ANDREW WEINER

THE PURPLE PILL

ONE

Conway was sitting at his drafting table, stirring non-dairy creamer into his second cup of coffee of the day, when Jackman called.

“Barry,” he said. “Where the hell are those storyboards?”

Conway put down his coffee. “Storyboards?”

“For the Fairfax pitch. They were supposed to be on my desk this morning.”

Conway tried to collect his thoughts. “I gave that one to Hal to finish up . .

.”

But even as he spoke, he remembered that Hal had called in sick yesterday. Which had left just him and Nora scrambling to keep up with.the rush of other work. The Fairfax pitch had simply slipped through the cracks.

Only a year or two ago, Hal’s absence would hardly have been missed. As a Group Art Director, Conway had managed a team of half a dozen artists. And there had been a fat budget to call upon freelancers to handle overloads. But that had been before the agency’s billings had begun to spiral downward, before Conway’s group had been downsized and downsized again.

These days, he was lucky to have any help at all. Judging from the flood of resumes that crossed his desk, and the desperate calls from former colleagues, he was lucky to have a job himself.

Another screw-up, and he might not have it much longer.

“I’m sorry, Lou,” he said. “Hal’s off sick. I guess it didn’t get done.”

“We need that account, Barry,” Jackman said. “Badly.”

“You’ll have the boards tomorrow. First thing.”

He put the phone down and picked up his coffee. It was cold, but he drank it anyway. He would need it, to get through the day that stretched ahead of him.

He had worked late the previous night, then slept poorly, listening to his daughter cough in the next room. She had been coughing for what seemed like weeks. Her pediatrician was waiting on the tests, but he was pretty sure that it was asthma.

The disease of the ‘90s, he had said. It seemed like half of Melinda’s grade one class were packing inhalers along with their lunch. Now there would be one more.

He was sick himself, probably with the same bug that had downed Hal. His eyes were sore, his sinuses ached, and he had shooting pains in his back. But he could not afford to take any time off right now.

He needed this job. As much as he hated it, he needed to hang on to it, at least until the economy picked up and he had someplace else to go to. If the economy ever picked up …

Right now, they were living in a house that was worth less than their mortgage. His wife, Alice, had not had a pay increase in two years, and her company was about to make more staff cutbacks. The transmission on the station wagon was shot, he was nudging the limits on all his credit cards, and he had no idea how they would cover Melinda’s school fees next year. They might have to put her in the public system. But that didn’t really bear thinking about, not with pushers in the playground and metal detectors at every door.

Soon he would get up and cross the room and sort through the mess on Hal’s desk for the Fairfax storyboards. But what he needed to do first was to rest his eyes, just for a moment.

He put his arms on the drafting table, then allowed his head to drift down on top of them. He closed his eyes.

Just for a moment.

TWO

“Cogan,” the voice said.

He was lying on some kind of couch, between narrow metallic walls. A pattern hovered above him, intricate and multicolored. It took him a moment to realize that it was a face. Then he picked out the eyes, the mouth, the nose. The entire face was decorated with twirling lines and geometric shapes. He blinked, but the lines and shapes remained.

“Wha…?” he said. His mouth felt clumsy, as if unaccustomed to speech. “What …?”

“Cogan,” the voice said again, with a trace of impatience. “Dreamtime is over.”

It was a woman’s voice, a woman’s face. As she leaned closer, he could read the fine bone structure beneath the tattoos. Or was it some kind of paint? He saw that her head was bald, and covered in the same patterns.

“What …?” he said. “Where …?”

The woman’s voice softened. “You must have been in deep,” she said. “Real deep. Try sitting up.”

He sat up on the couch and looked around him. He had been lying in some kind of capsule in a pink-walled room. There were five other capsules in the room, each of them sealed with a clear plastic lid. He glanced down into the nearest one. It was filled with a white mist. Through the mist he could glimpse a tattooed face.

“What is this place?” he asked. “Some kind of hospital ?” Although even as he spoke, he knew that it was not a hospital.

The woman shook her head slightly. “Real deep,” she said, again. “Happened to me once. I was a foot soldier in the siege of Troy. Inside the horse and everything. Got so into it, I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. But it comes back, real quick.”

She reached out a hand to help him from the capsule. He climbed out and rocked unsteadily on his feet.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What am I doing here?”

“Harper,” she said. “Harper Jennings. Your watch-partner. You really don’t remember?”

“Watch-partner? I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. I don’t understand anything.”

“You were here all along, Cogan. In a moment, you’ll remember.”

“My name isn’t Cogan,” he said. “It’s Conway. Barry Conway.”

“Where were you, anyway?” she asked. She walked around the capsule and touched a control. A screen lit up. “Late Twentieth Century Earth. I’ve never been there. Didn’t appeal.”

“Been there?”

“In the dream.”

“What dream? What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been asleep, Cogan. For two years, or two hundred years, depending on how you want to look at it. And while you were asleep, you dreamed you were someone called Barry Conway. But now it’s time to wake up.”

“That’s crazy,” he said. “I didn’t dream that I was Barry Conway. I am Barry Conway.”

“Your name is Cogan Phillips,” she said. “You’re a life-support tech on the starship Cool Canary, carrying a load of colonists to Barnard’s World. You’ve been in cold-sleep for the past two years, hooked up to a dream-machine, and so have I. But now it’s our watch.”

“Starship?” he echoed. “Cold-sleep? Dream-machine? Do you know how crazy all this sounds?”

She gave a little gasp of exasperation and turned away from him. “Mirror,” she said, pointing to the wall opposite them. “Full-length.”

The pink wall glowed white, then became a shiny mirror. He gazed for a moment, fascinated and appalled, at his own heavily tattooed face. And then he was falling toward it. He put out a hand to stop himself. And plunged right into the mirror, all the way through to the darkness on the other side.

THREE

“Barry.”

He felt a hand on his arm. He opened his eyes. He saw Nora standing beside him.

“Nora,” he said. “What time is it?”

“Eleven-thirty,” she said. “I was down in typography, and when I came back you were sleeping. I hated to wake you up, but I thought you’d want me to…” “I would ave, yeah. Thanks.”

Nora was just a year out of art school. She still needed a lot of reassurance.

He stretched his arms. “Jesus,” he said. “I had the strangest dream. Like science fiction. I was on this spaceship … ” He shook his head. “Just crazy stuff.” “Maybe you’ve been watching too much Star Trek.” “Me? I never watch that sci-fi crap.” “Me neither,” Nora said.

“I mean, what does it have to do with anything real?” “Nothing,” Nora said. “Nothing at all.” Although, he reminded himself, there had been a time when he had been quite infatuated with Star Trek and similar movies and TV shows, entranced with the bold new worlds they revealed to him. As a teenager, he had soaked up hundreds and hundreds of hours of the stuff.

Now it had come back to haunt him.

“Would you do me a favor? Go find me Hal’s work-up on the Fairfax pitch, while I get another coffee.” “Is that the cereal commercial?”

“Feminine hygiene. At least, I think it was.” He closed his eyes briefly in thought, and saw a brightly decorated face staring back at him. His eyes jerked open and his head snapped back.

“You all right, Barry?” Nora asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “And this is another perfect day.” He got up and began the long trek to the coffee machine.

FOUR

“Cogan,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice, a rich baritone. “We need to talk, Cogan.” Shit, Conway thought. Not again.

He was lying on a couch in a dimly lit room. He could not see anyone else in the room with him.

He had stayed at work until ten that night, finishing up the Fairfax storyboards. He had left the work on Jackman’s desk, then taken the elevator down to the ground floor, where the security guard had called him a cab. The cab had arrived and he had stepped out through the door and …

And what? He could not recall.

I’m asleep, he thought. Nodding off in the cab, or maybe back home with Alice.

Deliberately, he pinched himself on the thigh. He felt a tingle of pain. But he was still lying on the couch in the dimly lit room.

“This is no dream, Cogan,” the voice said. “Pinching yourself won’t help at all.” “Where are you?” he asked, peering into the shadows in the corners of the room. “I can’t see you.” The voice laughed, a touch theatrically.

“I’m everywhere in this ship, Cogan. And nowhere.”

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “Let me guess. You’re the ship’s computer, right?” “So it’s coming back to you.”

“What’s coming back to me is every dumb movie I ever wasted my time watching.” “This is remarkable,” the voice said. “A sustained delusion of remarkable self-consistency. In all the years we have been using the dream-machines, we have never recorded such an extraordinarily persistent re-adaption trauma. But to answer your question: I’m not exactly a computer. More like a community of parallel processors. Although for the moment, that’s close enough.” “I don’t believe this,” he said. “I don’t believe any of it.” “What do you believe?”

“That I’m dreaming this. Or else going nuts.”

“Going nuts,” the voice echoed. “Not how I would usually describe it. But again, close enough. You are indeed going nuts, Cogan. You are in the grip of a psychotic fugue. A full-fledged retreat from reality.” “My name is Conway,” he said. “Stop calling me Cogan.” “There is no Conway. There never was a Conway, only the construct you created in interaction with the dream-machine. For two years you lived the life of this fictional person, relishing the artless joys of a simpler, less stressful historical period, an escape fantasy of bucolic late-Twentieth Century Earth. But it’s time to come back, Cogan. To let go of your delusion and face reality.” With these words, the wall of the room seemed to vanish. He was looking out at the stars, a million bright stars scattered across a deep blackness.

“This is reality,” the voice said. “This harsh and magnificent universe through which we must travel in our fragile craft, buffeted by the winds between the stars, pounded mercilessly with hard radiation … this is the reality from which you seek to flee.” He looked out on the stars, the bright and terrible stars. And felt himself falling into them, falling unstoppably into that awful darkness.

FIVE

“Barry.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

“What?” he said.

He sat up in bed. It was still dark. The alarm clock on the bedside table told him that it was three in the morning.

“You were screaming,” Alice said. “Screaming your head off. I thought I should wake you.” “Screaming?”

“You must have been having some kind of nightmare.” “I was. Jesus, I really was.” “Is something worrying you?” she asked.

“Nothing. It was just a bad dream, that’s all.” “Because you’ve been awfully preoccupied these past few days.” “I’m fine,” he said. “Just fine.” He turned away from her and went back to sleep.

SIX

“Cogan.” The face looming over him was covered in lines and shapes. In the soft light glowing from the wall he saw that she was naked, and that he was, too. They were lying on a thin mat spread out on the floor of a tiny cubicle.

“Harper?” “You remember now?” “No,” he said. “I mean, I remember you from the first time I had this crazy dream. But I don’t remember anything from before that.” She reached out her hand to touch him. “Maybe this will help,” she said.

“No,” he said. But he felt himself responding to her.

“We have an hour before our watch,” she said, straddling him. “Let’s not waste it. It’s been a long time.”

SEVEN

“You did a nice job on the Fairfax pitch,” Jackman said. “Too bad we didn’t get it.”

“We didn’t?”

Jackman put down his fork and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

“It was always a long shot. They were basically happy with the job Belton Robbins were doing for them. Said they wanted a new approach, but really they wanted same-old same-old. Usual story. But it’s too bad all the same, because we needed some new billings.”

Conway put down his own fork. He had not really been eating anyway, just moving the brightly colored pieces of salad around on his plate. He waited for the other shoe to fall.

“I wanted you to hear it from me first,” Jackman said. “Before the rumors start flying. We’re looking at another consolidation.”

“Consolidation?”

“Your group with Tumer’s. Makes a lot of sense. We get to condense studio space, cut overhead … I can show you the spreadsheet. It’s hard to argue with the numbers.”

“And who …” For a moment, Conway could not bring himself to ask the question, but then he did anyway. “Who will be group head?”

“That’s still up in the air. But I’m pulling for you, Barry. Don’t doubt it.”

Conway doubted it. But even if he did have Jackman’s backing, he still didn’t care much for his chances. Turner Woodley was an industry veteran, a multiple award-winner, creator of dozens of striking campaigns.

But then again, the man was a drunk, sometimes an obnoxious one at that. He was consistently disrespectful to senior management. And if the agency was serious about cutting costs, what better place to start than Turner’s hefty compensation package?

He sat back, appalled at his own thoughts. Turner Woodley was an old friend, unfailingly generous over the years with his time and his advice. They had gone fishing, played poker, gathered their families together at Thanksgiving. Turner had helped him get this job.

Turner had two kids still in college, and another who was in and out of private psychiatric hospitals. He had a big house in Westchester and a summer place on the Cape, both mortgaged to the hilt. He was fifty-four years old, and looked older. If Turner lost his job he would probably never work again.

“Christ,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“But it will,” Jackman said.

“Maybe we could work together …”

“Too many cooks. Too few efficiencies. Of course, if you don’t want the job …” He gave Conway a searching look.

“Oh, I want it,” he said. He felt something rise in his throat. “I really want it, Lou.”

He got up from the table. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

He headed for the washroom door.

EIGHT

“In here, Cogan.”

He was walking down a metal corridor, his boots echoing dully on the floor. He was carrying a pack on his back. Harper was standing ahead of him, motioning to an open doorway.

He followed her into a large open space, filled with row upon row of capsules. Different colored paths snaked through the rows, allowing access to the capsules.

“Yellow 27,” Harper said, pointing. “Right over there.”

She raced up the path, and he followed behind her. He was panting by the time he caught up with her. She was already staring intently at the screen on the side of the capsule.

“Biosign alert,” she told him. “Low blood pressure reading.” He looked down into the capsule. “You mean, this person is sick?” “She maybe,” Harper said. “Although fifty to one it’s the diagnostics on the blink. Check it out.” “Check what out?”

“Oh come on,” she said. “Come on.”

He stared back at her blankly. Exasperated, she reached over and flipped open his backpack, producing a thin metal tool with a clear plastic bulb on top. She inserted the end of the tool into a small hole beside the screen. The bulb glowed orange.

“Faulty memory,” she said. “Pass me a new unit, will you?” Preoccupied, he failed to respond. He was looking around him at the rows of capsules.

“All these people, they’re crew members?”

She shook her head. “Cargo,” she said. “Cold-sleep all the way. They don’t get a wake-up call until we reach Barnard’s.” “And they’re all dreaming?”

“Like there’s no tomorrow.” She shook her head slowly. “I thought it was coming back to you. You didn’t have any problem remembering before …” “I’m sorry, Harper,” he said. “I’m not Cogan. I don’t know where he’s gone, or what I’m doing here …” I’m apologizing to a figure in a dream. “But that’s how it is.” “What use are you to me like this?” she asked. “You’re no use to me at all.” He saw her eyes fill up with tears.

“I’m sorry,” he said, again. And then he turned and ran away from her, through the maze of sleepers.

NINE

“Hey, you crazy, man?”

He was standing in the middle of the road, inches away from the hood of a cab. The driver of the cab was leaning out of the window and screaming at him. Behind the cab, other cars honked their impatience.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t see you.”

“You want to kill yourself, take the subway,” the cabbie said. “Now get out of my way.” He crossed to the other side of the street and stood staring up at an unfamiliar office building. What was he doing here?

He remembered then: Dr. Graves. He had come here to see Dr. Graves, the psychiatrist recommended by his family doctor.

He walked to the entrance of the building and stared in through the revolving glass doors. He saw a lobby, elevators, people milling around. He saw a million bright stars.

“You going in or what ?”

He turned to see a gray-haired woman with a deeply lined face. Or were those tattoos?

He looked back through the door. The stars were gone. “In,” he croaked. “I’m going in.” He pushed on the door and entered the building.

TEN

Dr. Graves had a dark beard and dark, thinning hair. His expression was serious, almost mournful, as Conway told his story.

“Are you under some stress at work, Mr. Conway?”

“Some, I guess. Isn’t everyone?”

“You work long hours?”

“Yes.”

“And worry about your job security?”

“Yes.”

“What about your relationships, Mr. Conway? How are you getting along with your wife?”

“Fine. At least, when we get to see each other, everything’s fine.”

“When did you last have sexual relations with your wife?”

“Sexual relations?” The question momentarily startled him. “I guess it must have been, oh, a week or two ago.”

“A week or two?”

“Well, maybe more like a month. What with both of us working so hard, sometimes it’s hard to find the energy …”

“A month.”

“Or two. What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. Simply exploring. What did you think I was suggesting?”

“That I have some kind of sexual problem.”

“Doesn’t everyone, Mr. Conway? But no, I don’t believe that. Your relations with this ah …”

“Harper,” Conway said, flushing a dull red.

“Harper, thank you. Your fantasized sexual relations with Harper are only one element of a much larger and more complex wish fulfillment.”

“Wish fulfillment? You think I like what’s happening to me? I hate it. I hate every moment of it.”

“The mind wants what it wants, Mr. Conway. And that is nothing to be ashamed of. Tell me, are you a frequent reader of science fiction?”

“A reader? I’m not much of a reader of anything. But I used to watch a lot of it. TV, drive-in movies, like that.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Oh, sure. The future. Seeing the future, bright and shiny and clean, I couldn’t get enough of that. Just the idea that there would be a future, that we would get out of this century alive, it didn’t even matter what kind of future. But I liked the space stuff the best. It was so …”

“So?”

“Optimistic,” he said. “The idea that we wouldn’t blow ourselves to pieces, wouldn’t choke on our own pollution. That we would not only survive, but endure. Go out there and conquer these fantastic new worlds, using our minds and our machines and our courage. It was the optimism that I liked most of all.”

“And you still watch these shows?”

“Not for years. I outgrew them, was what happened. I started dating, I went to art school, I traveled. I got a job, got married, bought a house, had a kid. I didn’t have time for that stuff, anymore. It didn’t have anything to do with my life. It seemed silly.”

“Silly?”

“The whole idea. That we could go into space. That we should even want to. If you think about it, it’s obscene. Children starving and we’re spending money on space shuttles.”

“And yet at some level,” Dr. Graves said, “you have not let go of your dreams.”

“Maybe not.” He shook his head. “I was hoping you were going to tell me that this was all chemical. Some bad chemicals swirling around in my head.”

“Oh, but there are,” Dr. Graves said. “Not bad chemicals exactly, but rather chemical imbalances. When you come under stress, that triggers the release of certain neurotransmitters, which in turn facilitate the psychotic break, allowing this bizarre ideation to emerge from your unconscious mind.”

“But which comes first? The crazy ideas? Or the bad chemicals?”

“We can debate etiology if you like, Mr. Conway. But it doesn’t really help us much. The real question is how to manage the situation. A decade or two ago, we would have spent many hours together discussing your ideation. But today, quite frankly, I don’t have the time or the interest, and you don’t have sufficient medical coverage. Fortunately there is an alternative.” “An alternative?”

Dr. Graves opened the drawer of his desk. He produced a container of purple pills. “These are new on the market. A really excellent anti-psychotic. I happen to have a sample you can take with you right now, and I’ll write you a prescription for more.”

Conway took the container and stared at it dubiously. “These pills will stop the delusions?”

“Stop them cold. Take one every morning and evening. If you feel another episode coming on, take another. They’ll bring you back to Earth in a hurry.”

ELEVEN

Conway leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms. The layout was finished, and it looked great. He felt tired, but it was a good tired.

Since being appointed head of the newly combined art group, Conway’s productivity had been on an upward swing. After struggling for so long with limited resources, it was a relief to have a full department again. And although the work load had increased, too, it was simply a matter of working smarter. Turner Woodley had been a notoriously poor manager, and his former assistants had responded enthusiastically to Conway’s new leadership.

It was too bad about Turner, of course. He really should call him up and take him out for lunch. And when the economy picked up, he would be able to throw a few freelance assignments his way.

Actually, from his point of view, the economy was already picking up. Jackman had come through for him, swinging him a raise to accompany his new responsibilities. Not a lot of money, but enough to fix the station wagon and cover Melanie’s school fees. Also, Alice had survived yet another round of cutbacks at her job. So things were looking up.

But the best news of all was the end of the dreams. Since he started taking the purple pills, he had stayed firmly rooted in the here-and-now. No more sleep capsules or dream-machines or echoing starship walls or tattooed ladies …

He felt a sudden, unexpected pang, thinking about Harper. She had seemed so real. It had all seemed real, at least while it was happening, but Harper most of all. He almost missed her. Almost.

“Conway.”

He looked around him, wondering who it was. He had thought that everyone else had gone home hours ago. He could see no one in the room.

“Conway,” the voice again, naggingly familiar.

He robbed his eyes, but still could see no one.

“Or should I say Cogan?”

He got up from his desk and pulled on his jacket, possessed by an urgent need to get out of the room.

The walls of the corridor glowed a soft metallic pink. The elevator door looked different, too, sleek and ultra-modem and smaller than he remembered.

When the elevator arrived, he got in. A heavily tattooed man nodded to him, and he nodded back. They rode downward in silence.

He had not taken his pill that morning. He had been about to, and then Melanie had distracted him with some question about her birthday party, and it had slipped his mind. Everything had been going so well that he had allowed himself to become careless.

This isn’t real, he told himself, as he stepped out into the lobby. None of this is real.

Except that there was no lobby, only another corridor, this one a dull blue. There was no front door leading to the street, only a large metal hatch.

“What do you think you’re doing, Cogan?”

This time he did not look for the source of the voice. He knew that the voice was in his head.

“I’m going home,” he said.

He stepped up toward the hatch.

“That door leads directly into space,” the voice said. “Open it, and you’ll be sucked out.”

“The door leads to the street,” Conway said. But he hesitated, all the same.

“You’ve been in fugue for weeks,” the voice said. “Now you’re coming out of it. You’re remembering that you are Cogan Phillips, a crew member on an interstellar starship. But your unconscious mind still resists that knowledge. It would rather kill you than accept the truth.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve got it all wrong.”

“I’ve scanned the dreams from your cold-sleep,” the voice said. “They are of an astounding mundanity. They reveal to me a life lived with no breadth of vision, with no higher purpose than getting through the day-to-day grind. A life filled with small betrayals of yourself and the people around you, with meaningless victories and pitiful defeats. Here you are doing important work, helping humanity populate the stars, building a better future for everyone. And yet you prefer to wallow in this absurd mire of your own creation. Why, Cogan? Why?”

“Because it’s my life,” he said. “That’s why.”

He leaned forward to press the button that would release the hatch.

“Cogan?” It was another voice, this one female. “What are you doing Cogan?”

He turned to see Harper, coming down the corridor toward him.

“You’ll kill yourself,” she said. “You’ll kill me. Don’t do it, Cogan.”

He paused, frozen, his finger on the button.

Harper was reaching out her hand toward him. “Come back to our quarters,” she said. “We still have some time before our next watch.”

He stared at her finely etched features, her glorious tattoos. He took a step toward her. As he moved, his hand brushed against the pocket of his jacket, and he felt the outline of the pill container inside.

Take one if you feel another episode coming on. That was what Dr. Graves had told him. Why hadn’t he done so?

“Cogan,” Harper was saying. “I’ve missed you, Cogan.”

She was still holding out her hand. He reached out to take it, then pulled his hand back. He fumbled in his pocket for the pill container. His hands were shaking so badly that when he opened it, he spilled the contents on the floor. He got down on his hands and knees and picked up a pill.

“What are you doing?” Harper asked.

“He’s acting out of his delusion,” the voice of the computer explained. “I believe he thinks he’s taking some kind of medication.”

Conway popped a pill in his dry mouth and tried to swallow it. He gagged momentarily. Then the pill went down.

He stood up and faced Harper.

“I’ve taken an anti-psychotic drug” he said. “In a minute or two, all this will fade away. You, too, Harper. I’m sorry.”

He wondered why he was apologizing.

“Cogan,” she said. But her voice was fainter now, it came to him as if from a great distance. And her tattoos were fading, too. He realized that he was staring at a Filipino woman, one of the building’s night maintenance staff. She was staring back at him in some concern.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Fine,” he croaked. “Now.”

He turned back to the hatch. It was fading out rapidly now, so that he could discern beneath it the outlines of the front door.

“Don’t,” said the voice of the computer. It was slurred and indistinct. “Open. That. Door.”

“Did you hear that?” he asked the cleaning woman?

“Hear what?” she asked.

The voice was gone. It was all gone: the echoing corridors, the exit hatch, Harper … There was only the door that led back to his real life.

He pushed firmly on the door and stepped out on to the avenue.

TWELVE

The sun had gone down hours ago, but it was still oppressively hot, another greenhouse effect summer. The air was stale and smelled of exhaust fumes, with a lingering undertaste of garbage, the remnants of a spring municipal workers’ strike.

The sky was full of light. Neons flashed up the avenue. No stars were visible.

Sirens wailed in every direction.

A man lay sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the building. Another man approached him, hand outstretched, a wild expression in his eyes. He gave the man his spare change, then crossed to the curb to hail a cab.

As the cab pulled up, he glanced back toward the building. For a moment, he could see the great starship hanging against a backdrop of stars. He took a half-step toward it. And then it was gone.

“Shit,” he said.

He got in the cab.

Author’s Note: As long-term SF readers may have realized, this story was inspired by Rog Phillip’s story “The Yellow Pill” (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1958) which I first read in one of Judith Merril’s wonderful Best SF collections.