but no Viking—in fact, he was on the short side even by modern undernourished standards, and what was worse, chubby, which caused strangers to look at him with that mixture of jealousy and hatred the underfed reserve for people whom they suspect of stuffing themselves at the public trough. In Alex's case, as all his acquaintances knew, they were absolutely right: as the head of a union under stringent government control, he was even technically only one step removed from being a public employee, and he could not blame his chubbiness on a metabolic defect, either; the fact was that he felt about food the way Shakespeare had felt about words. Nor, at forty, was he about to undertake any vast program of dietary reform. As for his face, it had been broad to begin with, and the accumulation of a faint double chin now made it look as though it had been sat upon by some creature with gentle instincts but heavy hindquarters. Oh well; since like everyone else he had been born into an atmosphere, and an ecology in general, which was a veritable sea of mutagens, he felt he had to think himself lucky that his nose wasn't on upside down, or equipped with an extra nostril.

As for the dancing teen-agers, they also made passage along the sidewalk even more difficult than it usually was at this hour, but Alex didn't mind. He watched them fondly. They consumed, but did not produce. And it was a privilege to be allowed to walk at all. In downtown Manhattan, you either owned a canoe (if you were wealthy) or traveled by TA barge, and left your office by a second-story window.

Twenty years ago, he liked to remember, Morningside Heights had consisted mostly of some (by modern standards) rather mild slums, completely surrounding the great university which had been their landlord. Today, like all other high ground in the city, the Heights was a vast skyscraper complex in which worked only the most powerful of the Earth. Lesser breeds had to paddle for it in the scummy, brackish canals of Times Square, Wall Street, Rockefeller Center, and other unimportant places, fending off lumps of offal and each other as best they could, or jamming over the interbuilding bridges, or trying to flag down an occasional blimp. Flatlands like Brooklyn—once all by itself one of the largest cities in the world—were of course completely flooded, which was probably just as well, for the earthquakes had been getting worse there lately.

The most powerful of the Earth. Alex liked the sound of the phrase. He was one of Them. As the General President of Local 802 of the International Brotherhood of Sanitation Engineers, he had in fact few peers, and not only in his own estimation. Doubtless such a figure as Everett Englebert Loosli Vladimir Bingovitch Felice de Tohil Vaca, by virtue of his higher lineage and his still higher post of U. S. Secretary of Health, Education, Welfare, and Resources (Disposal of), was the more honored; but it was doubtful that with all his hereditary advantages he could be the more cultured… and the next few weeks, Alex thought, would show which of them was truly the more powerful.

Adjusting his mask—no matter how new a mask was, it seemed to let in more free radicals from the ambient air every day—he put the thought resolutely aside and prepared to enjoy his stroll and his lunch. Today he was holding court with the writers, artists, and musicians in his circle—people of no importance whatsoever in the modern world, except to him; he was their patron. (Patroon, he corrected himself, with a nod toward the towers of Peter Stuyvesant's water-girdled village.) One, whom he might even consider making the next of his wives if she continued to shape up, he had even licensed to keep cats, creatures as useless as aesthetes in this hardening civilization, though a good deal less productive of solid wastes.

Nevertheless, he could not prevent himself—he was, after all, first and foremost a professional—from wondering how the masked men with the jackhammers were going to dispose of the asphalt they were cutting up. The project itself made sense: asphalt paving in a town where the noontime temperature rarely ran below eighty degrees ranged narrowly between being a nuisance and a trap. The dancers' shoes were already being slowed down by plaques and gobbets of the stuff. Nevertheless, it was virtually indigestible; once the men had dug it up and taken it away, where were they going to drop it? There was an underground tar pool in Riverdale in which such wastes were slowly—far too slowly—metabolized into carbon dioxide and water by an organism called Bacillus aliphaticus, but it was almost overflowing now and the sludge was being pushed up toward the top of the reservoir by the gas-trapping stickiness of the medium, like a beer with its head on the bottom. The time wasn't far off when the sewers of Riverdale would begin to ooze into its valleyed avenues not ordinary sewage, but stinking condensates so tacky and… indisposable… as to make hot asphalt seem as harmless as cold concrete. Nor was carbon dioxide a desirable end product any more…

But never mind all that now. Alex knocked at the door of the Brackette de Poisson, was recognized, and was admitted. At his table his coterie was waiting, and hands were lifted solemnly to him. His glance had only just sought out Juliette Bronck in the dimness when Fantasia ad Parnassum rose ceremonially and said:

"Ave, garbage-man."

Alex was deeply offended—nobody used that word any more—and worse, he was afraid it showed. People ought to understand that it is difficult to be friends with friends who won't respect one's sensitivities. But there was worse to come.

"Listen," Fantasia said with quiet vehemence. "Sit down. Drop your shovel. You won't need it any more."

"Why not, Fan?"

"Why not?" Fantasia made a production of being astonished. At last he added, "God damn it, Alex, don't you know yet that the world is coming to an end?"

So here we go again; Fan has a new hobby. It didn't look, after all, like it was going to be a very pleasant lunch.

"All right," Alex said with a sudden accession of weariness. He sat down and looked around the table, trying to beam benevolently. It shouldn't have been difficult. After all, there was Juliette, a cameolike, 26-year-old, bikini-sized brunette who, in fact, at the moment was dressed in very little else; Will Emshredder, a tall, cadaverous, gentle-voiced man who had once produced a twelve-hour-long Experience called The Junkpot Philosophy; Rosasharn Ellisam, who was a cultural heroine of Alex's, since she made welded sculpture out of old bones which otherwise would have had to have been disposed of in some other way; Goldfarb Z, a white Muslim who for years had been writing, in invisible ink, a subliminal epic called thus i marshal mcmoonahan; Strynge Tighe, a desperate Irishman clad entirely in beads made of blue-dyed corn, who specialized in an unthinkably ancient Etruscan verse form called txckxrxsm; Beda Grindford, famous as the last man to get out of Los Angeles before the cyclone hit the Hyperion plant, but for nothing else; Arthur Lloyd Merlyn, a genuine, hereditary drip who was spending his life looking for somebody to put a plug in for him; Bang Jfhnsund, who wrote an interminable 3V serial named The T.H.I.N.G. from O.U.T.B.A.C.K.; Girlie Stonacher, a blond model who had been a hostess on the blimp limousine to the lunar orbital shuttle until all commercial lunar flights had been discontinued; Fantasia's wife, Gradus, possibly the most beautiful woman since Eleanor of Aquitaine, who went about totally naked and would cut you to ribbons if you gave the faintest sign of noticing it; Polar Pons, who by virtue of being nine feet tall was in great demand as a lecturer; and, of course, the usual youngsters, who didn't count.

And, also of course, the inevitable thorn in the side of any such group, in this case Fantasia himself; there was always one. He was a smallish but handsome man of about fifty who exacerbated Alex, first of all, by having the largest and most distinguished lineage of any man in America, so distinguished that a mere list of his names read like three pages of a hotel register from the heyday of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; secondly, by having become wealthy in a blamelessly social way by a number of useful inventions (for example, he had invented a container for beer which, when the bottle was empty, combined with smog and dissolved down to its base to leave behind a cup containing one more swallow of beer, after which the base itself turned into counter polish); third, by being willing to argue on any side of any question, without seeming to care which side he was on so long as he could make a case for it (that was, in this gathering of artists, his art); and last (or almost last), by turning out to be right nearly every time Alex had been sure he had caught him out in his facts.

Alex nevertheless rather loved him, and got along with him most of the time by refusing to believe that he took anything seriously. But this time, for the first time, Fantasia had genuinely insulted him; and—

"—the end of the world," Fantasia said grimly.

"Carry a sign," Alex said, picking up the menu with his very best indifference. He would have liked to have had Alaskan king crab, but it was extinct; the sea-level Guatemalan ship canal of 1980 had let the Atlantic's high tides flow rhythmically into the Pacific, with results similar to but much more drastic than the admission through the St. Lawrence canal of the lamprey eel into the Great Lakes. Today's Special was neon shrimp; knowing where they came from, Alex lost his appetite. He put the card down and looked at his sudden antagonist.

"Listen, dammit."

"Eri tu, Brute?"

"Alex," Fan said with a sort of disturbing tenderness, "you won't get out of this with dub macaronics, even with garbage sauce. Don't wince, it's time we called things by their right names. I've been doing some figuring, and no matter how I look at it, I think we're dead."

Juliette took Alex's elbow, in that gesture which said, Don't listen, don't let him hurt you, I'll make it all up to you later; but Alex had no choice. He said, snake to mongoose, "Go ahead."

 

After the last gasp, and the last plea not to tumble off just yet, Alex arranged his feet among the cats and was on the shimmering verge of oblivion when Juliette said: "Alex, are you asleep?"

He sighed, kneed away a cat with the demeaning name of Hausmaus, and propped himself up on one elbow. Beside him, Juliette exuded warmth and the mixed perfumes of spray deodorant and love, but her expression was that of a woman who now, at last, meant to get down to the real business of the evening. Thrusting a big toe vindictively into the ribs of the fat Siamese called Splat!, he said, "No, not lately. What is it?"

"Do you think Fan is right?"

"Of course not, he was just showing off. You know damned well that if I'd agreed with him, he'd have switched sides on the spot. Now let's get some sleep. School keeps tomorrow, for me at least."

"But Alex, he sounded so… convinced. He said, 'No matter how I look at it.'"

"He always sounds convinced. Look, Juli, of course we've got a junk problem. Everybody knows that. Who could know it better than I do? But we're coping. We always have coped. People have been predicting disaster for twenty years and there hasn't been any disaster. And there won't be."

"He did seem to have all the figures."

"And it wouldn't surprise me if he'd got them right. They sounded right, where I was familiar with them. But what Fan doesn't take into account is the sheer mass of the Earth—including the sea and the air, of which there's a hell of a lot. You can't create any major changes in a body that big just by a little litter. Making changes like that takes geological time."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. Go to sleep."

 

Go to sleep…

Some kinds of wastes—weather, rust, decay—are metabolized, or otherwise are returned to balance with the general order of nature. Others are not.

Among those which are not are aluminum cans, glass bottles, and jugs, and plastic containers of all kinds. The torrent began in 1938, when in the United States alone about 35 million tons of these indigestible, unreclaimable, nonburnable, or otherwise indefeasible objects were discarded. By 1969, the rate was three quarters of a ton per year for every man, woman, and child in the country, and was increasing by 4 percent per year. That year, Americans threw away 48 billion aluminum cans, 28 billion glass bottles and jars, and uncountable billions of plastic containers of every conceivable size and shape… 140 million tons of indestructible garbage.

By 1989, the total for the year had reached 311 million tons. None of it had ever gone away. The accumulation—again, in the United States alone—was 7,141,950,000 tons.

Which is not to say that no attempts were made to cope with it. Cans that contained any iron at all were fished out by magnets. Some of the glass was pulverized to grains finer than sugar and fed into great cesspools like Lake Erie, where, since glass is slightly soluble in water, it would very slowly become a dissolved pollutant. But since glass had been being broken and thrown away since the Phoenicians invented it, the pulverizing composters made no measurable difference in the world's rising burden of grit, slag, and ashes.

In the meantime, nylon "ghost nets" broke free from fishing vessels and were set floating as permanent fish destroyers. The composters tore up nylon stockings and socks into eight-inch fragments, which, however, refused to rot. Heavy concentrations of polyethylene continued to build in truck-garden soil, spread by compost plants which were supposed to be selling humus. Eventually, many of the polyethylene bags and plastic containers were screened out for burning, but almost nothing was known about what happens when plastics burn, and in fact most such polymerized substances simply evaporated, adding to the enormous load of air pollution, which by 1969 had reached the highest levels of the atmosphere from jet exhausts. By 1989, the air of the whole world—thanks to the law of the diffusion of gases, which no White House Office of Science and Technology had thought to repeal—was multiply ionized and loaded with poisons ranging from simple industrial gases like sulfur dioxide to constantly recomplexing hydrocarbons, and emphysema had become the principal cause of death, followed closely by lung cancer. Skin cancer, too, was rising in the actuarial tables, in incidence though not in mortality; the wide and beautiful sky had become a sea of carcinogens.

Masks were introduced, but of course nobody could stop breathing and emitting carbon dioxide. In 1980 there were 4,500 million human carbon dioxide emitters on the Earth—very few of other species—and so much of the world had been paved over, or turned into desert, that the green plants had long lost the battle to convert the gas into oxygen and water vapor. The burning of fossil fuels, begun in prehistory among the peat bogs, might have fallen off with the invention of nuclear power, but the discovery in 1968—when nuclear power was still expensive to exploit, and which produced wastes so long-lived and so poisonous that people had the rare good sense to be terrified of them while it was still early enough to cut down on their production—of the Alaskan oil field, the fourth largest in history, aborted the nuclear boom and produced a new spurt in burning. The breathers, in the meantime, continued to multiply; by 1989 nobody knew what the population of the world was—most of the statistics of the increase had been buried under the statistics for the increment of garbage.

Carbon dioxide is not a poisonous gas, but it is indefatigably heat-conservative, as are all the other heavy molecules that had been smoked into the air. In particular, all these gases and vapors conserved solar heat, like the roof of a greenhouse. In due course, the Arctic ice cap, which had been only a thin sheet over a small ocean, an ocean furthermore contained in a basin also heat-conservative, melted, followed by the Greenland cap. Now the much deeper Antarctic cap was dwindling, dumping great icebergs into the warming Antarctic Ocean. Great fog banks swept around the world, accelerating the process and chelating the heavier gas molecules as they moved, making them immune from attack by oxygen, ozone, or the activating effects of sunlight. The fogs stank richly of tars and arsenes, and were thicker and yellower than any London had seen in the worst years before the Clean Air Act had been passed.

And the ice continued to melt. Sea level in 1989 was twenty-one feet higher than it had been in 1938; every harbor in the world had been obliterated, every shoreline changed, and the brokers of lower Manhattan had been forced to learn to paddle. The worldwide temperature rose; more bergs fell into the Ross Sea; the last Ice Age was over.

Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee…

 

For some reason, Alex awoke just before dawn. Disgruntled, he went to the head, had a long drink of water, took a tranquilizer, roughed up Splat!'s fur along the back until he purred with contented indignation and bit him, peeked lubriciously at Juliette in her cocoon, constructed what replies he might have made to Fantasia at lunch had he not been taken so completely aback, and finally lay down again; but nothing served—he was completely alert.

Then he remembered: Today was the day of his appointment with Secretary de Tohil Vaca, and the beginning of their test of power. Suddenly Fan's irresponsible hypothesizing, and the poses, hobbies, crotchets, and vapors of the rest of the coterie, suddenly even Juliette herself, fell into perspective. He was back in the real world, where nothing ever changed unless you made it change, and never mind those who merely talked. Reality was what counted.

Swinging out of the warm bed with some reluctance, he sat on the edge until his hypotensive dizziness had passed, then washed, shaved, dressed, turned off the alarm—no point in having it wake Juli, since he had anticipated it—and kissed her on the end of the nose. She murmured disturbedly, "Lemonade," as though she were having some peculiarly private dream, and resettled herself. She still exuded that unpublic, compound, organic fragrance which was her gift to him, and for a moment he felt a desperate urgency to pull off all his clothes and other arrangements and lie beside her again; but at the same moment of the impulse, he happened to see the teddy bear on her dresser, which, though it made her seem more pathetic, and the room even tinier, also re-reminded him of the substantial world.

Well, but he would protect her. Part of protecting her was the matter of coping with the real world. He checked the contents of his briefcase carefully in the false dawn, and then left, closing the door very quietly.

Some forty-five seconds later he was fumbling with the key before her door and fuming with loveless indignation. He had forgotten to feed the goddam cats.

 

Juli's apartment was on the fifth and only habitable floor of what had once been a moderately expensive apartment building in the Chelsea district. Occasionally, the landlord managed to rent out a fourth-floor flat at reduced rates to some gullible and desperate family, on the showing that even high tide did not reach that far; but they seldom lasted a month, or until the first storm sent waves breaking over their windowsills.

Luckily, there was no wind today, nor even any rain. Alex put on his mask, settled his stretch homburg carefully atop it, and went down the hallway. Rats scurried and squeaked ahead of him. Juli let the cats roam free in the building after she got up, but the rats always came back; unlike the cats, they could swim.

The canoe was lashed to the balcony of the fire escape, swung on davits, an arrangement kindly rigged by Fantasia; Alex himself could not so much as tie a knot without getting his forefinger caught in it. The tide was down today, and after settling himself in the canoe, he took a full five minutes lowering it gingerly to the greasy surface of the water. Once he had cast loose, however, he paddled up Eighth Avenue with fair skill and speed, an ability which was a by-product—not achieved without many spills—of the affair with Juli.

Thanks to the earliness of his awakening, there was not much traffic yet. Even the few barges he passed were half empty, the identical masked faces peering out of them looking as disconsolate as he felt to be up at this hour. At Thirty-Second, a street-sweeper went by him going the other way, sucking into its frontal maw everything that floated except the traffic, and discharging from its almost as capacious anus anything that did not clink, clank or crunch. The theory behind the monster, which had been designed over a decade ago, was that anything that did not make a noise as it passed through its innards could safely be left in the water for the fish and bacteria.

Actually, of course, there were no fish anywhere near this close to shore any more. There were not many even in the high seas. The Guatemalan canal had resulted in the destruction of about 23,000 Pacific species, through evolutionary competition, but the destruction in the Atlantic had not been that selective. It had begun with the poisoning of the Atlantic phytoplankton, the very beginning of the chain of nutrition for all marine life, by land effluents loaded with insecticides and herbicides. The population of the Atlantic from pole to pole, from brit to whales, was now only 10 percent of what it had been when the street-sweeper had been on the drawing boards. As for the bacteria, the number of species of molecules they could not digest now far outnumbered those that they could.

Nevertheless Alex waved to the monster as he went by. Obsolete or not, it belonged to his own working force. The men piloting it waved back. Though of course they did not recognize him in his mask, it was known that the boss often went to work this way: if somebody in a canoe waved to them, it was safer to wave back. Slllrrrrppp … Spprrrsttt, said the monster.

The city was waking up now. Outboard-powered car pools of men in wet-suits, painted to look tailored, were beginning to charge along the cross-streets, creating wakes and followed by the muffled obscenities of people in canoes. Most of these came across the Hudson from New Jersey, which had had a beautifully planned new city built north of Newark, on what had been the tidal swamp of the Meadows, only to have its expensively filled and tended lawns become swamps again and then go totally under water. Few of the commuters paid any attention to the traffic semaphores, having learned from experience that the rare police launches were reluctant to chase them—the wakes of the launches upset more canoes and rowboats than the speeding outboards did. Lately, some of the paddlers and rowers had taken to chucking sash weights over the gunwales of speeders when possible. The police were prone to ignore this, too, though they frowned at outright shooting.

Alex observed all the semaphores scrupulously and reached Forty-Second Street without incident. There, before turning starboard, he took off the homburg, stowed it in its plastic bag, and put on his crash helmet.

Again, thanks to the relative earliness of the hour, he had been able to thread his way through the jam of barges shipping produce into and out of what had once been Penn Station with considerable speed, but Times Square was another matter. There was no time after dawn when it was not a mass of boats of all sizes, many of them equipped with completely illegal rams and spikes, many locked together willy-nilly in raftlike complexes, the occupants swearing and flailing at each other with oars, paddles, barge poles, whips, boarding hooks, and specialized assegailike weapons developed by the more ingenious. There was no alternate route to where Alex was going that was any better.

The police concentrated here as a matter of course, which prevented individual acts of mayhem from fulminating into outright riot, and often managing to keep some sort of narrow canal open in one direction or another. Alex watched for these canals, and those that opened accidentally now and then, with the intensity of a mariner trying to pass through the mythical mazes of the Sargasso. He had learned long ago that picking fights with other boats was a waste of time. The only weapon that he carried was a table-tennis racquet sided with coarse sandpaper, with which he banged the knuckles of people in the water who tried to climb into his canoe. He did this completely impersonally and without malice; he knew, as the stragglers should have known, that it is impossible to get into a canoe from the water without upsetting it.

He took only two paddle blows elsewhere than directly on the helmet, which he thought must be a record for the course. Past Sixth Avenue, the furtive canals got wider and tempers tended to have cooled a little. By the time he reached the Public Library—whose books were now no more inaccessible to the public than they had been fifty years ago, though the reason had changed—he felt justified in removing the helmet and resuming the homburg. There was remarkably little water in the scuppers and he himself was only moderately splashed—the latter of no moment at all, since his clothing was entirely by Burberry and all he needed to do once he arrived was step into one of the Bell System's booths, deposit a quarter, and have the random garbage showered off with salt water.

All in all, he thought as he turned the canoe over to an Avis docker, it was a good thing that he hadn't been able to sleep. The trip had been an out-and-out snap.

 

Secretary de Tohil Vaca was a tall, fair, bearded man of almost insufferable elegance of manner. Ringed and ringleted, perfumed and pomaded, fringed and furbelowed, beaded and brocaded, he combined nature and nurture so overpoweringly, in fact in such an absolute assonance of synesthetic alliteration, that it became a positive pleasure to remind one's self that the underlying essence of his official cachet, like the musk of sex and the ambergris of the most ancient perfumes, was—Alex bit silently but savagely down on the word—garbage.

His office was on the top floor—in fact, was the top floor—of the old Pan Am building, which was itself one of the principal monuments to the ways junk had been piled up willy-nilly in the heyday of the Age of Waste. The building itself still sat over the vast septic tank which had once been Grand Central Station, a tank over which the tides gurgled semidaily without in any way slowing the accumulation of filth in those deep caverns and subway tubes. Most of the immense, ugly structure, which had always looked like the box some other building had been shipped in, was now occupied only by tax accountants, 3V producers, whores, mosquitoes, anthologists, brokers, blimp-race betting agencies, public-relations firms, travel agents, and other telephone-booth Indians, plus hordes and torrents of plague-bearing brown rats and their starving fleas.

Secretary de Tohil Vaca, however, reached his office, when he did, by private blimp, much accompanied by hostesses and secretaries rather like Girlie Stonacher; and he had been known, when he was in a rare hurry, to settle down upon the top of it by air-polluting helicopter. Rank had, as it is written, its privileges.

The office was flooded with sunlight from all sides when the smog let it through, and was hung alternately with Aztec tapestries and with modern collages of what was called the Reconstituted Findings school. The air was cool and almost odorless, and usually carried, as now, a discreet purring of music. In apparent—but only apparent—deference to Alex, the system was now playing a version for four exhaust-flutes of Hector, the Garbage Collector, the eighty-year-old anthem of Local 802. It was all very well prepared, but Alex was not going to be seduced. He not only knew what he wanted, but knew that he had to get it; he was, after all, as much a creature of his constituency as de Tohil Vaca was of the administration.

"Sit down, Alex," he said affably. "I'm sorry this meeting has been postponed so frequently, but, you'll understand, I'm sure, there have been other pressing matters…"

The Secretary waved vaguely and allowed the sentence to trail off. Alex thought he understood well enough: the Secretary had sought to convey the impression that the Administration did not regard the matter as serious and could, if it had to, get along very well without the services of Local 802. They both knew this to be nonsense, but the forms had to be gone through. Now that he was actually in the presence, however, Alex found this diagnosis weakening a little. The Secretary's expression was that of a man rather grimly amused by some private piece of information, like that of a wife accepting flowers from a husband she knows is having an affair with the computer girl. Of course, de Tohil Vaca was a superb actor, but nevertheless Alex found the expression rather disquieting. He tried not to show it.

"Quite all right," he said automatically. "Of course you realize that having left so little time for negotiation means that you'll have to accept our terms as stated."

"Not at all, not at all. In the first place, my dear Alex, you know as well as I do that a strike by your men would be illegal. In our present society we could no more allow it than a wooden city could allow a fireman's strike."

"I'm quite prepared to go to jail if I have to. You can't jail the whole union." He did not go on to add that winning this strike would also win him de Tohil Vaca's office in the next administration. The Secretary knew well enough what the stakes were, which was the real reason why no negotiation would have been fruitful; the strike was absolutely inevitable.

"I'm not threatening you, I assure you. No, really, that issue has in reality become quite irrelevant. You see, Alex, there have been new developments of which you're not aware. They are of sufficient importance so that we no longer care if your men quit work and never go back."

"That," Alex said, "is pure nonsense. The only justification you could have for such a statement would be the development of machinery which made all my men obsolete. I know the technology at least as well as you do, and no such advance has occurred. And if such machines exist in theory, you can't possibly get them into production and on the job fast enough to prevent a disaster if we strike—not even if in theory they're capable of solving the entire problem."

"I imply no such thing," de Tohil Vaca said, with a calmness that seemed to conceal a certain relish. "We have not solved the problem. Quite the opposite. The problem has solved us."

"All right," Alex said. "You've produced your effect. Now, just what are we talking about?"

The Secretary leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. "Just this," he said. "We cannot'dispose' of our wastes any longer. They have tipped the geological scales against us. The planet is breaking up. The process has already started, and the world will be effectively uninhabitable before the next ten years have passed."

The Secretary was watching Alex narrowly, and actor or no actor, could not prevent a faint shadow of disappointment from flitting over his face; Alex had only smiled.

"Good heavens, man," the Secretary said. "Do you hear an announcement like that every day? Or are you utterly without imagination?"

"Neither," Alex said. "But as it happens, I did hear a very similar statement less than twenty-four hours ago. It didn't come from quite so august a source, but I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now."

"What," de Tohil Vaca said, "would you think I stood to gain by making it?"

"I can't imagine. If you were another man, you might be hoping I'd carry this story back to the union and get the strike called off. Then, when the end of the world didn't come through on schedule, I'd be destroyed politically. But you know I'm not that credulous, and I know that you know you wouldn't dare to use such means; it'd destroy you, too."

"Well, at least we are now out in the open," de Tohil Vaca said. "But the fact is that I mean every word I say, and furthermore, I'm prepared to offer you a proposition, though not at all of the kind you thought you came here to discuss. To begin with, though, I had better offer you my documentation. You have, no doubt, noticed the Brooklyn earthquakes."

"Yes, and I know what caused them," Alex said, feeling suddenly, unexpectedly grateful for Fan's passionate lecture of the preceding day. "It's a residuum of deep-well disposal."

The Secretary looked openly astonished. "What on earth is that?" he said. "I've never heard of it."

"I'm not surprised. It hasn't been widely used in a long time. But back around 1950, some private firms began disposing of liquid wastes by injection into deep wells—mostly chemical companies and refineries. Most of the wells didn't go down more than six thousand feet and the drillers went to a lot of trouble not to get them involved with the water table. Everybody liked the idea at the time because it was an alternative to dumping into rivers and so on.

"But then the Army drilled one twelve thousand feet down, near Denver. They started pumping in 1962 and a month later, after only about four million gallons had gone down, Denver had its first earthquake in eighty years. After that, the tremors increased or decreased exactly in phase with the pumping volume. There's even a geological principle to explain it, called the Hubbert-Rubey Effect."

"My word," de Tohil Vaca said, taking notes rapidly. "What happened?"

"Well, nothing for a while. More than a hundred such wells were in operation by 1970, mostly in Louisiana and Texas. But by 1966 somebody had noticed the correlation—which was pretty sharp because the Denver area had never been subject to quakes before, and the quake zone was right underneath the Army's arsenal—so the Army stopped pumping. The quakes went on for another eighteen months—in fact, the biggest one of all was in 1970—but then they began to die back.

"And that's my point. The injection system was outlawed in most states, but there are still eight of them in operation in Pennsylvania, pumping into a strata system only marginally suited for them, and another right out here in Brookhaven, which is totally wwsuited for it. That brackets Brooklyn neatly—and unlike Denver, Brooklyn always has been subject to slight temblors. So there's your answer: cap those wells, and as soon as they get back into equilibrium again—which will take as long as it takes, eighteen months only applied to Denver—then, no earthquakes."

The Secretary dropped his stylus and stared at Alex in frank admiration.

"My word," he said again. "That's the most ingenious theory I've heard in years. I do seem to have underestimated you, after all."

"Well, it isn't entirely mine," Alex admitted. "The man I talked to yesterday thinks that once you trigger an earthquake, you can't untrigger it. But the Colorado experience shows you can."

"Even if you can," said de Tohil Vaca, "I regret to say that the theory, while elegant, is also irrelevant. The real process is something quite different, and absolutely irreversible. It's the greenhouse effect that's responsible—and I hope you'll pardon me if I read from notes here and there; I am no scientist."

"Go ahead."

The Secretary opened a folder. "You know the Arctic ice cap is gone. But that's minor; it was only pack ice. The real problem is down south. There are unthinkable billions of tons of ice over the Antarctic continent—which is volcanic, as Mount Erebus shows. Now the first effect of letting up the pressure of all that ice is that it changes the isostatic balance of the Earth's crust, which would be bad enough, but there's worse to follow.

"There's a thing called precession of the equinoxes, which means that not only does the Earth rotate on its axis, but the axis of rotation also moves around its own center, like the secondary motion of a top when it's slowing down."

"I know about that. It means the poles describe a small circle, so we don't always have the same pole star. But I also know just one of those circles takes twenty-five thousand years."

"Yes, but that's geologically a pretty short time. And bear in mind that swinging all that concentrated ice around and around represents an enormous amount of energy—of momentum. If you melt the ice and distribute its mass as water evenly all over the globe, where does the energy go?"

"I'm not a scientist either," Alex said. "But as an engineer, I'd predict that it'd show up as heat."

"And so some of it will—in lots of heat. Good-bye, fish, just for a starter. And the sea-level rise will total thirty-three feet when all the ice is gone. But there's still more, Alex. Besides the precession, the top wobbles. It used to be called the Drayson Effect, but I gather that everybody sneered so hard at poor old Drayson, whoever he was, for proposing it, that when they discovered the wobble was real, they gave it another name; it's called Chalmer's Wobble now. It shows up in a cyclical disturbance of the polar path, the equinoctial path."

"And how long is the cycle?"

"Fourteen months."

"Fourteen months! Are you sure you've got that right?"

"That's what it says here," de Tohil Vaca said grimly. "And it's been known for twenty years that any major variation in the cycle is a signal that a very large strain release is about to occur somewhere in the crust. Lately, my dear fellow, the polar path has been wobbling irregularly all over northern Canada.

"The outcome is going to be vulcanism on a scale never seen before in the lifetime of man. I'm told that we are in for a new era of mountain-building, the first since the Rockies were thrust up. That will bury all our old cans and bottles and junked cars very nicely—but there'll be nobody left around to rejoice."

"My God," Alex said slowly. "And obviously it's irreversible—we can't take the carbon dioxide and the other heavy gases out of the air. We've changed the climate, and that's that. The ice is going to go right on melting. Faster and faster, in fact, as more energy's released."

"Precisely."

Irrationally, Alex felt a momentary flash of pleasure at being now able to tell Fan of a disaster that made Fan's hypothesis look like a mild attack of hiccups. The moment's elation vanished in a horrible nightmarish sinking of every recognizable human emotion except terror. He could not doubt his erstwhile antagonist; the whole sequence, even he could see, flowed inevitably from as fundamental a law as the conservation of energy. Trying to keep his voice from shaking, he said,

"And yet you said you had a proposition."

"I do. We are going to evacuate some people to the Moon. We still have the old commercial ships, as well as military vehicles, and we've been maintaining the bases, mostly because the Soviets have been maintaining theirs. Of course there's no hope of mankind's thriving on the Moon, but it's at least a tenable way-station until we can organize a further jump to Mars, which we just might make livable."

"And what about the Soviets themselves?"

"They'll just have to think of the idea for themselves," the Secretary said. "We certainly aren't going to propose it to them. Personally, I'd a lot rather outnumber them when it's all over; lunar bases are terribly vulnerable."

"Hmm. How are you going to choose our people?"

"Partly by need, partly at random. We want people of proven ability and necessary skills; but we also want to minimize genetic drift, which I'm told will be a real danger in so small a population. Myself, I'm not even sure what it is. So we're picking out a small group of technicians and known leaders, and we're issuing each of them ten tickets, which they can hand out to anyone they please."

"Without restrictions?"

"There are several restrictions. Secrecy is one, though of course we know we can't maintain it for long. Another is baggage: twenty pounds per person, which has to pack into five cubic feet. But the most important one is that in every group of ten there must be six women. Under the circumstances, men are almost unimportant. If they weren't our main repository of technology, and of creative energy—and of course there's the high possibility of accident—we'd make the ratio nine to one, and still think it too high."

"No children, I suppose?"

"No children. We want skills plus genes. And potency. We'll generate children later, when we're sure we can take care of them. We can't ship them. So if any of your friends want to give up their seats for their bairns, you will have to tell them No."

"I can see myself doing that," Alex said.

"I hope you can. I'm sorry, Alex. It's ghastly, to be sure. But it's the way it's going to have to go."

An easy policy for an obvious homosexual like de Tohil Vaca to adapt to—or a childless man like Alex. But de Tohil Vaca was not going to have to tell anybody No; he had passed that obligation on. To, among other people, Alex.

"The system distributes the moral problem nicely, too," Alex said bitterly. "Every man a god to his friends."

"Would you rather have the Administration choose everybody?"

The answer to that was obvious. "What about livestock?"

"Oh, these vessels will be arks—animals, seeds, everything. Why? Have you got pets?"

"Two cats."

"We're taking ten. If your cats are of opposite sexes and haven't been altered, I'll issue you a ticket for your two; you're the first to ask, and with cats we don't care about breeds—they all reduce to alley cats in one crossing anyhow. Naturally they'll have to pass a medical exam, and so will your friends. These tickets, by the way, are being issued by commercial agencies with no connection—no visible connection—to the government. That cover won't last long, so don't fail to apply for yours instanter."

"I won't. But there must be a price for all this. There always is."

"My dear fellow," de Tohil Vaca said, "I told you we valued you. I do hope you'll call off the strike, as an obvious and complete irrelevancy now; just help us keep the garbage down to a dull roar until we get the ships off, and don't, if you'll pardon me the pun, rock the boat. No other price, except for the tickets, which are the same price the old spacelines used to sell them for to the Moon: a thousand dollars—ostensibly, round trip. That's a part of the cover."

"I see. Well, many thanks." Alex arose, hardly seeing his surroundings. The audio system was still playing that damned tune, which he had always hated. At the door, he turned and looked back.

"Mr. Secretary—you're going, of course."

"No, I am not," de Tohil Vaca said, his pleasantly vapid face suddenly turning to stone. "I am the man who failed to prevent this horror, as I was charged by my office to do. My presence on the Moon would dissolve the last chance of man in the bitterest kind of political strife. Under no circumstances would I introduce such a serpent into this rock garden." Then, suddenly, he smiled. "Besides, I want to see the end. When Ragnarok comes, there ought to be somebody on the spot who is capable of appreciating the spectacle."

When the door closed behind Alex, he felt, aside from all his other burdens, somewhat less than three inches high.

 

On the way back to his own office, Alex found himself wondering how Fan would take it. He had almost automatically decided that Fan would have to be one of "his" three men. There was nobody of his own sex that Alex loved better, and besides, the man was omni-competent—almost as much so as he made himself out to be. (Hmm… John Hillary, Alex's assistant, had better go, too. He was an expert on pressure systems, a good electronicist on the side, easy to get along with, and a vigorous forty ae.)

There was more than a little irony in Fan's being an obligatory survivor. He had lived an astonishingly full life, starting from the utmost poverty, leaving home at fourteen without a penny in his pocket, turning all kinds of odd jobs in a world where such jobs hardly existed any more, devouring the public library in every town he visited, eventually becoming a highly successful journalist until he got bored with the hours the job required him to keep, cranking out small but socially useful inventions at odd moments, and enjoying himself hugely every step of the way. The lives of most men, even when looked back at from the vantage point of half a century, by comparison resembled nothing so much as the slow growth of a forgotten turnip. Anything Fan accomplished from here on out would have to be regarded as a bonus.

And there was another side to the matter which might be even more important. Though Alex was nobody's adventurer, he had once faced death himself, but in retrospect it now seemed to have been very nearly a false alarm—an undifferentiated tumor of the mastoid process, of the same general class that struck many people these days, which had scared hell out of everybody concerned… and then turned out to be as easily operable as a hangnail, or almost.

Fan's experience had been quite different: he had been attacked by a mutated leukemia virus which had nearly cleaned out his bone marrow as thoroughly as if it had been sucked by a dog, leaving him virtually without any of the tissues necessary for generating blood cells. This had been followed, with utter inevitability, by a whole series of secondary infections for which it had been impossible to give him antibiotics—or, for that matter, even aspirin—because his natural immunity to any such foreign substances had been knocked out as well. And there was no treatment for the virus itself.

That siege had frightened nobody, for there was no doubt whatsoever that Fan was going to die. Fan's response was simply, "No thank you; not yet."

And so he hadn't. There was no explanation for that but Fan's own, which was preposterous: he claimed that he had directed his remaining blood-forming tissues to regenerate and get busy making antibodies against the virus, on pain of his extreme displeasure, and so of course they had. If you did not believe this analysis, Fan politely invited you to come up with one of your own.

It had become a moderately famous case history, and there were a good many medical research people who yearned for a few drops of Fan's blood to analyze for the antibodies. They had to go right on yearning, for any fooling around with Fan's blood was verboten. For nearly a year after his recovery, his attending physician had almost literally hovered over him night and day, waiting to slap a patch on him if he so much as cut himself shaving, until Fan tired of that too and told him to get out and go treat somebody who was sick, for God's sake.

That had all happened some years ago, but as a result Alex knew that few people in the world were as well equipped by temperament and by intelligence as Fan was to face the coming slaughter. If it had turned out that he had to stay behind, he would have watched the process with grave interest, and very likely some aesthetic pleasure. Rather like de Tohil Vaca, Alex thought; except that he had more confidence in Fan's ability to maintain his detachment to the end.

Maybe Fan ought to be left off the ship and asked to command the rock-tides to turn back. He would enjoy it so hugely if they did.

Now, who else? Juli, certainly; he would exercise that choice only because he had been given the power to do so and for no other reason, like an attorney's privilege for arbitrary challenge of a juror after all his challenges-for-cause had been used up. But the women were not the heart of the problem yet, for even with Juli ruled in, he had five more he could choose.

But since Fan had to go, and Hillary, he was left with only one more man. And very few of his male friends, he realized grimly, were really good for anything but amusing him… or, to put the matter more bluntly, flattering him and eating on his credit. Merlyn could be ruled out at once; he had no talents whatsoever, not even little ones, and besides had a vicious streak which would be dangerous in a small community. Grindford was a somewhat pleasanter person, with a demonstrated talent for survival; but what else could he do besides duck when he saw the egg approaching the fan? Not a damn thing, except brag about how irresistible he was to women. Even if the brags were true, which Alex gravely doubted, a great seducer would be nothing but a living fossil on the Moon, under the conditions de Tohil Vaca had specified.

Those two eliminations were easy, but from there on out the pain set in. All of the remaining men in the luncheon circle were creative in some slight degree—apparently equally slight, and all utterly negligible, until you examined them each on their merits under the new situation. Take Bang J0hnsund, for instance : who on the moon could use a talent for writing the most moronic and endless kind of 3V serial? The answer might well be, everybody; surely, under such confined and near-hopeless conditions, a talent for taking people's minds off their troubles might turn out to be of tremendous value. Much the same kind of value might inhere in Polar Pons; he entertained people, no, more, he told them things about their world that they needed to know in such a way that they thought they were being entertained while in fact they were learning. The fact that he had to simplify the information he imparted so well beyond the point of caricature—without knowing that he was doing so—counted against him, but he might shape up under pressure; almost everyone did.

Goldfarb Z and Tighe were only superficially easier cases. To be sure, the subject of Goldfarb Z's Cantos was unknown to everyone, including himself, since he had sworn not to develop the invisible ink he had been writing it in until he had finished the work. After that, he would read it, and probably change the title in the light of what he found; the present title was only a sort of running head or slug. But he was a poet, with a fair record of production behind him before he had undertaken the completely hermetic opus. The same could be said of Will Emshredder, though he worked in multimedia and thus—if one could judge by Goldfarb Z's working title—was of a completely opposite school. Obviously the lunar colony could not afford to be without a poet, but did Alex have to choose between schools as well, or was it only the genes for creativity that mattered? And Tighe was a scholar, and there again a propensity for scholarship might be more important than the fact that Tighe's particular field of study had no social utility on Earth even now, and would completely cease to exist on the Moon.

Although he had never given the matter any thought before, Alex had the feeling that poets were scarce commodities, whereas almost any other ten-man cadre might come up—literally—with a scholar. Which poet, then? Goldfarb Z, though gregarious, was also a man of almost impenetrable reserve; but even after all these years, Alex could not say he knew Emshred-der any better, because the man was almost fumblingly inarticulate except when he was in front of his consoles. He thought he did not know which of the two he liked better, which was some small advantage, in that it made for at least a little impartiality. And sheerly on instinct, he felt that Will Emshredder had the larger talent. Very well; he should be the third man.

And promptly upon this decision, Alex found out what he had never known before: that it was in fact Goldfarb Z whom he liked better. It was astonishing how acutely painful the discovery was.

The pain became worse when he came to consider the women. Rosasharn had a limited talent—how limited, he had no way of assessing—but she was somewhat beyond her child-bearing years, and decidedly ugly to boot; taking her along would be a betrayal of one of the essential premises of the escape, if Alex had understood de Tohil Vaca on that point. By the same token, Girlie Stonacher was young, pretty, promiscuous and provenly fertile; she would fit into the proposed colonial society like a key into a slot, and furthermore enjoy it hugely. Count her in. The same terms, with some minor reservations as to what era one was thinking about, had been said—Alex did not know with how much truth—of Irene Pons; but how, how, how could he give Irene a ticket and refuse one to Polar? And would Irene go without him? And if she did, would she not feel the guilt of her husband's death all the rest of her life, regardless of the fact that it would be in no way her fault, and hate Alex for forcing the choice upon her?

Worse was to come. He realized that he had been assuming all along that Fan's wife Gradus would also be among the Chosen, not specifically because she was Fan's wife but because she was the quickest intelligence among all the women, as well as being the most beautiful. But in both these departments, Goldfarb Y was not far behind and should surely be included; and the one emotion Goldfarb Z had ever shown in public was a passionate devotion to her. Alex was therefore in the position of having to part them forever, while at the same time arbitrarily taking along his own Juli, who, though pretty and sweet and good in bed, had a brain about the size of a truffle, and no talent he had ever been able to discover.

This was a more painful case than that of Polar and Irene Pons—not to them, but to Alex. The numbers simply and inexorably ruled Polar out; Alex was entitled to only one man out of the group, and he was morally certain that, having included one administrator and one engineer, that third man should be a poet. But suddenly he thought he saw a way out. It was genes that counted, wasn't it? Wasn't it? And Will Emshredder had a daughter…

Slowly, feeling as though he were dividing his own soul in two, he drew a line through Will Emshredder's name and wrote down that of Goldfarb Z.

It had never occurred to him before that the reason God demands love of everyone is that He must feel overwhelmingly guilty.

 

The basement warehouse was huge, but there were not many echoes in it; the Chosen were very subdued about their baggage-checking. Juli examined her two cartons for the umpteenth time. Twenty pounds and five cubic feet had not turned out to be much, and in the end she had decided on taking almost nothing but keepsakes—and, of course, Splat! and Hausmaus, currently crouched in a carrier on the labeling table, from which occasionally issued low, hoarse cat-howls of protest. Presumably Alex's cartons, which had already gone out, had been more practical.

Of course her cartons were not all keepsakes, really. She had also put together the best approximation she could think of to a survival kit, consisting of small tools, a medicine chest, blankets, and a few other such items, including a nest of plastic containers—no matter where a woman went, she would find some use for those. She hoped the teddy bear wouldn't be discovered; it probably wouldn't show up on the fluoroscope, except for its eyes, and there were several dozen other buttons, all loose, in that box. She knew the stuffed animal had no business being in there at all, but it had been the only toy she had ever had.

Well, if she had forgotten anything important, it was too late to include it now. Reluctantly she shoved the cartons onto the moving belt, which would carry them to the blimp for Rockland Spaceport. The cats ought to go now, too, but suddenly, seeing nobody else around her that she knew, she decided not to part with them just yet.

Where, above all, was Alex? Juli already had her reservation, but Alex had to confirm his own, and it was getting close to the time for the helicopter shuttle for today's flight (only the baggage went by blimp), on which they were both booked. He and the other eight people he had chosen, not without much agony, had been holding some kind of farewell party to the Earth, which she had chosen not to attend as likely to be entirely too painful. Had they all gotten drunk and lost track of the time?

She did not dare to go looking for him; suppose he should show up at the last minute and find her gone? But time passed on the big warehouse clock, and passed, and passed…

The elevator doors to the shuttle closed for the last time today. The endless belt stopped moving. There was nobody human left in the warehouse but herself.

They had missed the flight.

Halfway between panic and fury, she picked up the cat carrier, the contents of which had fallen asleep but now resumed its moans and squalls of despair, and marched off to a telephone booth, where she phoned, first of all, the ticket agent. For more than half an hour she got nothing but a recording telling her all the lines were busy, which she had fully expected. The secret was not yet out, at last reports, but all the same that office must be a madhouse; just the rumor (there had been no announcement) that commercial lunar flights were being resumed had generated a tidal wave of would-be tourists.

At last, she got through to a clerk. No, Dr. Stewart had not picked up his reservation. No, neither had Mr. ad Parnassum. Neither had any of the others.

Next, by citing the code formula which stood for (though the clerk did not know this) the real intent of the exodus, she reached the agent himself and made her plea.

'I'm-sorry-moddom, but you must understand that we have many standbys for each flight. Your seats were doubtless filled long ago."

"You don't understand. I know we've missed this flight. What I want to do is transfer our reservations to the next flight."

'Tm-sorry-moddom, but our instructions are strict. We cannot under any circumstances issue alternative tickets to no-shows."

"Now that's just silly. We weren't entirely no-shows. After all, our baggage is already on today's flight. What's the point of shipping all that baggage and then not sending the people it belongs to?"

'I'm-sorry-moddom, but I'm sure the people who took your seats will find some use for it."

"No, they won't." Juli began to cry, and at least half the tears were real. "No, they won't; it's almost all just keepsakes. Things that w-won't be valuable to anybody b-but us."

The agent had doubtless had to slosh his way through gallons of previous tears. "I'm-sorry-moddom, but regulations do not permit us to issue a second set of tickets."

"Oh, damn your regulations! Now listen, my… husband is the head of one of these groups of ten people, a, a cadre leader."

"There are hundreds of those, moddom. We are not allowed to treat them any differently than anybody else."

"But he's not just an ordinary cadre leader. He's somebody that Secretary de Tohil Vaca particularly wanted to go. The Secretary told him so, personally."

'I'm-sorry-moddom, but surely any faceless person could claim that over the telephone." In the background, people were shouting at him to answer another phone.

"If I were just anybody, how would I know the project code?"

"These things leak, moddom. Now if you'll excuse me—"

"Wait a minute," Juli said desperately. "Why would just anybody be asking for tickets under these particular names? You should have some sort of list with the names on them."

"Yes, moddom, we do, but for today's flight only. We cannot issue second chances."

"If you called the Secretary—" And then, right in the middle of this sentence, which in fact she did not know how she was going to end, she remembered that Alex's priority number was different from the secret project code number. She said: "My husband has priority number FHGR-One."

There was a long silence, except for the dim pandemonium in the background. She could only pray that the agent was looking the number up.

At last he was back. "I have confirmed the priority, moddom. I am therefore issuing you two reservations for tomorrow's flight."

"Oh… thank God. And thank you, too."

"Please bear in mind, moddom, that this is the last chance. The last, the final, the ultimate chance. Are you sure you understand that?"

"Yes, I do," she said gratefully. Her relief was so great that instead of flipping the hang-up toggle, she hit the shower toggle instead, and was promptly drenched with salt water. She hardly noticed.

The panic ebbed, but she was still worried. There might, after all, have been an accident. They might have all been killed, or anyhow hospitalized, on the very eve of escape. Oh God. She called the Brackette de Poisson.

And God damn them, they were there. They were all there.

Now free to feel completely unadulterated rage, she left a message for them with the management, put on her gas mask, snatched up the cats, and stamped out to flag down a water scooter.

 

The eight were still there when she arrived (after parking the grumbling cat carrier in the expensive supermarket next door, by polite but firm request of the restaurant's manager)—the eight who had survived Alex's playing God: three males (Fan, Goldfarb Z, and a man she placed vaguely as an engineer from Alex's office) and five females (Gradus, Girlie, Goldfarb Z's wife Y, Polar Pons' wife Irene, and Will Emshredder's divorced daughter Evadne).

Scanning this much constricted remnant of the old crew, and registering just exactly who remained of it here, Juli realized that more than the pains of choice and of partings had been involved here. There had also been a considerable spectrum of selfless sacrifice. With the realization, her righteous indignation began to simmer down toward the slightly more manageable level of simple resentment.

They all had indeed been drinking, but they did not look drunk. On the contrary, they were steady, quiet, and somber. As for Alex, he did not look guilty, or even contrite; only inexplicably sad.

"Why are you all just sitting here?" She demanded, but with much less vehemence than she would have believed possible only a few minutes ago. "Alex, I got us another reservation, I fought like mad for it, but you have to pick it up right now—we won't be able to get another!"

"I'm sorry, sweetheart," he said in a low voice. "You pick yours up if you want to. I wish you would. But we're leaving ours for the standbys."

"What?" she said, feeling dizzy. "Standbys? You're—you're not going?"

"No," he said, lower still. "We're staying here."

Juli felt as though she had been gored by two icicles. Then she at long last let the hysteria sweep through her. Blindly, she let them lead her to a chair. They all tried to comfort her, more or less clumsily—only the women thought to produce handkerchiefs—but the clouds had been gathering far too long to be checked now.

"And I, I p-packed everything so carefully—all the, all the things I loved—the things you g-gave me—"

"Sshh, dear," a woman's voice said. "It's all right."

"It's not all right, it's not all right! Now we'll not only die—we'll die without our things! Oh, Alex, I p-picked out a b-book for each of us—our tooth brushes—my t-t-t-t—"

The rest came out in a howl, about which she could do absolutely nothing. Pats rained gently on her from various angles, making her cringe and want to fight at the same time. She knew defiantly that that last word was going to have been "teddy bear" and waited for them to laugh; but nobody did.

The woman's voice said:

"Juli, love, it doesn't matter… really it doesn't. No matter how else we die, we all die naked."

Perhaps—she would never know—this truism would have done Juli no good at all had it come from any other source; but she just at this point recognized the voice as that of Girlie Stonacher, the last person in the dying world from whom she would have expected the consolations of philosophy, even of the tritest sort. She got herself under partial control with a humiliatingly juicy sniffle, and allowed the women to finish mopping her face.

Only then could she manage to look again around the circle, out of eyes she was sure were as red as her nose. After a pioneering hiccup, she said:

"Alex, why didn't you tell me? Instead of leaving me alone in that awful warehouse, getting scareder and scareder—while you sat here with all the friends we—"

"I did tell you, Juli," he said. "I remember telling you very distinctly. I even remember when, and where."

Juli still felt so frustrated and confused that under any ordinary circumstances she would have believed him gladly. After long suspicion of men in general, she had come to believe that Alex really did have an odd sort of trick memory, especially after drinking; where some of her previous lovers had had convenient blackouts, or at least blank spots where their promises had been lodged, he instead quite convincingly—to both of them—remembered things that hadn't happened at all, in particular things he hadn't told her but knew he should have, and hence readily admitted to. It had been a source of trust, though not one she would have felt comfortable explaining to anyone else, even a woman.

But these were not ordinary circumstances. "Alex," she said, "I don't believe you."

Clearly, this didn't surprise him. Instead, at last, he did look shamefaced.

"Well," he said, "Juli, the fact is, I didn't tell you. You see, I wanted you to go on that flight. I wanted you to have the chance, whatever I'd decided about myself. After all, we could still be wrong."

That did it. Juli's sorrow and hurt vanished; she was right back to being furious again.

"Wrong about what?" she fumed, clenching her fists until the nails bit into her palms. "Won't somebody in this high-and-mighty crew tell me why we're all committing suicide? I'd kind of like the chance to make up my own mind!"

"I told you so," Gradus said to Alex. "But you wouldn't listen to me."

"Juli," Alex said. "I can't explain it myself. I don't have the training, or the terms. And I couldn't quite face up to asking you to listen to hearing your life being explained away by Fan, with my consent. He's been wrong before."

"Do you believe him, Alex? Enough to stay behind?"

"Yes."

"Then I don't resent anything but your thinking that I'd want to go without you. Fan, explain it, will you? I'd really like to know. And somehow I'm not surprised to find you pronouncing our funeral oration. It seems sort of comfortable. Please speak, Fan, please."

"Thank you," Fan said. "I rise to the occasion."

But in fact he did not rise; he sat where he was, and spoke very quietly.

 

The only thing that puzzled me at first (Fan said) about our fairy friend de Tohil Vaca's theory—which made perfect sense otherwise—was the fact that he wasn't going along to the Moon. That didn't seem to be in character with what I knew about the man. I talked to Alex about it, since after all I only know the Secretary by reputation, and Alex seemed surprised by it, too.

Alex gave the Secretary the benefit of being a more complex man than he had seemed. I never give any man such credit until he's proved it by a lifetime of complex reactions. The Secretary's history didn't deserve it; his public history, it seemed to me, accurately reflected what little depths he had. He certainly had never struck me as a natural martyr.

So I looked at the theory again. The Secretary had also told Alex that he wasn't a scientist, and by God, on that second look, I found out why he'd said so.

The theory is right, mind you. But the Moon Project is wrong. The Moon is no safer now than the Earth is. As the ice melts and the two precessional movements of the Earth's axis get more and more out of synch, the Earth's center of gravity also is shifting. That will make the earthquakes even more violent, but we don't have to worry about that now; enough is enough; es ist vollbracht.

But in addition, the Earth-Moon system is a binary system—a pair of twin planets, or at least close enough to being one dynamically. Other planets have satellites bigger than the Moon: for instance, there's Saturn's satellite Titan, which is actually bigger than Mercury. But nowhere else in the solar system can you find a satellite which is a quarter the size of its primary.

One result of this is something we've known about ever since Herschel's time. The Moon raises very large tides on the Earth—that is, it exerts a significant amount of gravitational energy on the sea, the atmosphere, and even on the crust. Now, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, as poor old Newton told us, and the reaction has to show up somewhere. And it does. It shows up in the Moon's angular momentum, so that the Moon has been gradually drawing away from the Earth for millennia. I forget the rate—something in the nature of a few hundred feet per year, but I could be wrong by several orders of magnitude.

Suddenly—very suddenly—there's going to be a lot more mobile water on the Earth for the Moon to affect. Result: the Moon's velocity in its orbit is going to increase, equally suddenly. Viewed on a geological time scale, it will be one hell of a lurch.

And at the same time, something still more drastic will be happening. Because the Moon is so big in proportion to the Earth, the Moon never has revolved around the exact center of the Earth. Instead, the two bodies revolved around a common center, which was inside the Earth, but not at the Earth's center.

Both these centers—the center of revolution of the twin planets, and the Earth's center of gravity—are now shifting, both independently and in relation to each other. This change will feed back to the Moon, too. And there is still some vulcanism on the Moon—enough to shake it up drastically, since compared to the Earth, the Moon is a low-density, rather fragile world. While new mountains are being built here at home, all the sheer escarpments of the Moon will be tumbling down on our colonies—those that great fissures in the surface haven't swallowed in advance.

I suspect that this process has already started, and that it's why the commercial flights to the Moon were canceled so arbitrarily five or so years ago. Or maybe not; I'm just guessing. If it hasn't started, it will surely start soon.

I wish with all my heart that we'd had the sense to seed one of our planets—or the stars, it could have been done—a long time in the past. Did you know there was a starship in the planning stage in 1965? Well, there was. Even then it was clear to some people that the Earth was too small and too vulnerable for us to risk the whole future of our race on it alone. But instead, we killed off spaceflight almost entirely—and that's that.

And so (Fan continued) in the end I agree with Juli. If I have to die, I too want to die with my things—under which I mean to subsume my world, my history, my heritage, my race. Not in some warren underneath a desert world that's fit for nothing but a quarry for tombstones. Naked we come into the world, but we do not all die naked; we have a choice. We can die naked on the Moon—or we can go to Hell with Shakespeare.

I don't find the choice very difficult.

 

There was a small color 3V in operation over the bar at the rear of the restaurant, which Juli had ignored from the beginning. If she had noticed it at all, she supposed she had assumed that it was tuned to a baseball game, the only channel 3V sets in bars ever seemed able to receive; and the audio volume was gratefully low.

But in the silence following Fan's peroration, she realized that the announcer was talking about the resumption of traffic to the Moon, and the imminent launching. Glancing up at the little hologram tank, she saw the ship that she and Alex were supposed to be on. It looked exactly like two raw onions, one white, one red, joined by a mutual sprout. It occurred to her that they would probably work better if they were boiled. The red sphere, the 3V announcer was overexplaining, was the power sphere, which had to be kept separated from the people, because of the radiation.

The vessel's immense size showed, however, by comparison with the crowd of spectators. There did seem to be a lot of them, held back only with difficulty by armed guards. The background murmur from them did not sound festive.

She felt tears beginning to come again.

"It seems so cruel," she said, almost to herself. "Luring all those people on such a hopeless journey. And so wasteful. Do you suppose the government really doesn't know? About the Moon?"

"Sure they know," Fan said. He reached for his beer bottle, but ten seconds earlier it had turned into counter polish. "They just don't care. Or maybe it's just that they've been lying to us for so long, they couldn't tell us the truth if they wanted to." Morosely, he mopped up his invention with his sleeve.

"Fan, that's a guess," Alex said. "And let me remind you, I do know de Tohil Vaca, and you don't, except by reputation, just as you said. I still don't think he's the villain you make him out to be. He knows there's a risk, and he told me—I think he told all the potential trippers—that there's a risk. He didn't say exactly what it was, but if he had, nobody would have wanted to go at all."

"And maybe," Goldfarb Z said, "he hopes that at least a few of the bases will survive, after all. That would explain the effort, the expense, the deception, and so on. Otherwise, why bother?"

Fan snorted. "Impossible… Herr Ober, another beer here!… And even supposing that… no, damn it, I want a glass bottle, not one of those dissolving ones… even supposing a few bases do survive, they won't have the resources, or the population, or the spirit to put together a second jump to Mars. If there are any survivors on the Moon—and I insist, it's impossible that there will be—they'll just die a little later of attrition. People can't hope if there aren't enough of them to keep each other hoping."

"Fan, as a psychologist you're a pain in the ass," Irene Rons said. "There's one thing you have to give de Tohil Vaca. He's given his passengers the chance to roll the dice. Which is more than we've got the courage to do. And I'll bet he knew exactly how many of us would chicken out, too."

"I do not play," Fan said stiffly, "with loaded dice. But since you insist, I'll give de Tohil Vaca one gold star: He did say, more or less vaguely, that the dice were loaded. It's a limited form of honesty, but honesty it is."

"And decency," Juli said. "Even pity."

"Pity? Juli, I love you, but sometimes you're rather hard to follow."

"I mean, here I am, with Alex, and people I love around me—and I've even still got Splat! and Hausmaus. So—I mean, oh well, that's not so bad, after all. But for most of the people who're going on the trip… do you think they'd be going if they had anyone to love? Someone to help them look death in the eye? And for them, isn't it better to have a little hope? Better than just to stand around, waiting for the end, like so many snowmen waiting for a thaw?"

"By God, Juli," Goldfarb Z said softly, "I love you too."

"It's a nice notion," Fan said, "but it's Juli's alone, I'm afraid. That kind of motive doesn't ordinarily move governments into spending billions of dollars on a foredoomed project."

"What good is a dollar now?" Alex demanded. "And what else would be worth spending it on instead? Now? Not sewage, I can tell you that, and the Secretary knows it. He told me so, and damn bluntly, too."

Fan shrugged. "I can't quite see them breaking the thinking habits of a century," he said. "But on the other hand, it doesn't cost me a cent to give them credit for compassion. Blessed be thee, de Tohil Vaca."

There was another silence, underlined by the rumbling of the crowd at the spaceport, now sounding somehow ominous. By unspoken assent, they turned their chairs to watch the tank.

Juli found herself calm, resigned, washed out. She was even interested in seeing the takeoff, though such things had never interested her before; and not entirely because her "things" were on board. Goldfarb Z ordered another round of drinks.

A moment later, the floor twitched under them, like the hide of a horse trying to dislodge persistent flies. Bottles fell from the bar. The 3V image flickered, and the crowd roar from it swelled suddenly. Most of the customers at the bar made for the door, at speed, and almost everyone around the table sprang up. Chairs fell over.

Fan shot out one hand and grabbed Gradus by a wrist. "Sit down," he said. "Where are you running to?"

"That was an earthquake," she said glacially, "in case you hadn't noticed."

From the 3V the roar grew louder. Juli saw that the crowd was rushing the ship. Evidently, the secret was finally out. Then there was the dull sound of sneeze-gas grenades going off.

"Really, Fan," Goldfarb Y said, "it's better to be out of doors in an earthquake. "Everybody knows that."

"If that was ever true," Fan said, "it doesn't apply any more."

There was a second shock, and the 3V gave up entirely.

"Damn," Fan said. "I wanted to watch that. Alex, how tall is this building?"

"Seventeen stories, but the elevators only go up to the fifteenth. If they're still running at all."

"The lights are still on."

"But supposing the elevators quit on us while we're up there?" Girlie said.

"Suppose they do?" Fan said. There was silence. He went on:

"Girlie, do you really care what floor you die on? Wouldn't you rather see the first survival ship leave—or whether or not the quakes and the mob even let it leave—than run around in the street like a mouse? Let's be human beings to the end, goddam it. I'm going up. The rest of you can suit yourselves."

"Me too," Juli said. But she shook Alex's hand with great determination.

 

And there below them was the Earth, and its wide sky of islands; and the towers of the city to the south. It was a bright day; they could see the fugitive highlights of the sun glancing off the canals of lower Manhattan. It was all quite beautiful. Juli thought her heart ought to be breaking, but in fact she felt only a vast, free exhilaration. Soon it would all be gone; but she had never expected to outlive it. What filled her heart, instead, was something oddly like gratitude.

"There she goes!" Fan cried out suddenly, almost with joy. She felt his hand on her shoulder, turning her around to face toward the northwest. A thin, towering plume of pure white steam was rising slowly on the western horizon, rising, rising… For an instant, just above its tip, there was a splintery flash of metal. Then the plume began to twist and drift.

There was a strange sound from the little party on the roof, a little like a sob, a little like a cheer.

"They made it," Goldfarb Y said, like a prayer.

Then the building jerked like a whip under their feet, and the sound turned to screams and hoarse yells. Asphalt and gravel ripped into Juli's knees and palms. A roar floated up from the city, laced with still fainter screams, like the glints of sunlight on the water.

"My God," the nameless engineer was saying mechanically. "My God. My God."

Alex's hands grasped her, helped her to her feet, steadied her. The building was still swaying a little. Once more, they were all looking south.

Not far away—perhaps ten or fifteen blocks—a few small, old buildings were toppling and sliding down into rubble and dust, unheard in the general uproar. Juli scarcely noticed them, nor did the others seem to be watching that. Much farther downtown, perhaps in what had once been the financial district, or else from the waters of Red Hook or Park Slope, a thick, dense column of black fumes was rising toward the risen half-Moon, like a Satanic mockery of the trail of the vanished ship. It made a sound like the full diapason of some gigantic organ.

"Fissure," Fan shouted, in an otherwise perfectly neutral voice. "I do hate to see my predictions jump the gun like that. It might make people think I lack influence in the proper quarters."

"Your predictions, Fan?" Alex said ironically.

"Certainly. That break's in Brooklyn Heights or thereabouts. That's where I said it would open if the injection wells were responsible. So you see the Secretary and I were both right."

"How nice for you both," Gradus said, but for once there was no malice in her voice. Of course she was all ready to die naked, having been dressing the part for many years; but no one else seemed at all alarmed any more. Irene and Evadne were weeping silently, but without even seeming to notice it.

The black fumes rose in the bright sky. Gradually, they parted at the top, and began to spread gently, parallel to the horizon, as if along some low air stratum. The striations fanned out a little to the west as they drifted; the hinge of that fan did seem to be focused somewhere over the near shore of Brooklyn.

"Temperature inversion," Fan said. "New York's last smog attack."

"Omniscient to the last," Gradus said.

"It's funny," Juli said. "I mean, it's odd. I never thought of it before."

"Of what?" Alex said, taking her hand.

"That everything means something special, no matter what it is, if you know it'll never happen again. Even smog."

The dark striations floated toward them, their shadows making broader stripes over the groaning city in the brilliant sunshine. Were they just parts of widening circles? Or had the prevailing winds also changed? Or—

The roof lurched again. Evadne, who had been standing closest to the parapet, would have gone over it had the unnamed engineer not grabbed her. A cornice fell off and went smashing down the setbacks toward the street.

"There won't be," Fan said gently, "any flight tomorrow. Good-bye, all."

The cats!

With a cry, Juli raced for the stairwell. Alex called after her, something about the danger and the power being off, but she did not care.

 

She was almost fainting with exhaustion by the time she reached the dust-choking, bombarded street, and another temblor threw her to her knees just in front of the smashed glass display windows of the expensive supermarket. Shaking her dirty hair out of her face, she got up again and staggered inside.

"Hausmaus! Splat!"

There was a dim cry. Inside, the cement and plaster dust was almost impenetrable, but she could see vaguely that the place had been looted before the last panic had struck. Not only were there cans, bottles, and packages lying where the shocks had thrown them, but there were also a number of half-filled string bags and two-wheeled pushcarts abandoned near the door.

"Here, kitty! Kitty, kitty!"

Three or four meows responded. Through her watering, gritty, gas-inflamed eyes she seemed to be seeing thousands of cats. And indeed there were a great many. The carrier was where she had left it, half buried under a pile of loose cornflakes, diet cookies, and other things that had burst out of fallen paste board packages; but the door had fallen open and it was empty.

Through the haze and the tears, she was able finally to make out that all those thousands of cats were actually only a store cat and four squealing, barely ambulatory kittens. Then she saw Splat!, who somehow had managed to scramble to the top tier of a display rack which still held a few canned goods. He was too fat to get back down by himself, or at least that seemed to be his theory, and Juli decided to leave him there for the moment. He would be no safer anywhere else, and as long as he was treed like that, she would at least know where to find him.

"Hausmaus? Hausmaus?"

There was another violent earth shock. The entire front of the store crunched down to about half its previous height, and masonry roared into the street in front of it. Overhead, parallel to the street, a beam burst through the plaster of the ceiling, one end hanging free. Instantly changing her mind, Juli grabbed Splat! and stuffed him back in the carrier, followed by a kitten who happened to be in reach, and latched the door.

Was there another way out of the store? Yes, a door that evidently gave into the lobby of the building. It was wooden and had split at the top; its frame was twisted.

"Hausmaus! Here, puss!"

Another shock.

"Juli!"

It was Alex. He was pounding on the door, which evidently was locked, jammed, or both. "Juli, Juli, where are you?"

There was the sound of a heavier blow, as if he had kicked the door. Juli tugged frantically at the knob. It would not give.

He kicked the door again, and almost at the same time, there was another tremor. Part of the bottom panel fell out of the door. Juli dropped to her hands and knees, and found Alex facing her on the other side in the same position. He could not see her, however, for blood was streaming into his eyes from a slash which ran diagonally across his forehead and up over his scalp.

"Alex, here I am!"

She heard Splat!'s hoarse Siamese cry behind her, and then he was clambering clumsily over her calves. Evidently the door to the carrier had come open again.

"Juli—"

She reached out for Alex. As her hand touched his cheek, there was still another shock, and the free end of the ceiling beam began to fall, slowly at first. Juli felt the soft, familiar thump of Hausmaus landing on his frequent perch between her shoulder blades, and






 

 

 

 

 

 

(strange as it looks, but this is the end of this story (no dot), and strange words in this text are not errors)