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fifty-one

Tony Demiro paced agitatedly about the floor in the room of the Atlanta Hyatt. Wasn't she ever going to get here? She'd called him from the airport over an hour ago now to say she had arrived. How long was it supposed to take? All day he had stared at the TV, wandered aimlessly around the hotel, sat in the coffee shop and bar. . . . Anything to kill time. This last hour was the longest of all.

His first shock had been waking up that morning with no idea of how he came to be there. And then it had turned out to be mid November! Over five months of his life had simply disappeared, and he'd found himself apparently living the life of a different person. And then, as if that wasn't enough, the reaction when he called Rita. He'd expected her to be astonished after what he presumed had been his disappearance during all that time; but the look of numbed bewilderment when she saw him was something he hadn't been prepared for. And then he'd discovered that he was supposed to be dead!

He looked at himself in the mirror and tried to guess how it would feel if he were insane. But it was no good; he had no way of telling. Perhaps if you could tell, that was how you knew that you weren't. He looked again in the closet at the clothes that weren't his and around the room at the things that weren't his. No shred of recollection or association came with any of them. Nothing made sense.

The call tone came from the room's viewphone. He crossed the floor in a couple of swift strides and answered it.

"Mr. Gordon?"

He almost said no, wrong room, then remembered that was the name in the ID he was carrying. "Yes."

"Front desk, Mr. Gordon. There's a person down here asking for you, a Ms. Rita Chilsen. She says you're expecting her."

"Great. Yes, that's fine."

"I'll send her on up."

Demiro cleared the call, straightened up, and felt butterflies in the stomach. Was it because of the weirdness of the situation? Sudden doubts at the imminence of seeing Rita again? Uncertainty about how they would react? All of them? He paced over to the table and chairs by the window and looked out at the evening creeping across the high-rises of the city, rubbing his palms together, forcing himself to stay calm. Then he went across to the door, opened it, and stood waiting.

She appeared coming along the corridor from the direction of the elevators less than a minute later, wearing a green coat with an orange dress and carrying a shoulder bag. Her pace quickened when she saw him, but as she got to the door she slowed hesitantly. For a moment they stood and stared, trying to read each other's faces: she as if needing to be sure that it was he; he not knowing quite what to expect.

"Tony!"

And then, they both responded simultaneously. She threw her arms around him and he pulled her to him, and they moved back into the room, holding, hugging, and locked in a kiss that continued long after he nudged the door closed. There was the mystery of what had happened to him, the riddle of his death, questions, queries, a thousand things that needed to be talked about. . . . But the taste of her mouth and the aroma of her body, the pressure of her breasts and thighs against him, were already reawakening more powerful impulses that swept such thoughts aside. As they remained locked together, he drew her coat off her shoulders and began unfastening the hooks at the back of her dress. Keeping her mouth pressed to his as he guided her to the bed, she drew him down on top of her as he struggled to remove their remaining clothes.

"Promise you won't go away again," she whispered.

"Never," he said.

* * *

They lay naked between the damp sheets. Rita lit a cigarette and offered him one. He shook his head. She put the pack and lighter back on the bedside unit, lay against him, and exhaled long and slowly. After a few seconds she turned and touched a finger lightly to the puncture and mild swelling below his ear.

"What happened here, to your neck?"

"I don't know. It was there when I woke up this morning, just like all the rest."

"Is it sore?"

"A little. It feels like one of those small boils you sometimes get."

"It needs a Band-Aid. Stop it rubbing on your collar."

"The shop in the lobby should have some."

"You've got a bruise on the side of your head too," Rita said. "No idea how that happened?"

He shook his head, then got up from the bed, pulled on his pants, and went over to the bureau-vanity running along one wall. She watched curiously as he came back with a black briefcase. "Look inside here," he said, showing her. "Guns. That's a 9mm H&K automatic: professional killer's weapon. The other one's a special-purpose, gas-powered lightweight that fires some kind of tiny dart, probably toxic—those, in the plastic case. And there's all these tools and gadgets. It's a complete break-in, larceny, and espionage kit. What am I doing with all this shit?"

Rita could only shake her head uncomprehendingly. "Oh, God, Tony, what have they done to you?"

He went over to the closet and pointed to the suits, shirts, ties, slacks, and a blue, hip-length topcoat hanging inside. "None of this is mine. It's not even anything I'd pick." While Rita examined the things in the briefcase, he went back to the bureau and picked up a wallet that was lying there with some keys, loose change, and the room's magnetic passcard.

"According to the ID in here, I'm somebody called Maurice Gordon from Philadelphia." He brought the wallet over and showed her. "But it's got my picture in it. The cards are signed in my handwriting, but they say Gordon. It's all crazy. . . . And now you're telling me the Army says I'm dead."

Rita opened another section of the wallet and whistled. "Wow, look here. This Maurice Gordon guy doesn't believe in being caught short."

"Yeah, I know. I counted it. It's nearly twenty-five hundred dollars."

"He seems to be some kind of businessman."

Demiro shook his head dubiously. "It doesn't fit with that other stuff. More likely some kind of a cover." He raised a hand and rubbed the marks below his ear and on the side of his head gingerly. "Anyway, what kind of business does this?"

Rita got up and slipped on a light maroon robe that was among Gordon's things. She took the briefcase back to the bureau and picked up the hotel memo pad that was lying there. "Did you write these phone numbers? . . . Oh, yes, one of them's mine." It was for the new apartment that she'd moved into with Margaret in Chicago, when she left the place in Hodgkins.

"The others are nothing. I made a few calls earlier and ordered a pizza. Have you eaten?"

"A bite on the plane, but I could use something more." Rita flipped back the top sheet of the pad. "What this? It's your writing too." She read: "Headman to ship out via J'ville, sometime Nov 19. Check ref 'Cop 3.' What does it mean?"

"I don't know. I found it there this morning."

Rita put the pad down again and turned to move back over to him. "Oh, Tony, what are we going to do?" she sighed.

He put his arms around her and held her. "I don't know, hon. I don't know what any of it means. . . . But for right now, let's get you something to eat. I'll call room service."

* * *

A little under an hour later they were sitting at the table by the window, sharing a bowl of chili con carne with a side salad apiece and dessert. Demiro had also ordered a bottle of Canadian Club to see them through the rest of the evening.

"So before this morning, the last thing you remember was when you were back at Pearse in June," Rita said.

"Right."

"What do you remember, exactly? I mean, the last thing that actually happened?"

"It's amazingly clear," Demiro told her. "As if it was yesterday, know what I mean? It doesn't feel like five months ago. They were doing those tests for transferring new things straight into someone's head. The guys liked it. We could do all kinds of things. Not just what was in the official program—you know, stuff that the Army was interested in—but other things on the side, to make it more interesting, I guess. One of the guys who was a klutz turned into a cardsharp. I was playing the guitar there. So it was all going okay. . . . Then, one day I went in for a regular session on the machine. They fixed the pads and things around my head the way they always did . . . and the next thing I knew I was here in this room, and it was this morning."

"And that's it?"

"Just like that. Zap. No feeling of time gone by at all. It was like a piece being cut out of a movie."

Rita tidied the dishes together on the tray and got up to go over to the bureau, where the bottle of whiskey and the ice bucket were. "So the last thing you knew was being in that machine," she said, pouring two drinks.

"Right."

"Do you want this over there?" She turned, holding the glasses.

"No, let's get more comfortable." Demiro got up, went over to the bed, and stretched out on it.

Rita joined him and handed him one of the glasses. She put her own down on the side unit, then reached for her cigarettes. The conclusion that the machine was the cause of it all didn't need to be spelled out. "So what does it mean?" she said, finally propping herself back against the pillows alongside him. "Was the whole thing some kind of trick to camouflage something else they were doing? Was it to recruit people for some different kind of work all along?" She bit her lip uneasily. It was obvious that she meant his false ID, the guns, the other equipment: the kind of work that it all implicitly added up to.

"Maybe," Demiro agreed. "It sounds crazy, doesn't it. But . . ." He shrugged hopelessly.

"Do you think that faking the record of you being dead was part of it?" she asked. "Something they planned from the start?"

"I don't know. It sounds too fantastic. . . . Maybe something went wrong somehow."

"But what do we do? You can't go back to Pearse, if that was the center of it. And if the Army records are wrong, then it sounds like they're part of it too. So you can't go to the top. What about your old unit at Kankakee? Surely they're not in on it as well. Couldn't you start with your old CO there?"

"And what would he do?" Demiro said. "They're nothing. It'd all get swept under the carpet somehow."

"So what do we do?" Rita asked him again.

He sipped his drink and put the glass down on the side, then turned to her and moved closer. "Why don't you put that cigarette out? I don't know about tomorrow, but I know what I want to do right now. There's one way in which I do feel as if it's been five months. . . ."

* * *

Afterward they lay with the lights out and the drapes open, in the cool light coming in from the city. "What I'd really like to do is get away from all of it, just us, like we used to talk about," Demiro said. "All the things we said: just work for us, have our own kids, without needing numbers or licenses." He turned his head to look at the outline of her face. "Has that changed in five months? You still feel the same?"

She nodded. "Where would you like to go, if we ever got out of this country?"

"Oh, I don't know. One of the FER territories, I guess. Or maybe in the South World someplace, if you really want to get away. They say it's hard work, but not so hectic."

Rita smiled at him and stroked his hair. "Not offplanet anymore? What happened to that idea of the Offworld independencies, maybe Luna? We used to talk about that too."

His eyes were closing. He answered distantly. "Oh, just a dream. . . . Nice thought, maybe. Who do we know . . . who'd get us out? . . . Just talk. Talk and a dream. . . ."

"Sometimes they happen, though," she murmured. "Who knows? Maybe, if we knew who to talk to." A new thought struck her. "It might even be easier if you don't officially exist. Perhaps the best thing would be not to go looking for explanations and stirring things up. Ride with it, instead. Just vanish. Let's find out first if there are ways of benefiting from the situation. Tony? . . ." His body had relaxed beside her. His breathing was deep and even. "Tony, are you awake?" There was no response. She smiled, kissed him lightly, and snuggled close to him, feeling his warmth. She didn't mind what they did, as long as it was together.

Her body felt clammy and sticky. First thing tomorrow, she'd go for a swim, she decided. Later they could start making plans.

* * *

When Demiro awoke, the surroundings had changed. Rita was there, sitting on a chair watching him, but they were in a smaller room with electronic apparatus and shelves of instruments. He was lying not in a queen-size hotel bed, but under a sheet and blanket in a single cot, with a light above. For a chilling moment he thought he was back in the machine area at Pearse. But no . . . it was a different place.

He moved to raise himself and found that his body felt strangely light. And then he realized that somebody else was there too, a man whom Demiro had never seen before. He was big in stature, with thick gray hair, vivid features, and huge eyebrows, and wearing a white, laboratory-style smock.

Demiro looked uncertainly at Rita. "Where is this place? Who the hell's he?"

Professor Ulkanov gave a satisfied nod. "He should be all right now," he said to Rita. "I'll leave you both together for a while. There is all the time in the world now." He went over to the door and left, closing it quietly behind him.

Demiro looked bemusedly at Rita again. "What's going on?"

"Tony, it is you! You're back!"

"Of course it's me. Who the hell did you expect?"

Rita's face was flooding with uncontainable tears of joy. "It's such a long story. . . ."

 

 

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