Voices woke me. For a while I tried to ignore them, but something in the tone of the conversation made me prick up my ears.
One of the voices belonged to the little man from the park, a couple of lifetimes ago. He sounded as though he had a nice glow working; or maybe he was just excited. The female voice was husky and low—lower than his—with an edge to it like a sawed board. It was saying:
" . . . . you're a fool to take a risk like this, Jess!"
"Minka, my dear, they have no way of knowing—"
"How do you know what they have? This is Death Control you're playing with now, not some tee-cee meat-legger!"
I felt as dopey as a shanghaied deckhand, but I got an eyelid up, was looking at a high ceiling with ornate fretwork in gold and white. The walls under it were white, with little dabs of bright-colored tile here and there. There were a couple of chairs like pastel-toned eggshells perched on slim shiny rods, and a low table with a silver bowl half the size of a washtub, full of oversized bananas and pears, and grapes as big as golf balls. The floor was white, and there were silky-looking rugs spread on it.
I was lying on a neat little white bunk like a night nurse's cot, set up in a corner. My shirt was gone, and there was a layer of rubbery clear plastic over the six-inch slash in my side. I turned my head, not without a certain effort, and was looking past a row of columns along the far side of the room at blue sky that showed between them. Beyond the columns a terrace spread out, catching yellow sunlight. The little man was there, dressed in a pale pink suit with lace at the wrists. He was sitting in a violet chair worrying a fingernail.
The woman sitting with him was like something painted up to stand in front of a cigar store. Her hair was a varnished swirl of indigo, like a breaking wave, and there were faint orange spirals drawn on her cheeks, with the ends trailing down under her chin. Her outfit seemed to consist of a lot of colored ribbons, carelessly draped. All of this didn't disguise the fact that the bone structure was good enough to send a fashion photographer grabbing for his baby spots.
"You don't know who—or what—he might be," she was saying. "I thought your Secret Society had rules about picking up strangers."
"This is different! They were tracking him! They wanted him alive! Don't you see it?" The small man was waving both arms now. "If they want him—I want him!"
"Why do they want him?" she came back fast.
"I've admitted I don't know—yet. But you may be sure I'll find out. And then. . . ."
"Then it's going to fall in on you, Jess! They don't bother with the rats in the dump—until one of them comes out and tries to steal the food off their plates."
Jess brought his hands up and made a clawing motion, as if he were shredding a curtain.
"Don't be a blind grub of a stupid Preke! After all these years, this is an opportunity—the first in my time—"
"I am a Preke." The woman's face was stiff as a plaster cast, and under the lacquer job, about the same color. "That's all I ever was—ever will be. And you're—what you are. Face it, Jess, make the best—"
"Accept this? From them?" Jess jumped up and raked at his chest as if he were trying to tear off a sign somebody had hung on him. "I could hold the universe in my hands!" He showed her his cupped palms. "But they—these upstarts who aren't fit to carry out my grandfather's garbage—they say 'no!' "
"You're not your grandfather, Jess."
"You'd preach to me, you bedizened Preke trollop!" He leaned across toward the woman and shook the backs of his hands at her. She lifted a corner of her mouth at him.
"I've liked you for what you are, Jess; the other never meant anything to me."
"You're a lying, scheming Preke slut!" Jess was screeching like a dry bearing now. "After all I've done to raise you from your filthy dirtside beginnings, when I need your help—"
"Be quiet, Jess. You'll wake him."
"Bah! I've shot him full of enough lethenol to paralyze a platoon of Blackies. . . ." But he got up. I closed my eyes, listened to them come in and cross the floor to me. Neither of them said anything for half a minute.
"Caw, he's big enough," the woman said.
Jess tittered. "I had to strap two lift units to him to get him here."
"Was he badly hurt?"
"Just a nasty cut. I've given him two liters of blood, full spec with nutes."
"Why would they want anyone—alive?"
"He must know something," Jess sounded awed. "Something important."
"What could he know, that ETORP needs?"
"That's what I have to discover."
"You're a fool, Jess."
"Will you help me—or do you really intend to desert me, now that I need you?" Jess hissed the last words like a stepped-on snake.
"If it's what you want—of course I'll do what I can," the girl's voice was dull.
"Good girl. I knew you would. . . ." Their feet went away. Something clicked and the room became very still. I opened my eyes again. I was alone.
For a while I lay there where I was and looked at the fancy ceiling and waited for the memories to come flooding back; but nothing happened. I was still just Steve Dravek, former tough guy, once reputed to be a pretty savvy character but now not even sure what day it was or what continent I was on. Jess had sounded American, and so did the girl, but that didn't prove anything. The park could have been anywhere, and the street. . . . Well, in retrospect the street was a lot like something out of a dream fraught with obscure psychological significance. I wouldn't count the street.
Okay, Dravek; so where does that leave us?
In unfamiliar surroundings, broke, and nursing a knife wound—not a totally unique situation. I've come to in some pretty strange places in my time: from flophouses and fifty-cent dormitories where you could hear the crickets running footraces in the woodwork, to hundred-dollar-a-night suites with mink bath mats, where little lost ladies tapped discreetly at unexpected hours, trailing ninety-dollar-a-dram smells. A few times, I've started a day in a vacant lot with my pockets inside out; and now and then I've even awakened in a chintzy little bedroom with lots of hard morning sun shining in on the installment-plan furniture, showing up cracks in the wallpaper and flaws in complexions; and once I woke up in the hold of a Panamanian-registry banana scow sailing out of Mobile under a former Nazi destroyer skipper. He lived on mush for six weeks after I kicked in the door to his cabin and laid the schnapps bottle he was breakfasting from alongside his jaw. I was only seventeen at the time, but already pretty husky.
Yeah, I knew what it was like to wake up a little confused, throbbing a little here and there, with a mouth like an abandoned mouse nest and nothing but a set of raw knuckles and a fresh tattoo to help me reconstruct preceding events. But this time I didn't remember the celebration, or the cause for the celebration. What I did remember was an office paneled in dark, waxy wood, and a mean-looking old geezer with crew-cut white hair, nodding and saying, "Sure, Steve, if that's the way you want it."
Frazier. The name came slowly, like something remembered from a long time ago.
But what the hell—Frazier was my drinking buddy, a lean, wiry kid with bushy black hair and enough reach to spot most light-heavies ten pounds and a horseshoe. . . .
But he was the old man, too. . . . I shook my head to get rid of the double exposure, and did some deep breathing. Try again, Dravek.
This time I got a big room like a blimp hangar, full of pipes and noise and sharp, sour smells. Lots of smoke in the air—or mist—and more mist rising from tanks like oversized oxygen bottles.
No help there. Once more.
This time I got a woman's face: high cheekbones, big dark eyes, red-brown hair that came down to slim shoulders, the willowy figure of a thoroughbred. . . . but no name; no identity.
Come on, Dravek! You can do better than that: Address, phone number, occupation, last seen on the night of. . . .
Back to that. I turned my head and was looking across the room at a flat black case, lying on the table by the door. It looked like a case with something in it.
Sitting up was hard work, but no harder than carrying a safe up a fire escape. The side gave signals, and I felt a warm, wet-diaper feeling against my ribs that meant something had ripped a little, but I got my feet on the floor and pushed. Nothing happened except for a little sweat popping out where my hackles would have been if I'd had any hackles. The next try was better; I was as heavy as a lead-lined casket, but I made it across to the table. Coach called another time out then while I sat on the floor and pushed back a low fog that wanted to roll in over the scene. When my head cleared I went to work on the case.
It was rectangular, about two inches thick, six inches by eight, made of a soft, leathery material. My finger touched something and the top snicked back. I poked around in the kind of junk women have carted in handbags since Nefertiti's day. There was a long, curved comb, metal tubes of paint, a little box that rattled, some plastic shapes like charms for a charm bracelet, a folded paper that looked like a photostat of a magazine article. I opened it; except for the shorthand spelling, it read like a news item, written in the gushy tones of a fashion hack, all about the new Raped Look and the exciting corpse-colors that were taking the Crust by storm. There was nothing in that for me.
I started to toss it back and the line of print at the top caught my eye. It wasn't much, just a date: Sarday, Ma 33, 2103.
For a minute, the floor under my feet, the whole room, the city around me, seemed to turn to a thin gas, something my suppressed id had thought up during one of those long, hard nights just before the fever breaks.
"Twenty-one-oh-three," I said. "Ha—that's a good one." I dropped the paper on the floor and looked around at the room. It looked solid enough. There was a cool breeze moving in off the terrace now, and out beyond the columns I could see a couple of friendly-looking clouds. They had a nice familiar look that helped a lot just then.
"That makes next week my birthday," I said, but it didn't come out sounding cute. "My hundred and sixty-second. . . ."
There wasn't much more I could do with that. I put the stuff back in the handbag and ate a couple of grapes to restore my strength and started checking the room.
There were three sealed openings in the wall that were probably doors, but poking and prodding didn't open them. I went out on the terrace and looked out across empty space at a couple of fanciful-looking towers poking up through a cloud layer maybe five hundred feet below. The drop from the balustrade was vertical. That didn't tell me much about where I was, except that it was a place I'd never heard of. I went back inside, prowled the wall near the bed where the tile patterns looked a little different, found a hairline crack, and leaned on it. Something clicked and a closet door popped open. I found a plain dark pullover to replace the shirt I'd been wearing. A drawer under the closet contained a supply of the kind of frilly items the little man called Jess would want next to his skin. I poked around under them, touched something cool and smooth. It looked like the offspring of an automatic and a mixmaster. I thought about taking it, but I wasn't sure which end the medicine came out of.
Another few minutes of scratching at the wall used up the rest of my energy, but netted me no more trophies. I ate one of the bananas and stretched out on the bed to wait. I listened to the wind flirting around the columns and tried to stay awake; but after a while I dropped off into a restless dream about a big room full of noise and excited faces, and a smaller room with smoke curling out past an open door, and a big tank, painted green. There was a man in a white uniform with blood on his face, and a woman, crying, and I was saying, "That's an order, damn your guts!" And then they were all backing away and I picked up the bundle in my arms and went in through the smoky door and heard behind me the sound of the woman, crying.