YOU ARE NOT ALONE announced the sign, flashing neon red in the dark sky. People in the free mixed streets looked up and saw it as they walked back from work. It glowed red behind them in the sky as they entered the gates of their own Kingdoms; their own incorporated small countries and their own laws inside their gates They changed into their own strange costumes, perhaps light armor, and tourneyed, tilting lances against each other, winning ladies. Or in another Kingdom, with a higher wall around its enclosed blocks of city, the strange lotteries and rites of the Aztec sadist cult, or the simple poverty and friendliness of the Brotherhood Love Communes. They were not alone.

Nonconformists who could not choose, a suitable conformity lived in the mixed public areas, went to mixing parties, wondering and seeking. Seeking whom? To join with to do what? Returning from the parties late and alone, they passed the smaller signs flashing red in the store windows.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Find your own Kind, Find your own Hobby.

Find your own Mate, Find your own Kingdom.

Use “Harmony” Personality Diagnosis and Matching Service.

Carl Hodges was alone. lie stood in a deserted and ruined section of the city and saw the red glow of the sign reflecting against the foggy air of the sky of New York, blinking on and off like the light of a flickering red flame. He knew what the glow said. You are not alone.

He shut his eyes, and tears trickled from under his closed eyelids. Damn the day he had learned to do time track. He could remember and return to Susanne, he could even see the moment of the surfboard and his girl traveling down the front slope of a slanted wave front, even see the nose of the board catch again under the ripple, the wave heaving the board tip, up and over, and whipping down edge first like an ax. He knew how to return for pleasure to past events, but now he could not stop returning. It happened again before his eyes, over and over. Think about something else!

“Crying again, Pops?” said a young insolent voice. A hand pushed two tablets against his mouth. “Here, happy pills. Nothing to cry about. It’s a good world.”

Obediently Carl Hodges took the pills into his mouth and swallowed.

Soon memory and grief would stop hurting and go away. Think about something else. Work? No, he should be at work, on the job instead of vacationing, living with runaway children. Think about fun things.

It was possible that he was a prisoner, but he did not mind. Around him collecting in the dark, stood the crowd of runaway children and teen-agers in strange mixed costumes from many communes across the United States. They had told him that they had run away from the Kingdoms and odd customs of their parents, hating the Brotherhood, and conformity, and sameness of the adults they had been forced to live with by the law that let incorporated villages educate their own children within the walls.

The teeners had told him that all rules were evil, that all customs were neurotic repetition, that fear was a restriction, that practicality was a restriction, and mercy was a restriction.

He told himself they were children, in a passing phase of rebellion.

The pill effect began to swirl in a rosy fog of pleasure into his mind. He remembered fun. “Did I tell you,” he muttered to the runaway teener gang that held him as a prisoner-guest, “about the last game of Futures I played with Ronny? It was ten-thirty, late work, so when we finished we disconnected the big computer from its remote controls and started to play City Chess. We had three minor maintenance errors as our only three moves. He wiped out my half of the city, by starting an earthquake from a refrigerator failure in a lunchroom. It wiped out all the power plant crew with food poisoning, and the Croton power plant blew up along a fault line. That was cheating because he couldn’t prove the fault line. I wiped out his technocrats in Brooklyn Dome just by reversing the polarity on the air-conditioning machine. It’s a good thing our games aren’t real. Everyone is wiped out totally by the end of a good game.”

A blond kid who seemed to be the leader stepped forward and took Carl Hodges’ arm, leading him back toward his cellar room. “You started to tell me about it, but tell me again. I’m very interested. I’d like to study Maintenance Prediction as a career. What does reversing the leads on the air-conditioning machine do to destroy a place?”

“It changes the smell of the air,” said Carl Hodges, the missing man who knew too much. “You wouldn’t think that would make a lot of difference, would you?”

Since June 3, every detective the police could spare had been out looking for a missing computerman who had been last seen babbling about ways to destroy New York City.

Judd Oslow, Chief of Rescue Squad, sounded excited on the phone. “Your anti-chance score is out of sight, George. I want you to guess for us where Carl Hodges is and give us another hit like the first three. I’m not supposed to send my men after Carl Hodges, it’s not my department, but that’s my neck on the block, not yours. Brace yourself to memorize a description.”

“Sure.” George made ready to visualize a man.

“Carl Hodges, twenty-nine years old, a hundred and forty pounds, five feet nine inches tall, brown hair, hazel eyes.”

George visualized someone shorter and thinner than himself. He remembered some short underweight men who were always ready to fight to prove they were bigger.

“His job is assistant coordinator of computer automation city services,” read Judd Oslow.

“What’s that?” George wanted to get the feel of Carl Hodges’ job.

“Glorified maintenance man for the city, the brains for all the maintenance and repair teams. He uses the computer to predict wear and accidents and lightning strikes and floods that break down phone lines, power and water lines and he sends repair teams to strengthen the things before they are stressed so they don’t break. He prevents trouble.”

“Oh.” George thought: Carl Hodges will be proud of his job. He won’t want to be bigger. “How does he act with his friends? How does he feel?”

“Wait for the rest.” Judd read, “Hobbies are chess, minimax and surfing. No commune. Few friends. One girl who met with a fatal accident when they were on a love trip last month. He’s not happy. He was last seen at a Stranger’s introduction party, Thirty-sixth Street and Eighth. He might have been spaced out on drugs, or he might have been psychotic, because he was reported as mumbling continuously on a dangerous subject he was usually careful to keep quiet about.”

“What subject?”

“Secret.”

“Why?”

“Panic.”

“Oh.” George restrained his natural anger at being confronted with a secret, and remembered an excuse for the authorities. Panic, or any other group stimulation that could send many people unexpectedly in the same direction, could cause destructive crowding and clogging in the walkways and transportation. People could get jammed in, pushed, trampled, suffocated. In a city of tremendous population and close and immediate access to everything, safety from crowding was based on a good scatter of differences, with some people wanting to be in one place and others in another, keeping them thinly spread. Sometimes the authorities kept secrets, or managed the news to prevent interesting things from pulling dangerous jammed crowds into one place

The Chief of Rescue Squad got the TV connection to the public phone turned on, and let George look at a photograph of the missing man. A wiry undersized scholar with a compressed mouth and expressionless eyes. George tried to tune in by pretending it was his own face in the mirror. Staring into its eyes, he felt lonely.

He started by going to the Stranger’s introduction party. He followed his impulses, pretending to be Carl Hodges. He wandered the city closely on the trail of Carl Hodges, but he did not feel it with any confidence, because he thought that the trail of feelings that urged him from one place to another were his own lonely feelings and sad thoughts. After he was given a few bad events to be sad about, he was sure it was his own mood.

George woke at dawn and watched pink sunlight touch the bushes along the top of a building so they brightened up like candle flames on the top of a birthday cake. He lay with his eyes open and watched while the light brightened and the pink faded. Crickets sang and creaked in the deep grass and bending tall grass tickled against his face.

He lay still, feeling the kind of aches you get from being kicked. There were a lot of aches. The teener gang that had attacked him had even put chain bruises on his legs. They had not been trying to kill him, only to warn him against trespassing again.

But George still felt strange and without friends. Usually he could join any group. Usually he could be anybody’s friend. Was he forgetting how to be buddy with strangers? The teeners had left him on the sidewalk tied in a ridiculous knot with fingers and toes hooked together by Chinese finger trap tubes. He had worked his fingers free, and walked down to his girl friend’s Brotherhood Love Commune to sleep. He felt strange and inferior, and hoped no one would look at him, when he entered the commune. The brothers in the front rooms said he was giving out bad vibes, and upsetting an important group meditation, and they gave him a cup of tea and put him out with his sleeping bag.

Four A.M., wondering what he was doing wrong, he went to sleep in a shape-hiding shadow in the grass belt opposite the Rescue Squad midtown headquarters. Now awakened again by dawn, he felt his bruises and felt sad and unsuccessful. He had wandered through many places in the city the night before, but he had not found Carl Hodges. The computerman was still an unlucky prisoner somewhere.

By the time the sun was high, George was going across George Washington Bridge the hard way, on the understruts, clinging with bare hands and feet, clambering up and down slopes of girders and cables, sometimes sitting and watching the sun sparkle on the water more than a hundred feet below while huge ships went slowly by, seeming like toys.

The wind blew against his skin, warm sometimes rind sometimes cold and foggy. He watched a cloud shadow drift up from the south along the river. It darkened the spires of tall buildings, became a traveling island of dark blue in the light blue of the river, approached and widened, and then there was cool shadow across the bridge for long moments while George looked up and watched a dark cotton cloud pass between him and the sun.

The cloud left and the light blazed. George looked away, dots of darkness in front of his eyes, and watched the cloud shadow climb a giant cliff to the west and disappear over the top. He started picking his way along a downslope of girder, moving carefully because the dazzle of sun dots was still inside his eyes, dancing between his vision and the girders. Overhead the steady rumble of traffic passing along the roadway was a faraway and soothing sound.

A gull in the distance flapped upward through the air toward him. It found an updraft and drifted with it, wings spread and motionless, then paused in front of him, floating, a white beautiful set of wings, a sardonic cynical head with downcurved mouth and expressionless inspecting eyes.

George was tempted to reach out and grab. He shifted to the grip of one hand on the cross strut and hooked one knee over a bar.

The gull tilted the tips of his wings and floated upward and back, a little farther out of reach in the sky, but still temptingly close.

George decided that he was not stupid enough to let a gull trick him into falling off the bridge.

The gull slanted and slid sideways down a long invisible slope of air and squalled, “Creee. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha…” in a raucous gull laugh. George hoped he would come back and make friends, but he had never heard of anyone making friends with a gull. He climbed on toward the New Jersey shore, going up and down slopes of girders, found a steel ladder fastened to the side and climbed it straight up to a paint locker and a telephone. He dialed Rescue Squad, and asked for Judd Oslow.

“Chief, I’m tired of taking a vacation.”

“This morning Ahmed reported you walked like a cripple. How late did you work last night?”

“Three-thirty.

“Find any clues to Carl Hodges?”

“Not exactly.” George looked at the far, high planes and helicopters buzzing through the blue sky. He did not feel like discussing the failure of last night.

“Where are you now?”

“In a painter’s crow’s nest on George Washington Bridge.”

“Climbing George Washington Bridge is your idea of a rest’?”

“It’s away from people. I like climbing.”

“Okay, your choice. You are near Presbyterian Medical Center. Report to the Rescue Squad station there and fill out some reports oil what you’ve been doing all week. Some of the things you’ve been doing, we would probably like to pay you-for. The information girl there will help you fill out the forms. You’ll like her, George. She doesn’t mind paper work. Let her help you.”

Ahmed Kosavakats, George’s superior and childhood friend, was ready to admit defeat. He had reasoned in trying to find Carl Hodges and reasoned well.

Any commune which had Carl Hodges could ask him how to bias the city services computer in their favor. Ahmed had been checking the routine deliveries of repairs and improvements and rebuilding and projects to each commune, by running a comparison check against the normal deliveries through the statistics computer. Negative. There was no sign of a brilliant manipulator changing the city services.

Ahmed stood up and stretched long arms, thinking. Whoever had Carl Hodges was not using him. If Ahmed could rescue Carl Hodges and become his friend, he would not miss the opportunity to use him. If a man wanted to influence the future of his city …

If he could not use his own logic to find Carl Hodges, then the kidnappers were not thinking logically, and could not be predicted by logic. If they were thinking emotionally, then George Sanford could probably tune to them and locate them. But Ahmed would have to tell him what kind of people to tune to, and how they felt.

George Sanford’s intuition was a reliable talent. Once, when George, was a fattish, obliging kid in Ahmed’s gang, Ahmed had added up how often George’s simple remarks and guesses had turned out right. George had guessed right every time. But George didn’t think. Half envious, Ahmed had told the others that George’s head was like a radio; you could tune his brain to any station and get the news and weather and the right time in Paris, San Francisco and Hong Kong, but a radio isn’t going to add anything up, not even two plus two; it works because it’s empty.

George Sanford had grown up to a big silent cat of a man. Extremely strong, not caring apparently whether he ate, drank or slept, a rather blank expression, but he still tuned in on people. His goals were the simple ones of being with friends, helping out and being welcome, and he had friends everywhere.

Behind the apparent low IQ there were untapped abilities that could only be brought into action by demanding a lot of George when you asked him to help. It was not certain yet how much George could do. George did not know. He probably did not even think about it. He had no demands on himself.

The thing to do, Ahmed thought, was to keep the pressure on George. Keep him working.

Ahmed found George filling out reports by dictating them to a pretty girl. The pretty office worker had her hands poised over the typewriter and was listening to George with an expression of surprise and doubt. George, with his brow knotted, was plodding through a narrative of something he had done the day before. The girl rolled the report sheet through the typewriter opposite a different blank and asked a question timidly; a tape recorder showed its red light, recording the questions and answers. George hesitated, looking at the ceiling desperately for inspiration, his brow more knotted than before.

George always had trouble understanding the reasoning behind red tape. He did not know why certain answers were wanted. They both looked up with relief when Ahmed interrupted by turning off the tape recorder.

“They told me to team up with you this afternoon,” Ahmed said to George. “They give this job priority over reports or any other job. Are you feeling okay now?”

“Sure, Ahmed,” George said, slightly surprised.

“Let’s go outside and see if we can tune to the subject. Okay?”

“Okay.” George got up, moving easily. A bruise showed at his hairline on the side of his head, almost hidden by hair. On George’s right arm were two blue bruises, and below his slacks on the right ankle was a line of red dents with bruises. A left-handed assailant with a club, or a right-handed assailant with a chain, swinging it left to right, would bruise a man on one side like that.

Walking out of the Rescue Squad office, Ahmed indicated with a gesture the bruise on George’s arm.

“May I ask?”

“No,” George replied and closed his mouth tightly, staring straight ahead as they went through the double doors.

George didn’t want to talk about it, Ahmed thought, because he had lost that fight. That meant he had been outnumbered. But he was not dead or seriously hurt. The assailants then were not killers, or he had escaped them. Probably a trespassing problem. Probably George had trespassed onto some group’s territory or Kingdom last night while searching for Carl Hodges by himself. Ahmed put the thought aside. They stopped on a walk among the bushes and trees and looked up at the towering buildings of Presbyterian Medical Center, like giant walls reaching to the sky. Helicopter ambulances buzzed around landing steps like flies.

“Let’s not waste time, George, let’s get you tuned into Carl Hodges,” Ahmed said, pilling out a notebook and pen. “Do you have a picture of Hodges with you?”

“No.” The big young man looked uneasy. “You going to do it that same way, Ahmed? If he’s sick, will I get sick?”

“I’ve got a picture here.” Ahmed reached for a folder in his pocket and passed a photo to George.

The ground jolted in a sort of thud that struck upward against their feet.

Nine miles or more away, and two minutes earlier, Brooklyn Dome, the undersea suburb, suddenly lost its dome. The heavy ocean descended upon it, and air carrying a torrent of debris that had been houses and people blurted upward through an air shaft. A fountain of wreckage flung upward into the sky, falling in a circular rain of shattered parts to float upon the sea.

All morning a mass wish to escape from the enclosure of walls had driven George happily into the heights and winds and free sky. Now that note in the blend of the mood of the city suddenly changed and worsened to panic, helplessness, defeat and pain, and then an end. The event telescoped in speed, compressed into a blow of darkness. The broadcast of many thousand minds ended and their background hum in the vibes of the city diminished.

Reaching out with his mind for information, George encountered the memory of that impact. It went by like the thunder wave of breaking the sound barrier, like a wave of black fog. He shut his eyes to tune in, and found nothing, except that the world had lightened. A burden of fear had been suddenly erased.

George opened his eyes and took a deep breath. “Something big,” he said. “Something …”

Ahmed was watching the sweep-second hand on his watch. “Fifty-five hundred feet, one mile,” he muttered.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s an explosion somewhere. I’m counting the distance. Sound arrives first through the ground, second through the air. I’m waiting for the sound. I’ll get the distance by the time lag.”

At thirty seconds the sound of the death of an underseas city reached them, a strange sort of grinding roar, muffled, low and distant.

George shut his eyes again, and felt the world change around him to another place.

“Got something, George?” Ahmed asked alertly. “That was about seven miles.”

“Someone knows what happened. I’m picking him up. Brooklyn Dome just collapsed.”

“Twelve thousand inhabitants,” Ahmed said, dialing his wrist radio grimly, his earphone plugged into his ear. “No one answering at headquarters, just busy signals.”

George shut his eyes again, exploring the other place. “Someone’s having a nightmare,” he said. “He can’t wake up.”

“Don’t flip out, George, keep in touch with facts. A lot of people just died, is all. Keep a grip on that. I’m trying to get our orders.”

George stood with his eyes shut, exploring the sensation inside his head. Somewhere a man was trapped in a nightmare, half asleep in a dark prison or closet. It was some kind of delirium.

The real world was a cruel place that bright day, but the black and coiling fragments of that man’s world were worse. There was something important about the man’s thoughts. He had felt the explosion thud at a distance, as they had, and he had known what it meant. He had expected it.

“Can’t locate where he is,” George said, opening his eyes and regaining his grip on the bright sunshine world around him.

Ahmed squinted and tilted his head, listening to the obscure and rapid voices on the earplugs of his radio.

“Never mind about that case, George. That’s Carl Hodges probably. He’ll keep. Headquarters is broadcasting general orders for the emergency. Repair and services inspection people are ordered to make quick inspections at all danger points in the automatic services, looking for malfunction and sabotage. Repair and inspection teams are ordered into Jersey Dome, to check out every part of it and make sure it is not gimmicked to blow the way Brooklyn Dome went. They are instructed to describe it as a routine safety check.”

“What do we do? What about us?”

“Wait, I’m listening. They mentioned us by name. We go to Jersey underseas and try to locate and stop a sabotage agent who might have sabotaged Brooklyn Dome and might be preparing to use the same method on Jersey Dome.”

“What method?”

“They don’t know. They don’t even knot if there is a saboteur. They’re sending us to make sure.”

“‘If there is a saboteur, he’s probably working on it right now.” George walked, and then ran for the subway steps down into the underground moving chair belts. Ahmed followed and they caught a brace of abandoned chairs just as they slowed and accelerated them again out into the fast lanes.

“Dirty dogs! Let me out of here. I’ll kill you.” Furiously Carl Hodges kicked and thrashed and bit at restraining straps, remembering at last, believing his conclusions about the group of teeners that had him prisoner. “You decerebrate lizards. Let me out of here, you fools! You killed Brooklyn Dome. I’ve got to get back to work and level off the exchanges before something else happens. Let me out of here!”

They backed off, their smiles fading at the barrage of his anger. The tallest one answered with a trace of resentment. “Don’t get upset, Pops. They weren’t real people, just technocrats and objectivists and fascists and like that.”

“They were techs. This city needs techs. People with tech jobs run the city, remember?”

The tall one leaned over him, glowering. “I remember what my tapes tell me. The objectivists passed the law that the compulsory sterility of women can’t be reversed without paying five hundred dollars for the operation. That means if I ever want to get married I’ll have to save five hundred dollars for my woman to have a kid. They’re trying to wipe us all out. Nobody has that kind of money but techs. In the next generation we’ll all be gone. We’re just getting back at them, wiping them out.”

“But faster,” chuckled a small kid. “Like boon!”

“The objectivists got that law through legally. Why don’t your people pull enough votes to get it wiped?” Carl Hodges demanded.

“They ship us out to the boondocks. We can’t vote. You’re talking like an objectivist. Maybe you believe everyone without money should be wiped?”

“I believe anyone without brains should be wiped!” Carl Hodges snarled suddenly. “Your mothers wouldn’t have paid ten cents to have you. Too bad the law wasn’t passed sooner.”

“Genocide.” The tall one reached over and hit him across the mouth. “We were nice to you. To you!” He turned and spat in revulsion.

Others surged forward.

“Steady.” The leader spread arms and leaned back against the pressure. He addressed Carl. “We don’t want to hurt you. You tell us things, you’re a good teacher. We’ll let you have what you want. Money for rights. Lie there until you have enough money to buy your way out. It will cost you five dollars to get out. That’s cheaper than five hundred dollars to be born. That’s a bargain.”

The kids crowding behind him laughed, and laughed again, understanding the idea slowly. After a time of clumsy humor they untied him and went off, leaving him locked in a narrow windowless bedroom.

Carl Hodges went around the room, inspecting it and thinking coldly of escaping. He had to get out and straighten up the mess the city was in after the collapse of Brooklyn Dome. He had to get out and have the kids arrested before they sabotaged anything else. According to his best logic, there was no way to get out. He was stuck, and deserved it. He pushed his mind, thinking harder, fighting back a return of weakness and tears. He reached for a happy pill, then took the bottle of white pills and poured its contents down a hole in the floor.

The two Rescue Squad men shifted their chairs through acceleration bands to the inner fast slots and passed the other chairs, each leaning forward on the safety rail of his chair as if urging it on. The people they passed were holding portable TV screens like magazines, watching in the same way that people used to read.

The voice of the announcer murmured from a screen, grew louder as they passed, and then again fell to a murmur. “Brooklyn Dome. Fifteen pounds atmosphere pressure to sixty-five pounds per square inch. Exploded upward. Implosion first, then explosion.” The voice grew louder again as they approached another sliding chair in the slower lane. Another person listened, propping the screen up on the safety rail to stare into it, with the sound shouting. “Debris is floating for two square miles around the center from which the explosion came. Coast Guard rescue ships, submarines and scuba divers are converged into the area, searching for survivors.”

They neared and passed a TV screen which showed a distant picture of an explosion like an umbrella rising and opening on the horizon. “This is the way the explosion looked from the deck of a freighter, the Mary Lou, five miles south at the moment it occurred.”

George settled himself in his seat and shut his eyes to concentrate. He had to stop that explosion from happening again to the other undersea dome. Whoever had done it would be laughing as he watched on TV the explosion unfold and settle. Whoever had done it would be eager for destruction, delighting in the death and blood of a small city.

The peculiarly wide range of perceptions that was George Sanford groped out across the city.

“The police department is still investigating the cause of the explosion,” said the murmur, growing louder as they passed another TV watcher in the slow lane. Someone handed the announcer another note. “Ah, here we have some new information. Bell Telephone has opened up to the investigators eight recordings taken from public phones in Brooklyn Dome. These phone calls were being made at the moment Brooklyn Dome was destroyed.”

A face appeared on a screen behind the announcer, a giant face of a woman telephoning. After an instant of mental adjusting of viewpoint the woman’s face became normal in the viewer eye, the announcer shrank to ant size and was forgotten as the woman spoke rapidly into the phone. “I can’t stand this place another minute. I would have left already, but I can’t leave. The train station is jammed and there are lines in front of the ticket booth. I’ve never seen such lines. Jerry is getting tickets. I wish he’d hurry.” The anxious woman’s face glanced sideways either way out of the booth. “I hear the funniest noise, like thunder. Like a waterfall.”

The woman screamed and the background tilted as the screaming face and the booth went over sideways. A hand groped past the lens, blackness entered in sheets, and the picture broke into static sparks and splashes. The screen went blank, the antlike announcer sitting in front of it spoke soothingly and the camera rushed forward to him until he was normal size again. He showed a diagram.

George opened his eyes and sat up. Around him on the moving chairs people were watching their TV screens show the pictures he had just seen in his mind’s eye. It showed a diagram of the location of the phone booths at Brooklyn Dome, and then another recording of someone innocently calling from a videophone booth, about to die, and not knowing what was about to happen, an innocent middle-aged face.

Expressionlessly, the people in the traveling subway seats watched, hands bracing the sides of the TV screen, grip tightening as they waited for the ceilings to fall. Audience anticipation; love of power, greatness, crash … total force and completeness … admiring triumph of completeness in such destruction. Great show. Hope for more horror.

All over the city people looked at the innocent fool mouthing words and they waited, watching, urging the doom on as it approached. This time be bigger, blacker, more frightening, more crushing.

George shut his eyes and waited through the hoarse screams and then opened his eyes and looked at the back of the neck of the TV watcher they were passing, then turned around and looked at her face after they passed. She did not notice him; she was watching the TV intently, without outward expression.

Did that woman admit the delight she felt? Did she know she was urging the thundering waterfall on, striking the death blow downward with the descending ocean? She was not different from the others. Typical television viewer, lover of extremes. It was to her credit that when TV showed young lovers she urged them to love more intensely, and rejoiced in their kisses. Lovers of life are also lovers of death.

George slid down further in his seat and closed his eyes, and rode the tidal waves of mass emotion as the millions of watchers, emotions synchronized by watching, enjoyed their mass participation in the death rites of a small city. Over and over, expectancy, anticipation, panic, defeat, death, satisfaction.

The secretly worshiped god of death rode high.

In twenty minutes, after transfers on platforms that held air-lock doors to pass through into denser air, they arrived, carried by underseas tube train, at the small undersea city of Jersey Dome. Population: ten thousand; residents: civil service administrators and their families.

The city manager’s office building was built of large colored blocks of lightweight translucent foam plastic, like children’s large building blocks. There was no wind to blow it away. Inside, the colors of the light tinted the city man’s desk. He was a small man sitting behind a large desk with one phone held to his ear and another blinking a red light at him, untouched. “I know traffic is piling up. We have all the trains in service that city services can give up. Everyone wants to leave, that’s all. No. There isn’t any panic. There’s no reason for panic.” He hung up, and glared at the other phone’s blinking light.

“That phone,” he snarled, pointing, “is an outside line full of idiot reporters asking me how domes are built and how Brooklyn Dome could have blown up, or collapsed. It’s all idiocy. Well. What do you want?”

Ahmed opened his wallet to his credentials and handed it over. “We’re from Metropolitan Rescue Squad. We’re specialists in locating people by predicting behavior. We were sent over to .locate a possible lunatic who might have sabotaged Brooklyn Dome or blown it up, and might be here planning to blow up Jersey Dome.”

“He just might,” replied the manager of Jersey Dome with a high-pitched trembling earnestness in his voice. “And you might be the only dangerous lunatics around here. Lunatics who talk about Jersey Dome breaking. It can’t break. You understand. The only thing we have to fear is panic. You understand.”

“Of course,” Ahmed said soothingly. “But we won’t talk about it breaking. It’s our job to look for a saboteur. Probably it’s just a routine preventive checkup.”

The manager pulled a pistol out of a desk drawer and pointed it at them, with a trembling hand. “You’re still talking about it. This is an emergency. I am the city manager. I could call my police and have you taken to a mental hospital, gagged.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ahmed said soothingly, picking his wallet back off the desk and pocketing it. “We’re only here to admire the design and the machinery. Can we have a map?”

The manager lowered the pistol and laid it on the desk. “If you cooperate, the girl in the front office will give you all the maps of the design and structure that you’ll need. You will find a lot of technicians already in the works, inspecting wires and checking up. They’re here to design improvements. You understand.” His voice was still high-pitched and nervous, but steady.

“We understand,” Ahmed assured him. “Everything is perfectly safe. We’ll go admire their designs and improvements. Come on, George.” He turned and went out, stopped at the receptionist’s desk to get a map, consulted it and led the way across the trimmed lawn of the park.

Out on the curved walk under the innocent blue-green glow of the dome, Ahmed glanced back. “But I’m not sure he’s perfectly safe himself. Is he cracking up, George?”

“Not yet, but near it.” George glanced up apprehensively at the blue green glow, imagining he saw a rift, but the dark streak was only a catwalk, near the dome surface.

“What will he do when he cracks?” asked Ahmed.

“Run around screaming,‘The sky is falling!’ like Chicken Little.” muttered George. “What else?” He cocked an apprehensive glance upward at the green glow of the dome. Was it sagging in the middle? No, that was just an effect of perspective. Was there a crack appearing near the air shaft? No, just another catwalk, like a spiderweb on a ceiling.

Making an effort, he pulled his eyes away from the dome and saw Ahmed at a small building ahead labeled “Power Substation 10002.” It looked like a child’s building block ten feet high, pleasantly screened by bushes, matching the park. Ahmed was looking in the open door. He signaled to George and George hurried to reach him, feeling as if the pressurized thickened air resisted, like water.

He looked inside and saw a man tinkering with the heavy power cables that provided light and power for the undersea dome. Panels were off, and the connections were exposed.

The actions and mood of the man were those of a workman, serious and careful. He set a meter dial and carefully read it, reset it and made notes, then read it again. George watched him. There was a strange kind of fear in the man, something worse than the boxed-in feeling of being underwater. George felt a similar apprehension. It had been growing in him. He looked at Ahmed, doubtfully.

Ahmed had been lounging against the open door watching George and the man. He took a deep sighing breath and went in with weight evenly balanced on his feet, ready for fast action. “Okay, how are the improvements coming?” he asked the workman.

The man grinned over his shoulder. He was slightly bald in front. “Not a single improvement, not even a small bomb.”

“Let’s check your ID. We’re looking for the saboteur.” Ahmed held out his hand.

Obligingly the man unpinned a plastic ID card from under his lapel, and put a thumbprint over the photographed thumbprint so that it could be seen that the two prints matched. He seemed unafraid of them, and friendly.

“Okay.” Ahmed passed his badge back.

The engineer pinned it on again. “Have fun, detectives. I hope you nail a mad bomber so we can stop checking for defects and go home. I can’t stand this air down here. Crazy perfume. I don’t like it.”

“Me too,” George said. A thick perfumed pressure was in the air. He felt the weight of water hanging as a dome far above the city pressing the air down. “Bad air.”

“It has helium in it,” Ahmed remarked. He checked the map of the small city and looked in the direction of a glittering glass elevator shaft. A metal mesh elevator rose slowly in the shaft, shining in the semidark, like a giant birdcage full of people hanging above a giant living room.

George tried to take another deep breath and felt that whatever he was breathing was not air. “It smells strange, like fake air.”

“It doesn’t matter how it smells,” Ahmed said, leading the way’ “It’s to keep people from getting the bends from internal pressure when they leave here. Why didn’t you okay the man, George? His ID checked out.”

“He was scared.”

“What of?” Ahmed asked him.

“Not of us. I don’t know.”

“Then it doesn’t matter. He’s not up to any bad business.”

The two walked across the small green park, through the thick air, toward the glittering glass shaft that went up from the ground into the distant green dome that was the roof of the city. Inside the huge glass tube a brightly lit elevator rose slowly, carrying a crowd of people looking out over the city as a canary would look out above a giant room.

“Next we check the air-pump controls,” Ahmed said. “They’re near the elevator.” People went by, looking formal and overdressed, pale and quiet, stiff and neat. Not his kind of people. Civil servants, government administration people, accountants.

George followed, trying to breathe. The air seemed to be not air, but some inferior substitute. Glittering small buildings rose on either side of the park in rows, like teeth, and he felt inside a tiger mouth. The air smelled like lilies in a funeral parlor. The people he passed gave out vibes of a trapped hopeless defeat that made his depression worse. They passed a crowd of quiet miserable people waiting to get on the elevator, carrying fishing poles and swimming equipment.

High above them the elevator descended slowly.

“That’s bad,” George said. “You feel it, don’t you, Ahmed?”

“Feel what?” Ahmed stopped beside a small rounded building attached to the side of the shaft. The building throbbed with a deep steady thump, thump, thump, like a giant heart.

“I want to get out of here,” George said. “Don’t you feel it?”

“I ignore that kind of feeling,” Ahmed said expressionlessly, and pulled on the handle of the door to the pump room. It was unlocked. It opened. The thumping was louder. “Should be locked,”

Ahmed muttered. They looked inside.

Inside, down a flight of steps, two workmen were checking over some large warm thumping machinery. The two detectives went down the steps.

“Identity check, let’s see your ID,” George said, and looked at: the two badges they handed him, in the same way he had seen. Ahmed and other detectives checking them over. He took thumbprints and matched them to the photo thumbprints, he compared the faces on the photos to the faces before him. One big one with a craggy chiseled stone face and grim vertical lines on the cheeks; one short weathered one, slightly leaner, slightly more humor in the face. Both identified as engineers of Consolidated Power and Light, inspectors of electrical motor appliance and life support services.

“What are the pumps doing?” Ahmed asked, looking around.

“Pumping air in, pumping water out,” replied one of the men. “There’s the pump that pushes excess water up to the top, where it comes out as a little ornamental fountain in an artificial island. The pressure equalizes by itself, so it doesn’t need elaborate equipment, just power.”

“Why pump water out?” Ahmed asked. “The air pressure is supposed to be so high that it pushes the water, out.”

The man laughed. “You make it sound so simple. The air pressure is approximately the same here as up at the top surface of the dome, but the water pressure rises every foot of the way down. Down here at the bottom it is higher than the air pressure. Water squeezes in along the edges of the cement slab, up through the ground cover and the dirt. We have drains to catch the seepage, and lead it back to this pump. We expect seepage.”

“Why not pump in more air? Higher air pressure would keep all the water out.”

“Higher air pressure would burst the top of the dome like a balloon. There isn’t enough weight of water to counter push.”

George got an uncertain picture of air pushing to get out the top and water pushing to get in the bottom. “It’s working all right?” He handed the ID badges back to them.

“Right,” said the explanatory man, pinning on his badge. “It would take a bomb to get those pumps out of balance. Don’t know why they sent us to check the pumps. I’d rather be out fishing.”

“They’re looking for a bomb, dummy,” said the other one sourly.

“Oh.” The bigger one made a face. “You mean, like Brooklyn Dome blew up?” He looked around slowly. “If anything starts to happen, we’re right near the elevator. We can get to the top.”

“Not a chance,” said the sour one. “The elevator is too slow. And it has a waiting line, people ahead of you. Resign yourself. If this place blows, we blow.”

“Why is the elevator so slow?” George asked. Fix it! He hoped silently. They listened to the burn of the elevator engine lowering the elevator. It was slow.

“It can go faster; the timer’s right here.” The sour engineer walked over and inspected the box. “Someone has set it to the slowest speed. I wonder why.”

“For sightseeing,” George said, “but I saw the crowd waiting. They have fishing poles. They want to get to the top, they don’t want to wait in the middle of the air, just viewing.”

“Okay.” The talkative one walked over and firmly set the pointer over to “fast.” The elevator reached the ground on the other side of the wall, rumbled to a stop and the doors whirred open.

They listened, hearing voices and the shuffle of feet as people crowded inside, then the doors rumbled shut and the elevator started for the top. The whirr was high and rapid. In less than a third of the time the trip up to the surface had taken before, the whirr stopped.

The two engineers nodded at each other. “I hope they are happy with it.”

“They are getting there faster.”

George said, “That makes sense,” and Ahmed nodded agreement. They went out and watched the elevator return. As rapidly as falling, the great silver birdcage came down the glass shaft and slowed, and stopped, and opened. It was empty. No one who was up there was coming back in to the city.

More people got on.

“What is up there?” George asked, holding himself back from a panic desire to get in the elevator with the others and get out of the enclosed city. “I have a feeling we should go up there,” he said, hoping Ahmed would misunderstand and think George was being called by a hunch.

“What do you feel?” Ahmed looked at him keenly. The doors shut and the elevator rose rapidly, leaving them behind on the ground.

“What I feel is, we shouldn’t have let that elevator go without us. We’ve had it, old buddy. It’s been nice knowing you. I didn’t expect to die young.”

“Snap out of it.” Ahmed clicked his fingers under George’s nose. “You’re talking for somebody else. Hold that feeling separate from your thinking. It’s not your kind of feeling. George Sanford isn’t afraid, ever. You don’t think like that.”

“Yes I do,” George said sadly. He heard the elevator doors rumble open far overhead. Somewhere above people had escaped to the top of the ocean instead of the bottom. A dock? An island? Somewhere fresh winds were blowing across ocean waves.

“Locate that feeling of doom,” Ahmed said. “Maybe our mad bomber is a suicider and plans to go down with the ship. Shut your eyes. Where are you in your head?”

“On top, on an island in the daylight,” George said sadly, looking at his imagination of sand and seagulls. “It’s too late, Ahmed. We’re dead.” A few new people arrived and lined up behind him waiting for the elevator. The sound of its descent began far above. People approached through the park from the direction of the railway station, and George remembered that there had been fenced-in crowds waiting for trains, waiting to get out. Maybe some people had grown impatient and wanted to get to fresh air. The crowd behind him grew denser and began to push. The elevator doors opened in front of George.

“Get in, George,” said Ahmed, and pushed his elbow. “We’re going to the top.”

“Thanks.” George got on. They were pushed to the back of the cage and the doors shut. The elevator rose with knee-pressing speed. Over the heads of the people before him George saw a widening vision of the undersea city, small buildings circling a central park, dimly and artistically lit by green and blue spotlights on trees and vines, with a rippling effect in the light like seaweed and underwater waves. Paths and roads were lit with bead chains of golden sodium lights. On the other side of the park the railroad station, squares of soft yellow light, fenced in by lacework metal walls. Many people around it. Too many. Dense crowds. The paths across the park were moving with people approaching the elevator shaft.

The elevator reached the top of the dome and went through into a tube of darkness. For a few moments they rose through the darkness and then they felt the elevator slow and stop. The doors rumbled open and the people pressed out, hurried through a glass door and down a staircase, and were gone from the top floor.

George looked around. There was the sky and ocean spaces he had dreamed of, but the sky was cloudy, the ocean was gray, and he was looking at them through thick glass. The island viewing platform was arranged in a series of giant glass steps, and the elevator had opened and let them into the top step, a glass room that looked out in all directions through thick glass, giving a clear view of the-horizon, the glass rooms below, and the little motorboats that circled the docks of an artificial island.

“How’s your hunch? What do you feel’?” Ahmed snapped out, looking around alertly, weight on the balls of his feet, ready to spring at some mad bomber that he expected George to locate.

“The air is faked. I can’t breathe it,” George said, breathing noisily through his mouth. He felt like crying. This was not the escape he had dreamed of. The feeling of doom persisted and grew worse.

“It’s the same air and the same pressure as down undersea in the dome,” Ahmed said impatiently. “They keep the pressure high so people can come here from under without going through air locks. They can look, take pictures and go back down. It smells lousy, so ignore it.”

“You mean the air is under pressure here, as bad as all the way down at the bottom of the ocean?”

“Yes, lunk. That’s what makes sense to them, so that’s the way they have it set up.”

“That’s why the wall is so thick then, so it won’t burst and let the pressure out,” George said, feeling as if the thickness of the’ wall were a coffin, keeping him from escaping. He looked out through the thick glass wall and down through the glass roof of the observation room that was the next step down. He saw chairs and magazines, a waiting room, and the crowd of people that had come on the elevator with him lined up at a glass door, with the r first one in line tugging at the handle of the door. The door was not opening. “What are they doing?”

“They are waiting for the air pressure in the room to go down and equalize with the air pressure in the stairwell and the next room. Right now the pressure in the room presses the door shut. It opens inward as soon as the pressure goes down.” Ahmed looked bored.

“We have to go out.” George strode over to the inside door that shut off a stair leading down to the next room. He tugged. The, glass door did not open. “Air pressure?”

“Yes; wait, the elevator is rising. It seems to be compressing the air, forcing it upward.” Thick air made Ahmed’s voice high-pitched and distant.

George tugged on the handle, feeling the air growing thicker and press on his eardrums. “We have enough pressure here already. We don’t need any more fake air. Just some real air. I want to be out of here.”

The elevator door opened and a group of people, some carrying. suitcases, some carrying fishing gear, pressed out and milled and lined up at the door behind George, pushing each other and murmuring complaints about pushing in tones that were much less subdued than the civil service culture usually considered to be polite.

The elevator closed its doors and sank out of sight, and air pressure began to drop as if the air followed the piston of the elevator in pumping up and down. George swallowed and his eardrums clicked and rang. He yanked hard on the handle of the stairwell door. It swung wide with a hiss and he held it open. The crowd hurried down the stairs, giving him polite thanks as they passed. With each thanks received he felt the fear of the person passing. He stared into the faces of a woman, a teener, a young woman, a handsome middle-aged man, looking for something beside fear, and finding only fear and a mouse like instinctive urge to escape a trap, and a fear of fear that kept them quiet, afraid to express the sense of disaster that filled their imaginations.

“Argh,” said George as the last one went down the stairs. “Hurry up, Ahmed, maybe they are right.” He gestured his friend through the door and ran down after him onto the lower step of a big glass viewing room with tables and magazines to make waiting easy. Behind him he heard the door lock shut and the whirr of the elevator returning to the top with more people.

George leaned his forehead against the thick glass walls and looked out at a scene of little docks and a buzz of small electric boats circling the platform, bouncing in a gray choppy sea, under thick gray clouds.

“What’s out there?” Ahmed asked.

“Escape.”

“What about the saboteur?” Ahmed asked with an edge of impatience. “What is he thinking, or feeling? Are you picking anything up?”

“One of those boats is it,” George answered, lying to avoid Ahmed’s duty to return to the undersea city. “Or a small submarine, right out there. The top’s going to be blasted off the observation platform. Get rescue boats in here. Use your radio, hurry, and get me a helicopter. I want to be in the air to spot which boat.”

It wasn’t all lies; some of it felt like the truth. He still leaned his forehead against the wall and looked out, knowing he would say anything to get out. Or do anything. He tried to tune to the idea of sabotage, and open to other people’s thoughts, but the urge to escape came back in a greater sickness and swamped other Thoughts. “Why?” he asked the fear. “What is going to happen’?” An image came of horses kicking down a barn from inside, of cattle stampeding, of a chick pecking to get out of an egg, with the chick an embryo, not ready yet to survive in air. Kicking skeleton feet broke through from inside a bubble and the bubble vanished. The images were confusing. He looked away from his thoughts and watched the outside platform.

The platform was crowded with people, shivering in a cold wind; apparently waiting their turn to enjoy a ride in the little boats. George knew that they were outdoors because they could not stand being indoors.

Ahmed tapped on his arm. He had the wrist-radio earphones plugged into both ears, and his voice sounded odd and deaf “Headquarters wants to know why, George. Can you give details?”

“Tell them they have five minutes, seven minutes if they’re lucky. Get the patrol boats here to stop it and”-George almost shouted into Ahmed’s wrist mike-“GET ME THAT HELICOPTER. Get it over here fast! We need it as soon as we get through the air locks!”

The glass air-lock door opened and people tumbled and shoved through. On the other side was another room surrounded by glass. They lined up against the glass walls like moths against a lighted windowpane, looking out.

“Why do we have to wait so long?” It was a wail, a crying sound like an ambulance siren in the night. The group muttered agreement and nodded at the woman who clutched her hands against the glass as though trying to touch the scene outside.

“I’m not worried about the bends,” said a portly older man. “They adjust the waiting time for people with bad sinus and ear drum infections. Does anyone here have a sinus, or eardrum infection?”

“We don’t need to wait, then,” said the same man, louder when there was no reply. “Does anyone here know how to make the door open? We can go out right now.”

“My son has a screwdriver,” suggested a woman, pushing the teen-age young man toward the door. Ahmed moved to protest and the woman glared at him and opened her mouth to argue.

An old woman was tugging at the door. It opened suddenly and they forgot quarreling and went out through the door to the open docks and the cold salt wind, and the sound of cold choppy waves splashing against the cement pillars.

An air-beating heavy whirring sound hovered above the docks. Ahmed looked up. A ladder fell down and dangled before them. Ahmed grabbed the rope rungs and pulled. They sagged lower. He fitted his foot into a rung and climbed.

George stood, breathing deeply of an air that smelled sweet and right and tingled in his lungs like life and energy. The clouds of panic and resignation faded from his mind and he heard the seagulls screaming raucous delight, following the small boats and swooping at sandwiches. The people clustered at the edge of the docks, beginning to talk in normal tones.

The ladder dangled before him, bobbing up and down. The rope rungs brushed against his head and he brushed them aside. What had been happening? What was the doom he had just escaped from? He tried to remember the trapped moments and tried to understand what they had been.

“Come on, George,” a voice called from above.

He reached up, gripped and climbed, looking into a sky of scudding gray and silver clouds. A white and blue police helicopter bounced above him, its rotating blades shoving damp cool air against him in a kind of pressure that he enjoyed fighting. At the top the ladder stiffened into a metal stair with rails, and opened into the carpeted glass-walled platform of a big observation helicopter.

Ahmed sat cross-legged on the floor, twitching with hurry and impatience, holding his wrist radio to his lips. “Okay, George, tune to it. What will blow the observation building? Who, what, where? Coast Guard is waiting for information.”

Still with his memory gripped onto the strange depression he had felt inside the observation building, in the air of Jersey Dome, George looked down and tuned to it and knew how the people still inside felt, and what they wanted.

In the four-step glittering observation building, each glass room was full of people waiting at the doors. He saw the central elevator arrive and open its door and let out another crowd of people to wait and push and pull at the first door at the top. Desperation. A need to get out.

With a feeling of great sorrow, George knew who the saboteurs were. All the kids with screwdrivers, all the helpful people with technical skill who speed elevators, all the helpful people without mechanical understanding who would prop open dime-operated toilet doors for the stranger in need. They were going to be helpful, they were going to go through the air-lock doors and leave the doors jammed open behind them. No resistance behind them to hold back sixty-five pounds per square inch air pressure forcing up from below in the compressed city, pushing upward behind the rising elevator.

He had been pretending to believe it was a mad bomber. How could he tell the police and Coast Guard that it was just the residents of the city, mindless with the need to gel out, destroying their own air-lock system?

George held his head, the vision of death strong and blinding. “They are jamming the air-lock system open in the observation building, Ahmed. Tell someone to stop them. They can’t do that. It will blow!” The panic need to escape blanked his mind again.

“Lift,” George said, making nervous faces at the view below. “Lift this damned copter.”

“Is he all right?” the pilot asked Ahmed.

Ahmed was talking intensely into the wrist radio, repeating and relaying George’s message. He made a chopping gesture to shut up.

The copter pilot gave them both a glance of doubt for their sanity and set the copter to lift, very slowly.

Beating the air, the copter rose, tilting, and lifted away from the dwindling platform of glinting glass in the middle of the gray ocean.

George gripped the observation rail and watched, ashamed that his hands were shaking.

He saw something indefinable and peculiar begin to happen to the shape of the glass building. “There it goes,” he muttered, and abruptly sat down on the floor and put his hands over his face. “Hang on to the controls. Here we go. Ahmed, you look. Take pictures or something.”

There was a crash, and a boom like a cannon. Something that looked like a crushed elevator full of people shot upward at them, passed them slowly, and then fell, tumbling over and over downward.

A roaring uprush of air grabbed the copter and carried it into - the sky upside down, falling in a rain of small objects that looked like briefcases and fishing rods and small broken pieces that could not be recognized. George hung on to a railing. Suddenly the copter turned right side up, beating its heavy spinning blades in a straining pull upward away from the rising tornado.

With a tearing roar Jersey Dome spat its contents upward through the air shaft, squeezing buildings and foam blocks and people and furniture into the shaft and upward in a hose of air, upward to the surface and higher in a fountain of debris, mangled by decompression.

For long moments the fountain of air was a mushroom-shaped cloud, then it subsided, raining down bits. The copter circled, its occupants deafened and awed.

With one arm and one leg still hooked around the rail, Ahmed listened intently to his radio, hands cupped over his ears to make the speaker plugs in his ears louder. He spoke.

“The city manager is alive down there and broadcasting. He says the canopy of the done did not break, it just lowered. The air shaft sucked in everything near it and is now plugged shut with foam blocks from buildings but the blocks are slowly compressing into it, and they can hear an air hiss. Survivors are putting on scuba air equipment and finding places to survive another hurricane if the tube blows free again, but he’s afraid of water leaks coming in and drowning them out from underneath because the pressure is going down. He wants the air shaft plugged from the top. Suggests bombing it at the top to prevent more air escaping.”

Ahmed listened, tilting his head to the sounds in his ears.

“People in the water,” George said. “Bombs make concussion.

Let’s get the people out.”

“Affirmative,” said the police pilot. “Look for people.”

The helicopter swept low and cruised over the water, and they looked down at the close passing waves for a human swimmer needing help.

“There.” Ahmed pointed at a pink shiny arm, a dark head. They circled back and hovered, let down the ladder, and the two Rescue Squad men climbed down and maneuvered a web mesh sling around a limp young unconscious naked woman. Her head bobbed under and came up as they slid the sling under her. The waves washed up against their knees as they leaned out from the rope ladder.

“NOW HEAR THIS, NOW HEAR THIS,” proclaimed a giant amplified voice. “ALL BOATS IN THE AREA CIRCLE IN THE DISASTER AREA AND TAKE IN SURVIVORS. IN FIVE MINUTES, AT THE NEXT SIGNAL, ALL BOATS MUST WITHDRAW FROM THE AIR-SHAFT CENTER TO A DISTANCE OF FIVE HUNDRED YARDS TO PERMIT BOMBING. AWAIT SIGNAL. REPEAT. YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO SEARCH FOR AND TAKE IN SURVIVORS.”

Ahmed and George shouted up to the pilot, “Ready.” And the hoist drew the mesh sling with the young woman in it upward and into the copter through a cargo door in the bottom. The door hatch closed. They climbed back inside, dripping, and spread the unconscious and pretty body out on the floor for artificial respiration. She was cold, pulseless and bleeding from ears, nose and closed eyes. There were no bruises or breaks visible on the smooth skin. George tried gentle hand pressure on the rib cage to start her breathing again, and some blood came from her mouth with a sigh. He pushed again. Blood came from her eyes like tears.

Ahmed said wearily, “Give it up, George, she’s dead.”

George stood up and retreated from the body, backing away. “What do we do, throw her back?”

“No, we have to take bodies to the hospital. Regulations,” muttered the pilot.

They circled the copter around over the choppy gray seas, wipers going on the windshield. The body lay on the floor between them, touching their feet.

They saw an arm bobbing on the waves.

“Should we haul it in?” George asked.

“No, we don’t have to take pieces,” said the pilot, tone level.

They circled on, passing the little electric boats of the people `who had been fishing when the dome blew. The faces were pale as they looked up at the passing helicopter.

The corpse lay on the floor between them, the body smooth and perfect. The plane tilted and the body rolled. The arms and legs moved.

Ahmed seated himself in the copilot’s seat, fastened the safety harness and leaned forward with his head in his hands, not looking at the corpse. George looked out the windshields at the bobbing debris of furniture and unidentifiable bits, and watched Coast Guard boats approaching and searching the water.

The copter radio beeped urgently. The pilot switched it on. “Coast Guard command to Police Helicopter PB 1005768. Thank you for your assistance. We now have enough Coast Guard ships and planes in the search pattern; please withdraw from the disaster area. Please withdraw from the disaster area.”

“Order acknowledged. Withdrawing,” the pilot said, and switched the radio off. He changed the radio setting and spoke briefly to Rescue Squad headquarters, and turned the plane away from the area of destruction and toward the distant shore.

“What’s your job in police?” he asked over his shoulder.

George did not answer.

“Rescue, Detection and Prevention,” Ahmed answered for him “We were in Jersey Dome ten minutes ago.” Behind them the bombs boomed, breaking and closing the air shaft.

“You sure didn’t prevent this one,” said the copter pilot.

Ahmed did not answer.

This is a blackmail tape. One copy of this tape has been mailed to each of the major communes and subcities in the New York City district.

We are responsible for the destruction of Brooklyn Dome. It was a warning, and demonstrated our ability to destroy. We ham in our possession a futures expert whose specialty was locating and predicting accidental dangers to the city complex caused by possible simple mechanical and human failures. He is drugged and cooperative. We asked him how Brooklyn Dome could self-destruct from a simple mechanical failure, and he explained how. We are now prepared to offer his services for sale. Our fee will be fifteen thousand dollars a question. If you are afraid that your commune has enemies, your logical question would be: What and who can destroy my commune, and how can I prevent this attack? We will provide the answer service to your enemies, if they pay. They might be asking how to destroy your commune as you listen to this tape. Remember Brooklyn Dome. The name and address enclosed is your personal contact with us. No one else has this name. Keep it secret from the police, and use it when you decide to pay. If you give your contact up to the police, you will cut yourself off from our advice, your enemies will contact us through other names and buy methods to destroy you. Remember Brooklyn Dome. Act soon. Our fee is fifteen thousand dollars a question. The price of survival is cheap.

“Every police department has a copy. Want me to play it again?” Judd Oslow asked. He sat cross-legged on top of his desk like a large fat Buddha and sipped coffee.

“Once was enough,” Ahmed said. “Paranoia, and war among the communes. What do those nuts think they are doing with that tape?”

“Making money,” Judd Oslow sipped his coffee, carefully staying calm. “They mailed one to each commune in the city area, and only two have turned in the entire tape, or admitted receiving it. Only one has turned in his address. The others must be keeping their addresses, planning to ask attack, or defense, questions.”

“Armageddon,” said Ahmed.

Judd said, “George, why don’t you get off your rump and bring in Carl Hodges? These nuts can’t sell his brains if we get him back.”

Ahmed said, “You just gave George the: job last night. He almost had him this morning, but we were reassigned when Brooklyn Dome blew, and had to get off Carl I lodges’ trail to go to Jersey Dome.”

“So there’s some of the day left. George has spoiled me with success. I’m used to instant results. Come on, George. Carl Hodges, right here in this office, packaged and delivered.”

George looked up at him, eyes round and puzzled. “I’m supposed to help people. Every time I start trying to help Carl Hodges something bad happens. It doesn’t come out right. Maybe he likes being in trouble. Bodies all over the place! You don’t want me helping, with my luck!”

“Snap out of it, George. This is no time for pessimistic philosophy. Get together with Ahmed and hypnotize yourself and tell me where Carl Hodges is.”

“What’s the use?” George ran his hands over his head in a weary gesture that was not typical of him. “Brooklyn Dome people are dead already. Jersey Dome people are mostly dead already. Everybody that ever died is still dead. Billions of people since the beginning of time. How are you going to rescue them? Why not let a few more die? What difference does it make?”

“Let’s not have an essay on Eternity, George. Nothing makes any difference to Eternity. We don’t live in Eternity, we live in now. We want Carl Hodges now.”

“What’s the use? My advice just makes trouble. I didn’t save those people in Jersey Dome. I wasn’t smart enough to understand that they’d want to break their own air locks. No, it wasn’t the panic, it was the depression. The air changed its charge. Lab animals act irrational when you reverse the ground-to-air-static charge gradient. I should have-“

Judd shouted, “George, I’m not interested in your bad conscience. If you want to help people, just answer the question.”

George winced at the loudness and squinted up at him with his eyes seeming crossed. “George?”

“Wow!” Ahmed stepped forward. “Wait a minute. George did it already. That was Carl answering you.”

Judd hesitated between confident forward and back motions. He started and stopped a gesture. His confusion reached his expression. He shouted, “Get out of here, you kooks. Go do your lunacy somewhere else. When you bring back Carl Hodges, don’t tell me how you did it.”

“Affirmative,” Ahmed said. “Come on, Carl.”

In confusion and guilt George followed and found himself on the open sidewalk, standing under a row of maple trees. The wind blew and the trees shed a flutter of green winged seeds about him. He knew he had failed his job somehow, and couldn’t figure out how to get back to it. He walked to a bench and sat down.

“Do you understand what was just happening?” Ahmed asked.

“Yes.” He felt in his mind and found confusion. “No.”

“Shut your eyes. You seem to be on a bench in a park. It is an illusion. This is not where you are. Where are you really?”

George had shut his eyes. The voice went in deeply to a place in his mind where he knew he was in a room, a prisoner, and it was his fault. He did not like that knowledge. Better to pretend. He opened his eyes. “I want to be here in the park. Pretend you are real.” He bent and touched some green vetch at his feet and felt the tiny ferns. “History doesn’t matter. Sensation matters,” he said earnestly. “Even these illusions are real because they are happening now. We live in now. Memory isn’t real. The past doesn’t exist. Why should we feel anything about the past, or care about it?”

Ahmed computed that it was a good probability that Carl Hodges was speaking through George and looking through his eyes as a form of escape. The rationalization was fluent, the vocabulary not George’s. Vocabulary choice is as constant as fingerprints.

The person speaking had to be Carl Hodges.

“Carl Hodges. Do you want to get away from where you are and lie down in this park?”

“You are a questioner. I should not speak.”

“Is it wrong to answer questions?”

“Yes; answers kill. People are dead. Like Susanne, they are all dead. Does mourning one person kill others? They drowned too, and floated. Saw girl in water … Connection … ?”

George had been speaking dreamily, eyes wide and round and sightless. He closed his eyes and every muscle in his face and body tightened in a curling spasm like pain. He slid off the bench and fell to his knees in the soft vetch. “Get me out of this. Make it unhappen. Reverse time. Wipe me out before I did it.” The spasmed crouch—was it pain or prayer?

Watching the figure of misery, Ahmed made urgent calculations. The shame-driven need to escape memory was there to work with. Use it.

“Carl, you are in a green field in a small park on East E Avenue and Fifth Street. This is a future scene. Two hours from now, you will be rescued and free, without guilt, relaxed and enjoying being outdoors. We are the police, we are getting into a sky taxi to come and get you. What directions are we giving the driver?”

“Amsterdam Avenue and Fifty-third Street to Columbus Avenue, the wrecked blocks, one of the good cellars near the center of the flattened part of the ruins. Buzz it twice. Thanks. I think I can knock down a kid when I hear you and come out and wave. Land and pick me up fast.”

“Okay,” said Ahmed, straightening and stepping back from the crouched praying figure.

George took his hands from his face. “Okay what?” His voice was George’s usual voice. He got up and brushed small green fronds from his knees.

“Okay, let’s make a raid into another kid gang’s territory,” Ahmed said.

“Where’s Biggy?” George looked around as if expecting to see their own gang of kids around them. “Oh, he went to the Canary Islands. And the others, they went to the Sahara. They all went…” He shook his head as if waking up. “Ahmed, what do you mean, raid a kid gang territory? That’s all over. We’re grown up now.”

“We’re going to rescue that kidnapped computerman. A mixed gang of teener kids are holding him in the ruins near West Fifty-third Street. We know how to handle a kid gang fight.”

George was not going to let go of common sense. He settled back on the bench and looked around at the green warm comfort of the park, and rubbed one of the bruises on his arm. “Let’s call the police, let them do it.”

“We are the police, lunk.” Ahmed still stood, smiling, depending on the force of his personality, the habit of command, to get George to obey. George looked up at him, squinting into the light of the sky, one eye half closed. Half of a bruise showed at the side of his face, most of it hidden by the hairline.

“Ahmed, don’t be a nut. Logical thinking doesn’t fight chains and clubs for you. I mean, your brains are great, but we need muscle against a juv army, because they don’t know about thinking, and they don’t listen.”

“What if they are all in their cellars, lunk, and we want to drop them before they get in deeper and carry Carl Hodges away? What kind of thing could get them all out into the open where a helicopter could drop them with gas?”

George absently rubbed the dark mark on the side of his face. “They come out when somebody gets onto their territory, Ahmed.

Not an army of cops or a helicopter, I don’t mean that. I mean some poor goof is crossing, looking for a shortcut to somewhere else, and they all come out and beat him up.”

“That’s for you.”

“How did you figure … Oh, yeah, you don’t mean yesterday. You mean strategy, like. They come out to beat me up again and the copter drops them with a gas spray, and maybe there’s no one left underground to kill Carl Hodges, or take him away.” George got up. “Okay, let’s do it.”

They came up out of the subway at Fifty-third Street and walked together on the sidewalk opposite the bombed-out shells of old buildings. A distant helicopter sound buzzed in the air.

“Separate, but we keep in touch. Leave your radio open to send, but shut it for receive so there won’t be any sound coming out of it. The copter pilot will be listening. I’ll circle the block and look in doorways and hallways for trouble. You cut across. We both act like we have some reason to be here, like I’m looking for an address. We’re strangers.”

“Okay,” George said. “I’ve got a story for them. Don’t worry about me.” He turned and walked nonchalantly around the corner, across the street, past some standing ruins and into the flattened spaces and the area that had once been paved backyard, with steps down to doors that had opened into the cellars of gone buildings. Flattened rubble and standing walls showed where the buildings had been.

He stood in the middle of a backyard, near two flights of cement stairs that led down into the ground to old doors, and he walked onward slowly, going in an irregular wandering course, studying the ground, acting a little confused and clumsy, just the way he had acted the last time he had been there.

The setting sun struck long shadows across the white broken pavement. He turned and looked back at his own long shadow, and started when another person’s shadow appeared silently on the pavement alongside of his. He glanced sideways and saw a tall, husky teener in a strange costume standing beside him holding a heavy bat. The teener did not look back at him, he looked off into space, lips pursed as though whistling silently.

George winced again when a short teener with straight blond hair stepped out from behind a fragment of standing wall.

“Back, huh?” asked the blond kid.

George felt the shadows of others gathering behind him.

George said, “I’m looking for a pocket watch I lost the night you guys beat me up. I mean, it’s really an antique, and it reminds me of someone. I’ve got to find it.”

He looked at the ground, turning around in a circle. There was a, circle of feet all around him, feet standing in ruined doorways, feet on top of mounds of rubble, the clubs resting on the ground as the owners leaned on them, the chains swinging slightly.

“You must be really stupid,” said the leader, his teeth showing in a small smile that had no friendship.

Where was Carl-Hodges? The area George stood in was clean, probably well used by feet. The stairs leading down to a cellar door were clean, the door handle had the shine of use. The leader had appeared late, from an unlikely direction. Ire was standing on dusty, rubble-piled ground which feet had not rubbed and cleared. The leader then had not wanted to come out the usual way and path to confront George. Probably the usual way would have been the door George was facing, the one that looked used.

It was like playing hot and cold for a hidden object. If Carl Hodges was behind that door, the teeners would not let George approach it. George, looking slow and confused, shuffled his feet two steps in that direction. There was a simultaneous shuffle and hiss of clothing as the circle behind him and all around him closed in closer. George stopped and they stopped.

Now there was a circle of armed teeners close around him. Two were standing almost between him and the steps. The helicopter still buzzed in the distance, circling the blocks. George knew if he shouted, or even spoke clearly, and asked for help the copter pilot would bring the plane over in a count of seconds.

The blond kid did not move, still lounging, flashing his teeth in a small smile as he studied George up and down with the expression of a scientist at a zoo studying an odd specimen of gorilla.

“I got something important to tell you,” George said to him. But they didn’t listen.

“It’s a kind of a shame,” the blond kid said to the others. “He’s so stupid already. I mean, if we just bashed out his brains he wouldn’t even notice they were gone.”

George faced the leader and sidled another small step in the direction of the steps and the door, and heard the shuffle of feet closing in behind him. He stopped moving and they stopped moving. For sure that door was hiding something. They wanted to keep strangers away from it! “Look, if you found my watch I lost, and if you give it to me, I’ll tell you about a thing you ought to know.”

If he talked long and confusingly enough, every member of the gang would come out on the surface to hear what he was trying to say. They would all be out in the open. The helicopter was armed for riots; it could spray sleep gas and get every one of them.

He didn’t even feel the blow. Suddenly he was on his knees, a purple haze before his eyes. He tried to get up and fell over sideways, still in the curled-up position. He realized he wasn’t breathing.

Could a back-of-the-neck karate chop knock out your breathing centers? What had the teacher said? His lungs contracted, wheezing out more air, unable to let air in. It must have been a solar plexus jab with a stick. But then how come he hadn’t seen the stick? The purple haze was turning into spinning black spots. He couldn’t see.

“What was it he wanted to tell us?”

“Ask him.”

“He can’t answer, dummy. He can’t even grunt. You’ll have to wait.”

“I don’t mind waiting,” said the voice of the one carrying a chain. George heard the chain whistle and slap into something, and wondered if it had hit him. Nothing in his body registered anything but a red burning need for air.

“You don’t want to trespass on our territory,” said a voice. “We’re just trying to teach you respect. You stay on the free public sidewalks and don’t go inside other people’s Kingdoms. Not unless they ask you.” The chain whistled and slapped again.

George tried to breathe, but the effort to inhale knotted his chest tighter, forcing breath out instead of in.

It is a desperate thing having your lungs working against you. The knot tightening the lungs held for another second and then loosened. He drew in a rasping breath of cool air, and another. Air came in like waves of light, dispelling the blindness and bringing back awareness of arms and legs. He straightened out from the curled-up knot and lay on his back breathing deeply and listening to the sounds around him.

The helicopter motor hummed in the distance. The copter pilot is listening, he thought, but he doesn’t know I’m in trouble.

He heard a clink and a hiss of breath like someone making an effort. He rolled suddenly over to one side and covered his face. The chain hit where he had been. He rolled to a crouch with both feet under him, and for the first time looked at the circle of faces of the teeners who had beaten and made fun of him when he was pretending to be drunk and making believe to be Carl Hodges, and had stumbled into this forbidden territory. He had been retracing Carl Hodges’ actions, but he had not been sure it was working. He had been near Carl Hodges here, but he had no proof, no reason to protest when they punished him for violating their boundaries. The faces were the same. Young but cold, some faces were uncertain about punishing an adult, but gaining courage from the others. All sizes of teeners in costumes from many communes, but the fellowship and good nature he was used to seeing in groups was missing.

“I used to be in a gang like yours once” he said rapidly to inform the radio listener. “I thought you wouldn’t jump me. I didn’t come here to get stomped. I just want my antique watch and to tell you something.”

He finished the sentence with a quick leap to one side, but the swinging chain swung up and followed, slapped into his skin and curled a line of dents around ribs, chest and arms. The magnet on the end clanked and clung against a loop of chain. The owner of the chain yanked hard on his handle and the metal lumps turned to teeth and bit in and the chain tightened like rope. George staggered and straightened and stood wrapped up in biting steel chain.

He stood very still. “Hey,” he said softly. “That ain’t nice.”

“Tell us about your news.” The circle of teeners and juvs around him were curious about the message he wanted to deliver to them.

George said, “A friend of mine was figuring from my lumps that I got here last time that you’ve got something important you want me to keep away from. He figures you got the missing computerman. The one who blew up Brooklyn Dome. There’s a reward out for him.”

A ripple of shock ran through the group surrounding him but the blond kid did not need time to assimilate the threat. Without change of expression he made a gesture of command. “Three of you check the streets. Maybe he brought somebody with him.” Three ran silently in different directions.

“I’m just doing you a favor telling you what people say,” George said in stupid tones. “Now you gotta do me a favor and help me get my watch back.”

” Favor?” screamed the tall, misproportioned one with the chain. “Favor? You stupid fink, you should have kept your stupid mouth shut.” He yanked hard on the chain to make its teeth extend more sharply.

An outraged force had been expanding in George’s chest. He stood still, looking meek and confused one more second, watching his captors snarl and hate him for having “told his friend.” Then he bent forward and butted the chain holder down, rolled over his form to the cement and rolled rapidly down three small cement steps, unrolling the chain behind him. He came up on one knee, reaching for the chain as a weapon. It was a seven-foot chain with a handle at each end. A heavy chain is a terrible weapon in the hands of a strong man. If it had been behind him at the moment of impulse, he would have swept it around and forward and cut them down like grass. He gathered it looped into his hands, eyeing the crowd of oddly dressed teeners that was his target. His speed was too fast to intercept, his motions too smooth to look fast. lie threw the chain up into the air behind him, then arched back with every muscle tight and bent forward with a grunt of effort, ignoring two clubs that bounced off his shoulders, bringing the chain forward with a tremendous released surge of force that was rage. The teen gang scattered and fled and the chain swung its cutting circle through the air where they had been.

“Dumb punks.” George breathed noisily with the effort. “Whyncha act like brothers? Can’t let anybody be your friend. Trying to be smart, not knowing …”

He stopped and let the swinging chain drag along the ground, slowing. He rippled it in and let it wrap around his arm, with a short murderous loop of it in his hand. The sun had set and it was growing darker in the corners and harder to see. George fended off a flung stick by deflecting it with the chain, then grabbed a club for his other hand. Something whistled by and clanged against a wall. Probably a knife. The teener leader would see that George knew too much, and instruct the gang to kill him. The boy was logical and ruthless and would decide a stranger’s life was less important to him than the million he hoped to gain from selling the computerman’s answers.

“Carl Hodges,” George bellowed. “Ally ally infree. I need help. Computerman Carl Hodges, come out.” The police riot control man in the circling copter would at last hear a request for help, and bring his plane in fast. The teeners would only hear him yelling Carl Hodges’ name and still not be sure the police were near.

The cellar door gave two thumps and a crash and fell forward off its rusty hinges across the steps. A man fell out on top of it and scrambled across the door and up the steps without bothering to straighten from all fours.

At the top he stood up. He was thin and balding, wiry and a little under average in size, totally unlike George in either shape or face, but the impression of lifetime familiarity was overwhelming. His own eyes looked out of the strange face.

George handed him a club from the ground. “Guard my back. They are going to try to take you alive, I think, but not me.” He spun slowly, looking and listening, but all was quiet. Teeners lurked in a distance along the routes George would use if he tried to escape.

George looked back at Carl Hodges and saw the thin computerman inspecting George’s appearance with a knot of puzzlement between his brows. Looking at him was like looking into a mirror.

“Hello, me over there,” George said.

“Hello, me over there,” the man said. “Are you a computerman? When I get back on the job do you want to come play City Chess with me? Maybe you could get a job in my department.”

“No, buddy, we are us, but I don’t play City Chess. I’m not like you.”

“Then why—“Carl Hodges ducked a flung club and it clattered against the cement. Then why do I have this impression of two people being the same person? he thought.

“We have an empathy link in our guts,” George said. “I don’t think like you. I just feel what you feel.”

“God help anyone who feels the way I feel,” Hodges said. “I see some kids advancing on my side.”

“Hold them off. Back to back. All we need is a little time.” George turned away from him again, and searched the corners with his eyes, ready for a rush. “About the way you feel. It’s not all that bad. I’ll get over it.”

“I did it,” Carl Hodges said. “How do I get over it? I feel … I mean, I have a reason for feeling… I got drunk and the egg hit the fan. How do I get over that?” His voice was broken by grunts of effort, and things clattered by, deflected, missing them and hitting walls and cement flooring.

They stood back to back and fended off bricks, sticks and glittering objects that he hoped were not knives. “We can get killed if we don’t watch it. That’s one way,” George said. A stick came through the air and rapped George’s ear as he met it with his club. The attackers advanced, silhouettes against the dimming view of stone walls. Another attacker shadow picked up the clattering stick from the ground and threw it back as he advanced.

“Ouch,” said Carl Hodges. “Duck.” They both ducked and a flung net went by. “We fight well together. We must get together and fight another teen gang sometime. Right?” said his brisk voice. “Ouch, damn.”

George received a rush by the tallest of the gang, caught at the outstretched staff and yanked the enemy past. He tried to trip the teener as he hurtled by, but missed and turned to see him neatly h tripped by a stick between the ankles by Carl. The teener went face forward to the ground and rolled, getting out of range.

“Good pass!” Several new and heavy blows on head and shoulders reminded George to watch his own side. Dizzied, he spun, bracing the staff for a pushing blow with both hands, and felt it strike twice against blurred forms. He reversed it and struck down at an attacker with a contented growl.

With a heavy thrumming and a push of air the police helicopter came over a wall, swooping low, like an owl settling over a nest of mice, and released a white cloud of gas.

George took a deep breath of the clear air before the cloud reached him. Beside him Carl Hodges took a deep startled breath of the white cloud and went down as suddenly as if a club blow .had hit.

Still holding his breath, George straddled him and stood alert, peering through the fog at shapes that seemed to be upright and moving. Most of the teeners had run away, or gone down flat on the ground. What were these shapes? Eighteen seconds of holding his breath. Not hard. He could make two minutes usually. He held his breath and tried to see through the white clouds around him. The sound of the helicopter circled, in a wider and wider spiral, laying a cloud of gas to catch all the running mice from the center of the area to its edges.

The shapes suddenly appeared beside him, running, and struck with a double push, flinging him back ten feet so that he skidded on his back on the sandy concrete. He remembered to hold his breath after one snort of surprise and silently rolled to his feet and charged back.

Carl Hodges’ unconscious form was missing. George saw movement through the white fog ahead, heard feet scuffing cement and hollow wood, and he charged in pursuit of the sounds. He half fell, half slid down the cement steps, across the wooden door on the ground and into a corridor, and glimpsed motion ahead, and heard a closet door shutting. Holding his breath, groping, he opened the door, saw broken wall with an opening, smelled the wet smell of cement and underground drafts, and leaped over a pile of ancient trash brooms into the opening.

Safe to breathe here. As he took a deep breath a brilliant flashlight suddenly came on, shining blindingly in his face from only two feet away. “I have a gun pointed at you,” said the precise voice of the blond short teener. “Turn left and walk ahead in the directions I tell you. I could kill you here, and no one would find your body, so try to keep my good will.”

“Where is Carl Hodges?” George asked, walking with his hands up. The flashlight threw his shadow ahead of him big and wavering across the narrow walls.

“We’re all going to be holing down together. Turn left here.” The voice was odd.

George looked back and saw that the short teener was wearing a gas mask. As he took a breath to ask why, the white fog rolled down from a night-sky crevice above them. It smelled damp and slightly alcoholic.

“Keep moving,” said the teener, gesturing with his gun. George turned left, wondering what happened next when you breathed that fog. A busy day, a busy night. An experience of symbolic insight was often reported by people who had been flattened by police anti-riot gas. What had the day meant? Why were such things happening?

Floating in white mist, George floated free of his body over the city and saw a vast spirit being of complex and bitter logic who brooded over the city and lived also in its future. George spoke to it, in thoughts that were not words. “Ahmed uses the world view of his grandmother, the gypsy. He believes that you are Fate. He believes you have intentions and plans.”

It laughed and thought: The wheels of time grind tight. No room between gear and gear for change. Future exists, logical and unchangeable. No room for change in logic. When it adds up, it must arrive at the same concluding scene. The city is necessity. The future is built. The gears move us toward it. I am Fate.

George made a strange objecting thought. “The past can change. So everything that adds up from the past can change.”

There was a wail from the atmosphere. The vast spirit that brooded over the city vanished, destroyed, dwindling to nowhere, uncreated, never true, like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy poured a bucket of water over her, leaving behind the same dwindling wail. “But all my beautiful disasters, the logic, the logic …

“No arithmetic;” George said firmly. “If you can see the future, you can change it. If you can’t see the past, it can change by itself and be anything. It won’t add up the same twice.”

All the crystallized visions of the city of the future shattered and dissolved into white fog, a creative fog that could be shaped to anything by thought. George stood at the center of creation and felt stubborn. They were tempting him again, trying to get him into the bureaucratic game of rules and unfreedom. “No,” he said. “I won’t fence anyone in with my idea. Let them choose their own past.”

He came to consciousness lying on the floor in a small tight room with the blond kid sitting on a bed pointing a gun at him.

“They got Carl Hodges back,” the kid said. “You ruined everything. Maybe you are a cop. I don’t know. Maybe I should kill you.”

“I just had a wild dream,” George said, lifting his head, but not moving because he did not want to be shot. “I dreamed I talked to the Fate of New York City. And I told Fate that the future can change anytime, and the past can change anytime. In the beginning was the middle, I said. And Fate started crying and boohooing and vanished. I mean, no more Fate. Vanished.”

There was a long pause while the short blond kid held the pistol pointed at George’s face and stared at him over the top of it. The kid tried several tough faces, and then curiosity got the better of him. He was basically an intellectual, even though a young one, and curiosity meant more to him than love or hate. “What do you mean? The past is variable? You can change it?”

“I mean, we don’t know what happened in the past exactly. It’s gone anyhow. It’s not real anymore. So we can say anything happened we want to have happened. If one past is going to make trouble, we can change it just by being dumb, and everything will straighten out. Like, for example, we just met, right now, right here, we just met. Nothing else happened.”

“Oh.” The kid put away his gun, thinking about that. “Glad to meet you. My name’s Larry.”

“My name’s George.” He arranged himself more comfortably on the floor, not making any sudden moves.

They had a long philosophical discussion, while Larry waited for the police outside to finish searching and go away. Sometimes Larry took the gun out and pointed it again, but usually they discussed things and exchanged stories without accepting any past.

Larry was serious and persuasive in trying to convince George that the world had too many technicians. “They don’t know how to be human beings. They like to read about being Tarzan, or see old movies and imagine they are Humphrey Bogart and James Bond, but actually all they have the guts to do is read and study. They make money that way, and they make more gadgets and they run computers that do all the thinking and take all the challenge and conquest out of life. And they give a pension to all the people who want to go out into the woods, or surf, instead of staying indoors pushing buttons, and they call the surfers and islanders and forestfarmers Free Loaders, and make sure they are sterilized and don’t have children. That’s genocide. They are killing off the real people. The race will be descended from those compulsive button pushers, and forget how to live.”

It was a good speech. George was uneasy, because it sounded right, and he was sure no man was smart enough to refute the killer, but he tried.

“Couldn’t a guy who really wanted children earn enough money to get a breeding permit for himself and an operation for his wife?”

“There aren’t that many jobs anymore. The jobs that are left are button-pusher jobs, and you have to study for twenty years to learn to push the right button. They’re planning to sterilize everyone but button pushers.”

George had nothing to say. It made sense, but his own experience did not fit. “I’m not sterilized, Larry, and I’m a real dope. I didn’t get past the sixth grade.”

“When did your childhood support run out?”

“Last year.”

“No more free food and housing. How about your family—they support you?”

“No family. Orphan. I got lots of good friends, but they all took their pensions and shipped out. Except one. He got a job.”

“You didn’t apply for the unemployable youth pension yet?”

“No. I wanted to stay around the city. I didn’t want to be shipped out. I figured I could get a job.”

“That’s a laugh. Lots of luck in getting a job, George. How are you planning to eat?”

“Sometimes I help out around communes and share meals. Everyone usually likes me in the Brotherhood communes.” George shifted positions uneasily on the floor and sat up. This was almost lying. He had a job now, but he wasn’t going to talk about Rescue Squad, because Larry might call him a cop and try to shoot him. “But I don’t bum meals.”

“When’s the longest you’ve gone without meals?”

“I don’t feel hungry much. I went two days without food once. I’m healthy.”

The kid sat cross-legged on the bed and laughed. “Really healthy! You got muscles all over. You’ve got muscles from ear to ear. So you’re trying to beat the system! It was built just to wipe out muscleheads like you. If you apply for welfare, they sterilize you. If you take your unemployable support pension, they sterilize you. If you are caught begging, they sterilize you. Money gets all you muscleheads sooner or later. It’s going to get you too. I’ll bet when you are hungry you think of the bottle of wine and the big free meal at the sterility clinic. You think of the chance of winning the million dollar sweepstakes if the operation gives you the right tattoo number, don’t you?”

George didn’t answer.

“Maybe you don’t know it, but your unemployable pension is piling up, half saved for every week you don’t claim it. You’ve been avoiding it a year almost? When it piles high enough, you’ll go in and claim your money and let them sterilize you and ship you out to the boondocks, like everyone else.”

“Not me.”

“Why not?”

George didn’t answer. After a while he said, “Are you going to let them sterilize you?”

Larry laughed again. He had a fox face and big ears. “Not likely. There are lots of ways for a smart guy to beat the system. My descendants are going to be there the year the sun runs down and we hook drives to Earth and cruise away looking for a new sun. My descendants are going to surf light waves in space. Nobody going to wipe me out, and nobody’s going to make them into button pushers.”

“Okay, I see it.” George got up and paced, two steps one way, two steps the other way in the narrow room. “Who are you working for, Larry? Who are you crying over? People who let themselves be bribed into cutting off their descendants? They’re different from you. Do they have guts enough to bother with? Are they worth getting your brain wiped in a court of law? You’re right about history, I guess. I’m the kind of guy the techs are trying to get rid of. You’re a tech type of guy yourself. Why don’t you be a tech and forget about making trouble?”

At the end of the room, faced away from Larry, George stopped and stared at the wall. His fists clenched. “Kid, do you know what kind of trouble you make?”

“I see it on television,” Larry said.

“Those are real people you killed.” George still stared at the wall: “This afternoon I was giving artificial respiration to a girl. She was bleeding from the eyes.” His voice knotted up. Big muscles bulged on his arms and his fists whitened as he tried to talk. “She was dead, they told me. She looked all right, except for her eyes. I guess because I’m stupid.” He turned and his eyes glittered with tears and with a kind of madness. He glanced around the small room looking for a thing to use for a weapon.

Larry took out his gun and pointed it at George, hastily getting off the bed. “Oh oh, the past is real again. Time for me to leave!” Holding the gun pointed steadily and carefully at George’s face, he used his other hand to put on black goggles and slung the gas mask around his neck. “Hold still, George, you don’t want a hole through your face. If you fight me, who are you working for? Not your kind of people. Think, man.” He backed to the door. George turned, still facing him, his big hands away from his sides and ready, his eyes glittering with a mindless alertness.

Larry backed into the dark hall. “Don’t follow. You don’t want to follow me. This gun has infrasights, shoots in the dark. If you stick your head out the door, I might shoot it off. Just stand there for ten minutes and don’t make any trouble. The gun is silenced. If I have to shoot you, you don’t get any medal for being a dead hero. No one would know.”

The short teener backed down the dark corridor and was gone. George still stood crouched, but he shook his head, like a man trying to shake off something that had fallen over his eyes.

He heard Larry bump into something a long way down the corridor.

“I would know,” a voice said from the ceiling. Ahmed let himself down from a hole in the ceiling, hung by both long arms and then dropped, landing catlike and silent. He was tall and sooty and filthy and covered with cobwebs. He grinned and his teeth were white in a very dark face. “You just missed a medal for being a dead hero. I thought you were going to try to kill him.”

He twiddled the dial of his wrist radio, plugged an earphone into one ear and spoke into the wrist radio. “Flushed one. He’s heading west on a cellar corridor from the center, wearing a gas mask and infragoggles, armed and dangerous. Lie’s the kingpin, so try hard, buddies.”

George sat down on the edge of the bunk, sweating. “I get too mad sometimes. I almost did try to kill him. What he said was probably right. What he said.”

Ahmed unplugged the speaker from his ear. “I was mostly listening to you, good buddy. Very interesting philosophical discussion you were putting out. I kept wanting to sneeze. How come you get into philosophical arguments today and I just get beat up? Everything is backward.”

“You’re the smart one, Ahmed,” said George slowly, accepting the fact that he had been protected. “Thanks for watching.” He looked at his own hands, still worrying slowly on an idea. “How come everything the kid said made sense?”

“It didn’t,” Ahmed said impatiently. “You made sense.”

“But Larry said that techs are wiping out nontechs.”

“Maybe they are, but they aren’t killing anybody. The kid kills.”

George pushed his hands together, felt them wet with sweat wiped them on his shirt. “I almost killed the kid. But it felt right, what he was saying. He was talking for the way things are and for the way they’re going to be, like Fate.”

“Killing is unphilosophical,” Ahmed said. “You’re tired, George Take it easy, we’ve had a long day.”

They heard a police siren wail and then distant shots. Ahmed plugged the earphone into his ear. “They just dropped somebody in goggles, gas didn’t work on him. They had to drop him with hypo bullets. Probably Larry. Let’s try to get out of here.”

They put a wad of blankets out into the corridor, head high. No shots, so they went out cautiously and started groping down the long black hall, looking for an exit.

Ahmed said, “So you think Larry was the fickle finger of Fate on the groping hand of the future. No power on Earth can resist the force of an idea whose time has come, said somebody once. But, good buddy, when I was listening to you whilst lying in the ceiling with the spiders crawling on me, I thought I heard you a new metaphysics. Didn’t you just abolish Fate?”

The corridor widened, and George felt a draft of fresh air without dust, and saw a glimmer of light through a hole. They climbed through and saw a doorway, and a broken door. “I don’t know,” Ahmed,” he said vaguely. “Did I?”

They climbed up the broken door and a flight of stone steps and. found themselves in a deserted yard at the center of the ruin. It was very quiet. In the distance around the edges of the block police copters buzzed, landing in the streets.

“Sure you did,” Ahmed said. “You abolished Fate. I heard you.”

George looked up at the moon. It was bright and it shone across ‘. the entire city, like the evil Fate in his dream, but it was only the moon, and the city was quiet. Suddenly George leaped into the air and clicked his heels. “I did. I did.” He bellowed. “Hey, everybody! Hey, I did it! I abolished Fate!”

He landed and stopped leaping, and stood panting. The red glow in the sky over New York blinked on and off, on and off from the giant sign they could not see.

“Congratulations,” said Ahmed, and rested an arm briefly across his shoulders. “May I offer you a tranquilizer?”

“No, you may offer me a meal,” George said. “No, cancel that too. Judd gave me money yesterday. Steaks, hot showers, hotel room. Wow. I’ve got a job.” He turned abruptly and walked away. “See you tomorrow.”

Left alone, tall and tired, smeared with dirt and itchy with cobwebs, Ahmed stared after him, feeling betrayed. Where was all the respect George used to give him? George was a short fat kid once, and treated Ahmed like a boss. Now he was beginning to loom like a Kodiak bear, and he walked away without permission.

Ahmed looked up at the lopsided moon. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the smartest guy of all? Don’t answer that, lady. It’s been a long day. I’m tired.”

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