The Day Before Forever
     Keith Laumer
             The Day Before Forever
                 Keith Laumer
  Prologue
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Epilogue
                                       Prologue
   Somewhere a bell was ringing. The Old Man reached out in the darkness, fumbled
across rumpled silks for the heavy velvet pull cord. He tugged it twice, imperiously.
   "Sir!" a voice responded instantly.
   "Get him!"
   The Old Man lay back among the scattered cushions.
   He's alive, he thought. Somewhere in the city, he's alive again. . . .
                                              1
   It was a narrow street, without curbs or sidewalks, jammed between flat gray walls
that ran in a straight line as far as I could see. Misty light filtered down from above on a
heavy ornamental ironwork gate set in the wall across the way. There were no people in
sight, no parked cars, no doorways, no windows. Just the wall and the gate and the street,
and a rumble through my shoes like heavy machinery grinding up boulders in the
distance.
   I took a step away from the wall and the pain hit me. The top of my skull felt like the
place John Henry had picked to drive his last spike. Cold rain was trickling down my face
and a cut on my lip was leaking salty blood that mixed with the rain. I looked at the
palms of my hands; they were crisscrossed with shallow cuts, and there was rust and
grime in the cuts. That started me trying to remember when I'd had my last tetanus shot,
but thinking just made my head hurt worse.
   A few feet to the left an alley mouth cut back into the wall behind me; I had a feeling
something unpleasant might come out of it any minute now, and a little curiosity stirred
as to what might be at the other end, but it was just a passing thought. I needed a dark
hole to crawl into and hide before I could take a lot of interest in unimportant matters like
where I was and what I was running from. I got a good grip on my head and pushed away
from the wall. The pavement rocked like a Channel steamer in a three-quarter gale, but it
stayed under me. I made the thirty feet across the street and put a shoulder against the
wall to steady it and waited for the little whirly lights to go away. My pulse was
hammering a little, but no worse than you'd expect after the kind of weekend that could
put a man out on a strange pavement talking to himself. The chills were fading out now,
and I was starting to sweat. My coat felt tight under the arms, and the collar was rubbing
the back of my neck. I looked at my sleeve. It was stiff, shiny cloth; no class, no style.
Somebody else's coat. I breathed through my teeth a few times to blow some of the fog
out of my brain, but it didn't seem to help. It must have been one hell of a party, but it
was all gone now, like easy money.
   I checked my pockets; except for some loose threads and a pinch of lint I was as clean
as a Salvation Army lassie catching the last bus back from the track.
   The placard attached to the gate caught my eyes. Weathered block letters spelled out:

                                             ***

    I looked through the gate. If it was a park, there might be a nice patch of grass to lie
down on. The line about risk of life might have called for some looking into, but next to a
nap, what was a little gamble like that? I pushed on the iron curlicues and the gate swung
in.
                                               ***
    White marble steps led down, flanked by big urns full of black fronds. At the bottom,
a wide flagstone walk led away between clipped borders and flowering shrubs. The dark
green smell of night-blooming flowers was strong here; I heard the soft play of water in a
fountain that caught reflections from lights strung in the hedges. Away in the distance
beyond the park other lights crossed the sky in rows like high bridges. The light breeze
made lonesome noises in the branches over me. It was a nice place, but something in the
air kept me from wanting to curl up on the grass and compose a sonnet about it.
    The walkway I was on was of patterned brick, bordered by little white flowers that led
away into the shadows of trees. I followed it, listening for sneaky footsteps behind me.
As far as I could tell, there weren't any; but the exposed feeling up my back didn't go
away.
    There was something on the grass, under the trees ahead. Something pale, with a shape
that I couldn't quite make out. At first I thought it was an old pair of pants; then it looked
like a naked man lying with his upper half in shadow. I kept on trying to make it look that
way until I was ten feet from it; at that range, I quit kidding myself. It was a man, all
right; but his upper half wasn't in shadow. It wasn't there at all. He'd been cut in two just
below the ribs.
    I circled around him, maybe with a vague idea of finding the rest of him. Up closer, I
could see he'd been bisected by hand, not neatly, but in a businesslike way, as if the cutter
had a lot of carcasses to get out tonight and couldn't waste too much time on fancy
cleaverwork. There wasn't much blood around; he'd been drained before being cut up. I
was just getting ready to roll him over in case he was lying on a clue, when something
made a little sound no louder than a grain of corn popping.
    I moved off across turf like black Wilton, stepped in under an odor of juniper, and
stared at a lot of shadowy shapes that might have been twenty-man gangs for all I knew,
and waited for something that seemed to be about to happen. A minute went by that way.
    With no more sound than a shadow makes moving on a wall, a man stepped into view
fifteen feet from me. He put his head up and sniffed the air like a hound. When he turned
his head his eyes caught the light with a dull shine. He stood with one shoulder high, the
other twisted under the load of a hump like a crouched monkey. His face was
pockmarked, and there were scars across his shaved skull. A lumpy strip of keloid ran
from under his left ear down under the collar of a thick sweater. Heavy thigh muscles
showed through tight pants with a camouflage pattern of diagonal gray lozenges. There
was a heavy wooden handle in his belt with a blade that was honed to a thin finger of
steel like a butcher's trimming knife. He swung slowly; when he was facing my way, he
stopped. I stood still and tried to think like a plant. He squinted into the shadows, and
then grinned, not a pretty grin.
    "Come out nice, sweetie." He had a husky bass growl that went with the scar on his
throat. "Keep the hands in sight."
    I didn't move. He made a quick motion with his left hand; there was a soft sound and a
second man came out of the bushes on his left, hefting a working length of iron pipe. This
one was older, wider, with thick arms and bowed legs and a stubbly beard shot with gray.
He had little sow's eyes that flicked past me and back.
    The hunchback touched his filed blade with a finger and said, "All alone in the park,
hey? That ain't smart, palsy."
    "Chill the buzz," the one with the beard said through his left nostril. "Slice it and haul,
that's the rax."
    He reached inside his shirt, brought something out gripped in his fist; I got a whiff of a
volatile polyester.
    The hunchback moved closer.
    "You got anybody'll buy you for live meat?" he talked with a lot of mouth movement
that showed me a thick pink tongue and broken teeth. Off to my left, somebody was
generating a fair amount of noise making yardage around to my rear. I ignored that,
ignored the question.
    "Better open up." The hunchback slid the knife out and held it on his palm. I took a
step out from under the tree then.
    "Don't scare me to death," I told him. "I've got friends on the force."
    "Talks like a Cruster," the bearded one whined. "Caw, Rutch, take the mothering weed
down and let's fade."
    "Try me, baby," I threw a line at him, just to keep him interested. "I eat your kind for
breakfast."
    Behind me, a stick cracked. Rutch tossed the knife on his palm, then stepped in and
feinted short. I didn't move. That meant I was slow. Beaver hefted his pipe and took a
bite out of the inside of his cheek. Rutch was watching my hands. He didn't see any guns,
so he moved in that last foot and gave the high sign.
    Behind me, the Indian fighter took a noisy step and wrapped arms around me and
leaned back. That put him where I wanted him. I used my right shoe to rake down his
shin and tramped hard on his arch. The grip slipped an inch, which gave me room to
snap-kick the hunchback below the knee. The bone went with a crunch like a dropped
plate. I gripped hands with myself and gave the lad behind me a couple of elbows in the
short ribs; heoofed and let go and Rutch fell past me in time for me to meet Beaver
coming in with his club swung up overhead like the royal executioner getting set to lop
off a head. I caught his arm between my crossed wrists, shifted grips, and broke his
elbow. He hit on his face and squealed and the club bounced off my back.
    The one who had done the back door work was on his hands and knees, coming up. He
looked like a half-breed Chinaman, with a wide, shiny face and lots of unhealthy-looking
fat along the jaw line. I sent him back with a knee to the chin and stood over him,
breathing hard; my wind wasn't what it should have been. I was glad none of them looked
like getting up.
    The Chinaman and the beard were out cold, but the one called Rutch was humping on
the grass like a baby mouse in a bonfire. I went over to him and flipped him on his back.
    "Your boys are soft, and too slow for the work," I told him. I nodded at what was on
the grass. "Yours?"
    He spat in the direction of my left knee and missed.
    "Nice town," I said. "What's the name of it?"
    His mouth worked. The stubble on his head was orange-red, and up close I could see
the pale freckles across the knob of gristle he used for a nose. A tough redhead, in spite of
the crooked back. I put a foot on his hand and leaned on it.
    "Tell it, Red. What's the racket?"
    He made a move and I leaned a little harder.
    "Deathers. . . . in the park. . . . tonight. . . . !" He said it in quick gasps, like a drowning
man dictating a will between waves.
    "More detail, Red. I catch on slow."
    "Blackies. . . ." There was a little foam at the corners of his mouth and he was grunting
softly, like a hound dreaming of rabbits. I didn't blame him for that. A broken knee is
pretty hard to bottle up. Then his eyes rolled up. I started to turn away, half heard the
sound and swung back, saw the shine on the blade in his hand an instant before the blow
low on my back and the hot-poker pain of the knife going in.

                                              ***

    The shock effect on the human nervous system of a stab wound varies a lot with
different subjects. Sometimes the victim falls out flat on his face before he's lost the first
ounce of blood. Other times he'll walk home, go to bed, and quietly bleed to death,
unaware that he's even been hit. With me it was somewhere in between. I felt the blade
hit bone and deflect upward, and all the while my right hand was coming around edge-on
in a flat arc that connected with Red's superior maxillary just below the nose, a messy
spot. He fell back hard and didn't move, and I stood over him, trying to get hold of my
side with both hands. A heavy pulse was gushing down over my hip like a spillway. I
took three steps, felt my knees going, sat down hard on the ground, still trying to hold the
wound closed. I was clear-headed, but the strength had gone out of me. I sat there
listening to my pulse hammer in my ears and thinking about trying it again just as soon as
it quieted down.
    Come on, Dravek, on your feet. Back home you're supposed to be a tough guy. . . .
    I made what I thought was a move to get up and went over sideways, slowly, like an
old tree falling. I lay there with a mouthful of sod, listening to the wind sighing in the
trees, a soft gobbling sound from Rutch or one of his boys—and another sound, like
stealthy feet creeping up through the underbrush. Or maybe it was just the bats flapping
their wings in the attic. My eyes were wide open and I could see the fat Chinaman's feet,
and beyond him a lot of black shadows. One of the shadows moved, and a man was
standing there, looking at me.
    He was small, lean, spidery, dressed in tight black. He came across toward me,
through a sort of luminous mist that had sprung up suddenly. I thought of a couple of
things I wanted to say, but somebody had cut the strings operating my talk-box. I
watched him skirt the Chinaman, come over, and stop a couple of feet from me. It was
very dark now; I could barely make out the shape of his boots against the black. I heard a
sound that seemed to be a nice easy laugh, like a guy who's just heard a mildly funny
joke, and a voice from a long way off seemed to say, "Neat, very neat. . . ."
    Things got hazy then. I felt hands moving over me; the pain in my side was like a line
of fading red fire.
    "Lie still," somebody said in a whispery voice. "I have to stop the bleeding."
    I started to say that Red had put the point in an inch too high, that all he'd sliced was
fat and gristle, but it came out as a grunt.
    "I gave you a shot of fun juice," the same voice said. It was a breathy tenor, as soft as
a fog at sea. "It was all I had."
    The hands did some more things that hurt, but it was a remoter pain now. A nice warm
feeling was spreading up my side. I lay still and breathed.
    "There," the voice said. "Do you suppose you could stand?"
    I grunted on purpose this time and rolled over on my face. I got my knees under me
and rested on all fours, watching the trees sail past like the view from a merry-go-round.
    "We'd better hurry," the little man said. "They're close."
    I said, "Yeah," and got my feet under me and climbed to my feet like a weekend
Alpinist doing the last few yards to the top of Annapurna. We looked at each other across
a stretch of smooth-mowed grass unmarred by anything except three and a half corpses.
He was a slender-built, dainty-moving man with the sharp, complicated features of a
Bourbon king, a sleek, narrow head with bugged-out eyes set on the corner of it, deft
hands in black kid gloves. The tight pants were tucked into short boots, and he wore a
ducky little vest with ruffles along the top edge over a black turtleneck.
    "Who were they?" I asked, just to break the silence. My voice came out in a croak.
    He glanced down at the nearest of them, who happened to be the Chinaman; the fat
face had that vacant, collapsed look you see on photos of bodies found on a battlefield.
The little man lifted a lip and showed me a row of sharp teeth that were too white to be
real.
    "Scum," he said delicately. "Baiters; cold-meat men. Their kind are the lowest of the
low." He laughed. "Whereas I am the highest of the low." I could hardly hear him for the
zinging in my head. My legs felt like something snipped out of cardboard. I rubbed the
back of my head, but it didn't help. I still felt like a guy who's stepped into what he
thought was the men's room and wound up in the third act ofAïda .
    "You a cop?" I said.
    "A. . . . ?"
    "Cop. Dick. The law."
    He said "ah" and lifted his chin. A light came and went behind his eyes. "No, I am not
a, ah, cop. But we'll talk later. You've lost a considerable amount of blood, but I think
you can manage the walk. It's just to the edge of the park." His voice was coming through
with a lot of static, like a transatlantic broadcast.
    "I was just passing through on my way to the Greyhound station," I got the words out
past a tongue like a sock full of sand. "Just point me that way and I'll drift out of your
life."
    He shook his head. "That's hardly safe, while the native wildlife is abroad.
Just. . . . along. . . . my place. . . . car. . . ." He was tuning in and out now; the static was
getting worse on the short-wave band. I thought about lying down, but then my feet were
working. He was towing me along and I gave up and followed, trying not to bump my
head on my knees. I remember going under dark shrubbery, pushing through a hedge like
a barbed-wire entanglement over what felt like dead men's bones but were probably just
tree roots. Then I was getting helped into the seat of a small shiny car that looked like
something hand-tooled for the King of Siam. It did a U-turn on a Kennedy dime and took
off straight up. I knew then I was dreaming, so I leaned back into a seat upholstered with
clouds and let it all slide.
                                               2
    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 theywant him—Iwant 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—"
    "Iam 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.
                                               3
    The sunny blue sky had turned to scarlet and purple before my host came back,
humming a little tune between his teeth. The woman was with him. She left after a
minute, and I played possum while he thumbed back my eyelid; then he went across to
the wall and got busy poking buttons on a console that swung out on command. He took
something out of a slot, held it up to the light and frowned at it, came back over to me
and took hold of my arm. That was my signal to take hold of his neck. He squawked and
flapped his arms and the thing in his hand hit the floor. I got my feet under me and stood
up; he went for a pocket with one hand and I shifted grips and took him up against the
wall. His eyes goggled at me.
    "What have you got that's good for a lethenol hangover, Jess?" I leaned on him and let
him get a swallow of air in past my thumb.
    "Let me go. . . ." It was a thin squeak like a rubber rat.
    "How long have I been here?"
    "Thirty hours—but—"
    "Who are you, Jess? What's your racket?"
    "Are you. . . . out of your mind? I saw you were in difficulty—"
    "Why'd you butt in? It strikes me that park's rough territory for a little fellow like
you."
    He kicked and made choking sounds and I slacked off a little to let some of the purple
drain out of his face.
    He twisted his mouth into a grin like a wounded fox. "One has one's little hobbies," he
got out, and tried to bite me. I pounded his head on the wall a few times. They both
sounded solid. All this effort started my head humming again. "You're tough, Jess," I told
him. "I'm tougher."
    He tried with a finger for the eye, and I knocked him down and held him on the floor
with a knee in his back and slapped his pockets. I found a couple of scented tissues and
some plastic tokens. He said a few things, none of them helpful.
    "You're making me curious, Jess," I tried to talk without panting. "It must be
important dope you're hanging on to."
    "If you'll take your thumb out of my throat so that we can talk together like civilized
men, I'll tell you what I can. Otherwise, you may kill me and be damned to you!" He said
it in a new voice, nothing like the whine he'd been using.
    I let him sit up. "Let's start with whothey are," I said. "The ones that wanted me alive."
    "Blackies. Commission men." He spat the words.
    "Make it plainer."
    "Death Control, damn you! How plain does it have to be?"
    "How do you know it's me they want?"
    "I heard them talking. In the park."
    "So you snatched me out from under their noses. What made me worth taking the
chance?"
    He tried out a couple of expressions, settled on a sad smile like a mortician suggesting
a more appropriate tribute to a departed loved one.
    "Really, you have a suspicious nature. I overheard nothing further than that they had
seen you enter the park." He gave me a quick look. "By the way, how didyou happen to
be there?"
    "I wandered in off the street. Maybe I was a little drunk."
    He gave me a catty smile. He was getting his wind back fast. "I saw your work. Very
clever—except for the carelessness just at the last."
    "Yeah. Red fooled me."
    "You would have bled to death."
    I nodded. "Thanks for sticking me back together. That's one I owe you."
    "How are you feeling now?" He cocked his head as if the answer was worth a lot of
money and he didn't want to miss any overtones.
    "Like it happened to two other guys. By the way, you wouldn't have a drink around
the place?"
    He looked at my hand holding his ruffled shirt. "May I?"
    I stepped back and he got up and went past me to the alcove with the buttons, and
punched a couple. He said "ah" and came back with a right-looking glass.
    "Better get two."
    He followed instructions. I traded glasses, watched him drink half of his, then tried
mine. It tasted like perfumed apple juice, but I drank it anyway. Maybe it helped. My
head seemed to clear a little. Jess dabbed the blood off his chin with a tissue. He got out a
flat case and extracted a thin cigarette no thicker than a matchstick, fitted it into a pair of
little silver tongs, took a sip from it like a hummingbird sampling the first nectar of
spring. He was looking relaxed now, as if we were old school chums having a cozy chat.
    "You're a stranger here in the city," he said, making it casual. "Where do you come
from?"
    "Well, Jess, I have a little problem there. I don't exactly remember how I got to your
town. I was hoping you might tell me."
    He looked solemn and alert, like a sympathetic judge just before he hits you with the
book. "I?"
    "Our gentlemanly arrangement isn't going to work out unless you play, too, Jess."
    "Really, you're asking the impossible," he said. "What would I know of you—a perfect
stranger?"
    I banged my glass on the table and leaned over and put my face an inch from his. "Try
a guess," I said.
    He looked me in the eye. "Very well," he said. "My guess is that you're an ice case,
illegally out of low-O."
    "What's that mean?"
    "If I'm right," he said, "for the past hundred years or more, your body has been in an
ETORP cryothesis vault—frozen solid at absolute zero."

                                              ***

    Half an hour later, with a couple more innocent-tasting drinks under my belt, I was
still asking questions and getting answers that made me ask more questions.
    " . . . . most of the low-O's were placed in a cold stasis by relatives: persons who were
ill, with a then-incurable ailment—or injured in an accident. Their hope was that in time a
cure would be found, and they'd be awakened. Of course, they never were. The dead stay
dead. ETORP owns them now."
    "I was never sick a day in my life. Outside of that, it sounds like a good story."
    Jess shook his head. "The difficulty is that there hasn't been an authorized thaw for
over fifty years, to my knowledge. And if you'd been revived under official sanction,
you'd have awakened in an ETORP 'doc ward, with a cephalotaper clamped to your skull,
pumping you full of a canned ETORP briefing, not wandering the streets in an amnesiac
condition."
    "Maybe a relative did the job."
    "Relatives—of a corpse who's been on ice for a century? Not even your own great-
great-grandchildren would know anything of you—and if they did—would they give up
their own visas for you?" Jess wagged his head. "And in any event, laws have been
passed. We can't have the dead waking up, they tell us; there's no room for them, with a
world population of twenty billion. And they cite the legal complications, hold up the
specter of old diseases released. They make a good case, but the real reason is. . . ." he
looked at me, watching for my reaction. "Spare parts," he said crisply.
    "Go on."
    "Consider it!" He leaned toward me, slitted his eyes. "Perfectly good arms and legs
and kidneys, going to waste—and outside—people needing them, dying for want of
them! They're ready to pay ETORP's price, perform any service in return for life and
health!"
    "What's this ETORP?"
    "Eternity, Incorporated."
    "Sounds like a cemetery."
    "A. . . . ?"
    "Where you bury the dead ones."
    "The Blackies would gather you in for a trick like that." He sounded a little indignant.
"The minerals are valuable, even if the hulk is useless."
    "You were telling me about ETORP."
    "ETORP controls the most precious commodity of all: life. It issues birth permits and
life visas, performs transplants and cosmetic surgery, supplies rejuve and longevity
treatments and drugs. Technically, it's a private corporation, operating under the Public
Constitution. In fact, it rules our society with an iron hand."
    "What about the government?"
    "Pah! A withered organ, dangling anachronistically from the body politic. What power
is there that compares with life? Money? Military force? What are they to a dying man?"
    "Nice business. How did ETORP get the monopoly?"
    "The company began simply enough, with patented drugs and techniques, invented in
their own laboratories and closely controlled. Then they developed the frozen organ
banks; then whole-body cryothesia. After the development of the cancer cures and the
perfection ofex-utero cultures, there was a last-ditch legal fight with a group calling
themselves the Free Life Party. They charged the company with murder and abortion,
sacrilege, desecration of the dead, all manner of crimes. They lost, of course. The bait
ETORP had to dangle over judges' heads was irresistible. After that, ETORP's power
burgeoned at geometric rates. It bought and sold legislators like poker chips. It became a
tyrant that ruled with a whip in one hand and a sweet in the other! And all the while, its
vaults were filling with freeze cases, waiting for a resurrection that would never come."
    "So Uncle Elmer never woke up after all. . . ."
    "So sad," Jess said. "All those trusting souls, saying goodbye, kissing their children
and wives and going off to the hospital, leaving pitiful little notes to be opened on
anniversaries, going under the anesthetic babbling of the parties they'd stage when they
came back. . . . and now—a century later—sawed apart to be sold from open stock to the
lucky ones with negotiable skills, or handed out as door prizes to faithful company hacks.
And bodies! Whole bodies, an almost unlimited supply, something that had never been
plentiful. That was where the power was, Steve—that was what made ETORP! What was
a billion dollars to a ninety-year-old mummy in a wheelchair? He'd pay it all for a
twenty-year-old body—possibly keeping a million or two in reserve for a new stake."
    "Maybe I'm slow. What good would a dead body do him?"
    "Dead?" Jess' eyebrows went up. "It's theliving body that's valuable, Steve. A young
hulk, cured of its once-fatal ailments, will fetch its weight in graymarket chits." I was still
frowning at him, and he added, "For brain transfer, you understand."
    "Do I?"
    He looked surprised. "There are always wealthy Crusters and Dooses with lapsed
visas. For a price, it's easy enough to arrange new papers—but those are worthless to a
man with a dying body. And prime hulks are in short supply. Dirties won't do, of course;
riddled with defects."
    "You're talking about scooping out a man's brains and putting somebody else's in?"
    "Even in your day the surgical transplant of limbs and organs was practiced. The brain
is simply another organ."
    "OK; so I'm wanted by the law for illegally rising from the dead. Where does that
leave us? Who thawed me? And why?"
    Jess thought about it for three puffs of his dope stick. "Steve—how old were you—
areyou?"
    I felt the question over in my mind. I had the feeling the answer was on the tip of my
tongue, but I couldn't quite pin it down. "About fifty," I said. "Middle-aged."
    Jess got up and went across to a table, came back with a hand mirror and an ivory
handle.
    "Look at yourself."
    I took the mirror. It was a good glass, nine inches square. It showed me a face that was
mine, all right; but the hairline was an inch lower on the forehead than it should have
been, and the lines I'd collected in a lot of years were gone like the shine on five-dollar
shoes. I looked like a new recruit for the freshman grid squad, turned down for underage.
                                               4
   "Tell me about yourself, Steve," Jess said. "Anything at all. Start at the beginning—
your earliest memories."
   "I remember the early days all right. My childhood, if you can call it that." I rubbed
the side of my face and tried to think about it, but the ideas that should have been ready to
jump into my mind felt rusty and old, as if I hadn't thought about them, hadn't used the
words, for a long, long time.
   "I was kicked up in a tough part of Philly, went to sea, joined the Army when the
Chinese busted loose in Burma. After the war I went to school, got enough education to
start in as a white-collar man with a grocery chain. Five years later, I owned the
company. . . ." I listened to myself talking, remembering it all in a vague, academic sort
of way, as if it was something I saw in the movies.
   "Go on."
   "The office; the plant. A big car with two telephones. . . ." Shadowy memories were
taking shape; but there was something dark there I didn't like.
   "What else?" Jess whispered.
   "I remember my days at sea better." This was a safer subject; I was talking to myself
now, looking into the past. "That was real: The stinks and the rust on the deck and the
mold growing on my shore shoes, and coastlines in the morning like white reefs coming
out of the mist, and the noise and the lights in port at night, and the waterfront joints and
the lousy booze and the guy that used to play sad tunes on the fantail after the hatches
were down."
   "It sounds quite romantic."
   "Like a case of the yaws. But it had a certain something; something to do with being
young and tough, sleep anywhere, eat anything, fight anybody. . . ."
   "Tell me about your business associates. Perhaps one of them. . . ." he let it trail off. I
thought about it, tried to sort out the conflicting impressions. A young fellow with black
hair; an old bird with a neck like a turkey. . . .
   "My best pal was a fellow I served with in China and Nepal. He saved my life once;
plugged the hole in my wrist where a Chink .25 mm went through." I remembered it all:
The two-mile walk back to the forward aid station, handling the gun left-handed while
the woods buzzed with scatter-shell fragments; the surgeons clucking like hens and then
settling down to three hours of needlework that would have won prizes at the county fair,
while Frazier poured slugs for both of us and kept my cigar lit. They'd done a nice job of
putting nerves and blood vessels back together, but the carpal joint was never the same,
and there was an inch-wide scar that was the reason I'd taken to wearing my Rolex Oyster
on my left wrist. . . . I had a sudden idea, one that had been ducking around the edge of
my consciousness, flapping its arms for attention ever since I woke up in the rain.
   I flipped my cuff back and looked at the wrist. The skin was unflawed. The scar was
gone.
   "What is it?" Jess was watching my face. I turned the cuff back down.
   "Nothing. Just another little slip in my grip on reality. What would you say to another
shot of what we just had?"
    He watched me while I poured out a nice jolt. I took it back without bothering to roll it
on my tongue.
    "This freezing process," I said. "Does it remove scars?"
    "Why, no—"
    "Does it make you look younger?"
    "Nothing of that sort, Steve—"
    "Then scratch your theory."
    "What do you mean?"
    "If I was one of your freeze cases, I'd remember a brick wall running at me, or a
sickbed and a flock of medicine bottles and some old goat shaking his whiskers and
saying, 'Ice this boy until I figure out what to do next.' "
    Jess pushed his lips in and out. "It's quite possible that the trauma associated with the
shock—"
    "It wasn't an accident; no scars, remember? And if I had a fatal ailment—who cured
it?"
    He looked a little nervous. "Perhaps you weren't cured."
    "Relax, cancer's not catching."
    "Steve—this is no joking matter! We have to find out who you are, what you know
that makes you a threat to ETORP!"
    "I'm no threat. I'm just a mixed-up guy who wants to get unmixed and back to minding
my own business."
    "They're afraid of you! Nothing else could explain a class Y search for you—and
therein lies a weapon to be used against them!"
    "If you're talking revolution, count me out."
    "Count you out—on the quest for the greatest prize the world has ever known?"
    "What are you dancing around the edge of, Jess?"
    His eyes went to slits with a glint back of them like Midas thinking about Fort Knox.
    "Immortality."
    "Sure. Throw in flying carpets while you're at it."
    "It's no myth, Steve! They have it! It's there, don't you understand? We don't have to
die! We could live forever! But will they share it with us? No, they let us toil and die like
grubs in an ant heap!"
    "You toil, Jess? Don't tickle me; my side still hurts."
    "Longevity treatments, rejuve!" Jess spat out the words like a dirty taste. "A sop for
the tech class they need to keep their corrupt machine functioning. Limb and organ graft
and regeneration—and the ultimate iniquity, brain transfer, and the attendant black
market in bodies that makes it unsafe for an unarmed man to walk abroad at night. And
all in order to keep up the value of their stock-in-trade!"
    "Times haven't changed much," I said. "In my day it was Zionist plots and pills you
could drop in the gas tank to convert water to gasoline."
    "You think I'm raving? Consider it, Steve! Medical research long ago synthesized
protoplasm, created life in the laboratory, cured cancer—and in the process, inevitably
discovered the secret of the aging process. It's a disease, like any other—and they've
cured it. Nature doesn't care, you see; her intent was only to preserve the individual past
the breeding age. Fifteen years to sexual maturity, another fifteen years of vigorous life to
see the next generation on the way—then—decay. Just as we've begun to learn to live, we
begin to die! No wonder the race lives in anarchy and turmoil, each generation repeating
the mistakes of the one before. The world is run by children, while our mature minds,
seasoned by life, go down to death. And they could stop it!"
   "How could they keep a thing like that a secret—if they had it?"
   "By limiting its use to a favored few—in whose interest it would be, of course, to
preserve the deception."
   "Uh-huh—but somebody would notice after a while if old Mr. Gotrocks never showed
up in the obit column."
   "Who? Who keeps records of such things? It's not as it was in your day, Steve; we
have no public figures as you knew them; we live in a rigidly stratified society; Dooses
know little of the activities of Crusters; Threevees never venture down to Forkwaters; and
no graded citizen ever sets foot dirtside, among the visaless Preke rabble."
   "That's all guesswork, Jess. Why get excited about it—"
   "There are those of us who feel that man wasn't meant to die in his prime, Steve! It's
not his destiny! Life eternal is almost in our grasp—life in which to see the stars and the
planets and the riches thereof—"
   "Seventy years are long enough. I won't waste 'em chasing a pot of gold at the end of a
cardboard rainbow."
   "Seventy years?" Jess popped his eyes at me. "I'm seventy-nine now!" his voice broke.
"I expect to live to a hundred and fifteen, even without the blessing of ETORP. But
there's more, Steve—so much more—and that's where you can help!"
   "Sorry—I've got other plans."
   "Plans? You, a nobody without even an identity?"
   Just then, as if it had been waiting for the signal, a cool chime cut through the still of
the evening.
                                               ***
   Jess came out of his chair like a cocky featherweight answering the bell for Round 2.
All his teeth were showing in a grin that had no humor in it. The tone sounded again,
twice, three times.
   "Minka?" Jess asked the air.
   The chime stopped and somebody pounded on the door.
   "Just like old times," I said. "That sounds like copper to me, Jess."
   "How could they. . . . ?" he started and then closed his mouth. He gave me a narrow-
eyed look.
   "You can trust me now," he said, "or not, just as you please. Neither of us wants you
found here. There's one way out for us."
   "What have you got in mind?"
   "Out there." He pointed to the terrace. "I'll give them something to think about. What
you do is up to you." He didn't wait to catch my reaction, just started across toward the
door. That left me a couple of seconds to think it over. I looked around, saw three blank
walls and the columns leading to the terrace. I went out, stood in the shadows.
   Jess opened the door—and was backing into the room, holding his hands out from his
sides. A man was pushing him and another was behind, looking as happy as his kind of
face could. They were lean, slim-hipped lads, buckled into black uniforms with silver
cord down the pants seams and more silver worked into their stiff stand-up collars. They
wore holsters strapped down low, in working position, and their eyes had that screw-you-
Jack look that spelled cop or professional soldier as far as you could hear a pair of heels
click.
    "Say all the right things," one of them said in a filed-steel voice, "and you could live to
cash in your chits."
    "What's all this?" Jess sounded a little breathless. "My visa is in order—"
    The cop backhanded him down onto the floor.
    "Topside wants you bad," the cop nodded. "I guess this is the first clean spring from
the Palace in sixty years. Now, let's have it all: How you handled the outer ring, how you
took the main vault, who did the thaw job—the works."
    Jess was sitting up, looking tearful. "You're making a mistake—"
    The Blackie hit him. Jess curled up on the rug and made noises like a lonely pup.
    "Start now and save muscle all around," the Blackie said. "Who was your first
contact?"
    Jess looked up at him. "He was a big fellow, about seven-three, with chin whiskers
and a glass eye," he said in a nasty tone. "I didn't get the name."
    "Funny man." The Blackie swung his foot and caught Jess in the shoulder as he rolled
away. The other cop kicked him back.
    "Where's the other one at?"
    They fanned out and looked at the bare walls. One of them blew air out over his lower
lip and looked at his partner.
    "I thought you had this pile staked off."
    "Maybe the mothering crot's got an outlaw shaft."
    "He couldn't have used it. Power block, remember?"
    "We should have called this in, Supe."
    I backed a quiet step; a light breeze moved palm fans in a pot beside me. They weren't
big enough to help much. The boys inside didn't look any smarter than their kind usually
do, but after a while it was going to occur to them to take a peek out on the back porch.
    "He couldn't have gone out—" one of the cops said, and stopped. I could almost hear
his brains working: If there were two guys in a locked room and only one in sight, how
many are still hiding under the rug?
    I thought about stepping out and trying the honest citizen route, but those guns the
boys packed looked big and impatient. And even if I didn't buy Jess' program a hundred
percent, there were a couple of things about this pair that put me on the other side.
    "I don't like it, Supe," the number two cop was saying. "We shouldn't of played wise
with a Y priority."
    "There's twenty-year chits in it for the ones that take him solo. . . ." The voices were
keeping up the patter, coming my way. I blinked sweat out of my eyes and waited. What I
needed was a break, one lousy little break. It was too much to ask for, too much to expect
from a frail-looking little fellow who had already absorbed more punches than a Golden
Gloves runner-up losing the big one. But something about the little I'd seen of Jess made
me set myself and get ready. . . .
    When it came, it was a bleat like a docked sheep. "I'll tell you! Why should I lose my
visa for that mothering weed?"
    The feet held up and then went back and I eased over to the right and faded an eye past
the edge of the open door. Jess was on his feet. What was holding him there was the boss
Blackie. He was standing with his back to me. He had his legs planted well apart and was
holding a handful of Jess' pretty green shirt in his left fist and bending him backward over
the table. There was a lot of blood on the little man's face, and one eye was swollen
almost shut. The other cop was leaning against the wall to the right. If he had moved his
eyes an eighth of an inch he'd have been looking straight at me. I stayed where I was and
waited.
   "We got all night," the cop said. "Tell it now or tell it in an hour, we don't care. We
like our work."
   Jess mumbled something, but I wasn't paying much attention to the conversation.
What I was watching was Jess' right hand. It was feeling over the table, out of sight of the
other cop. The fingers worked carefully, deliberately, as though they had all the time in
the world. They teased the drawer open, came out with the tip of a thin blade between
them. The fingers worked the knife around until they could touch the narrow black-taped
grip, closed over it. Jess' arm came up slowly, carefully, poised for a moment with the
needletip just touching the black cloth stretched over the ribs of the man bending over
him. Then with a smooth thrust, he put it in.
   The Blackie jerked once, as if he had touched something hot. He pivoted slowly, still
holding Jess.
   "What are you doing?" his partner took a step toward him. The cop's hand went to his
side, caressed the knife hilt that was tight against the black cloth. Then his knees went,
and he hit the floor hard. The other Blackie came forward a step, raked at the gun at his
hip, and I was into the room and behind him. He was slow turning and I hit him in the
neck, twice, and he dropped the gun and jackknifed to the floor and lay twisted, the way
they do when the spine is shattered.
   I kicked the gun across the room and Jess staggered away from the table, breathing
with a lot of noise. I looked at the door.
   "They came alone," Jess gasped it out. He wiped blood off his mouth. "They were
keeping this play to themselves. Nice for us, Steve. No one knows where they were." He
made a face and I saw he was grinning.
   "You're a great actor," I said. "What do you do for an encore?"
   "We make a good team," he said. "A pity to break it up."
   I went to the bar and poured myself a stiff one and swallowed it.
   "Let's put this pair in the back closet," I said. "Then get a map of New York City, circa
1970. I think I may have an idea."

                                            ***

   The map on the tabletop screen showed the eastern half of the state plus a chunk of
Pennsylvania and Jersey. The highway grid looked a lot denser than it should have, but
otherwise it was pretty normal.
   "Higher mag," I said, and he focused down until the city filled the screen. I asked him
to center it on Long Island, the Jamaica section, and he worked the knobs and got a
blowup that showed every street and major building. I pointed to a spot. "That's it: my old
plant."
   "And you imagine that would be intact today? The building probably doesn't exist—"
   "The spot I'm looking for wasn't exactly in a building, Jess. It was under one—a place
that was built to last. I made some arrangements for that."
    "You think you might have left some clue there?"
    "It's a place to look."
    He poked a lever. A red dot popped up at the top of the screen, and he used two knobs
to guide it down to mark the plant. Then he blanked the screen and a new map came onto
it. It looked like one of those webs built by a drunk spider. There were cryptic symbols
all over it like Chinese alphabet soup. Jess looked up at me. There was a strange look in
his eye.
    "Interesting spot you've picked," he said. "This is a cartogram of modern Granyauck,
overlying the site of the town you used to know. As you'll notice, the former islands have
been joined to the mainland by various hydraulic works. The section you call Long
Island, here. . . ." he pointed to a green blob that covered a piece of the screen—"is an
ETORP preserve. The specific point in which you expressed an interest happens to
coincide almost precisely with the most closely guarded premises in the North American
Sector."
    "What is it?"
    "The Cryothesis Center," he said. "Vulgarly known as the Ice Palace." He smiled. "I
think we've made a connection, Steve."

                                             ***

    Jess was pacing the floor. "It poses an interesting problem, Steve. I won't say it can't
be done—I pride myself on my ability to enter presumably closed precincts—but the
question remains—is it worth the risk involved?"
    "If you want to back out, I'll go in alone."
    "I'd like nothing better than to back out." He looked at me and I thought he looked a
little pale around the jaw. "But as you said, it's our only lead. Therefore, the question is:
How best to beard ETORP in his stronghold?"
    He went back to his fancy desk and punched more keys, spent the next hour muttering
at technical diagrams that were over my head like the Goodyear blimp.
    "The Hudson outfall appears the likeliest spot," he said. "That means going dirtside,
but it can't be helped."
    "When do we start?"
    "As soon as your wound has knit. And it will be as well for you to stay out of sight for
a few days. After a century, that shouldn't matter much."
    I conceded the point.
    We ate then, and afterward sat out on the terrace and listened to music, some of it old
enough to sound familiar. Then he showed me to a room papered with black roses and I
stretched out in a shaft of moonlight and after a while slid down into a dream about a
small pale face behind a pane of frosted glass and the vague shadows of forgotten
sorrows as remote as a pharaoh's last wish.
                                               5
   We waited three days to make our move; my side was still tender, but Jess' medicine
had healed it to a thin scar.
   He fitted me out with a set of shiny black long johns that turned out to be lightweight
scuba gear and led the way by back routes down into the depths of the city to a high
blank wall with lights far up on it and that grim look that prisons and military
installations have.
   "This is the outer perimeter wall of the reserve," Jess said. I looked up at the top, fifty
feet up in deep shadow.
   "How do we get over it?"
   "We don't, of course. We circumvent it. Come along."
   I trailed him to the end of the alley, and we were facing a chest-high wall with lots of
dark, cold air beyond it. I looked over it, saw black water swirling twenty feet below.
   "A pleasant evening for a swim," Jess said. He pulled off his jacket and produced a
slim-barreled gun from somewhere and made clicking sounds with it, checking the
action. I stripped down to my frogman suit and turned up the heat control a notch higher.
Jess looked me over to be sure I hadn't left my seat flap hanging down, and vaulted up on
the coping of the wall, agile as a squirrel.
   "Stay clear of the rungs when you dive," he said. "And be sure to keep your comset
open. Its range is only about a hundred feet, under water." He gave me a casual wave,
like a movie star dismissing a fan, and tilted over the edge. I hopped up on the wall,
swung both legs over, and kicked off without looking, feet-first.

                                              ***

   It seemed like a long fall before I hit water as hard as a sidewalk and felt myself
tumbling in a strong current that sucked the heat out of me like a blotter. I straightened
myself out facing upstream and looked for Jess. It was like swimming in an inkwell. I
found my heat control and thumbed it up, then tried my water jets.
   "Use more power," Jess' voice tinned very faintly in my left ear. "You're drifting off."
   I found the controls and used them and Jess guided me his way. When I was three feet
from him, I saw the faint phosphorescent outline of his suit. He was hanging onto a
mossy pipe projecting from the retaining wall.
   "We have a brisk little swim ahead of us," he told me. "The duct I was hoping to use is
blocked, but there should be another, a hundred and forty meters upstream."
   It was a half-hour battle. Once I angled out a little too far and the tide took me and
rolled me half a dozen times before I got my keel under me again. After a while the wall
beside me changed from mossy concrete to rusted metal.
   "Steer for the lights," Jess transmitted. A minute or two later, I saw a greenish arc
glowing off to my right that turned out to be the open mouth of a six-foot conduit. There
were some symbols painted on it in luminous pink and a mechanism bolted to the side.
Jess was perched on the housing, tinkering. I heard him say "ah" and the louvers that
blocked the mouth pivoted and I could see light coming from inside the duct. Water was
boiling out of it like a millrace. He headed in, using the hand rungs, and I followed. The
miniature pump strapped to my back hummed and the straps sawed under my arms. We
passed up a pair of side branches and the duct narrowed. There was a glow-strip along the
side here, with more symbols. Jess checked each one we came to, after a while held up
and said, "There should be a hatch here."
   I flattened myself against the curved wall and held on and watched while he checked
over the section ahead. Then his head and shoulders disappeared. I came up beside him
and his legs went up inside a vertical shaft a yard in diameter. There were rungs there. I
hauled myself up after him and after ten feet, the shaft angled and we were coming out of
water into open air.

                                              ***

   "I suppose this is a maintenance lock," Jess said. It was a square room, twenty feet on
a side, with motor-operated valves all over one wall and color-coded piping on the other
ones. I could hear pumps throbbing somewhere. The ceiling shed a glow like
phosphorescent mold on Jess' face. In the tight black suit, he looked like a detail from
Hieronymus Bosch.
   I was looking at a panel set between banked valves.
   "Try this," I said.
   Jess looked at me, said nothing. He unclipped a tool kit from his belt and went to
work. Five minutes later he grinned at me and turned something slowly and the look of
strain tightened. Beyond the wall, something made a solid snick.
   "That's it," he said.
   I went past him and pushed on the panel and a section of wall slid back and I was
looking into a silent corridor with a row of green ceiling lights that stretched away into
distance.
   "So much for the impregnability of ETORP," Jess said. "We're inside the Ice Palace.
There are a thousand Blackies patrolling a few feet overhead, but we seem to have this
level to ourselves. Now what?"
   I didn't answer him right away. I was looking at the corridor, and feeling little icy
fingers running up my backbone.
   "Did you ever walk into a strange place and have the feeling you'd been there before?"
I spoke carefully, so as not to shatter a fragile thought.
   "It's called thedéjà vu ," Jess said, watching me.
   "There's something down there," I said. "Something I won't like."
   "What is it, Steve?" Jess' voice was like a freezing man breathing on the dying spark
of his last match.
   "I don't know," I said. I looked along the hall, but it was just a hall now. I pointed
toward the far end.
   "Come on, Jess," I said. "I don't know whether it's a hunch or a nightmare, but I think
what we want's that way."

                                              ***

   "There's dust here," Jess said. "This section's not in use, hasn't been for a long time."
    The corridor ran for a couple of hundred feet and ended in a right-angle turn with a
cubbyhole full of shelves. There was nothing on them but dust. Under the shelves there
was a row of hooks designed for coats, but no coats were hanging on them. Jess stamped
on the floor, looked at the ceiling.
    "There must be a route leading from here," he said. "This appears to be a dressing
room, where special protective clothing was donned."
    I was looking at the hooks. Something about them bothered me. I counted them.
Twelve. I got a grip on the third from the right and pulled down. It felt pretty solid. I
pushed up hard, and it clicked and folded back. Jess was watching me with his mouth
open. I fingered the next one, then took hold of the fifth in line, flipped it up. I could feel
a little sweat on my forehead under the mask. I reached for the hanger between the other
two and lifted it and something made a crunching sound and the wall on the right jumped
open half an inch.
    "How did you know, Steve?"
    "I don't know," I said, and pushed the door open and went through into a place I'd seen
somewhere, a long time ago, in a dream of another life.

                                              ***

    It was a wide room with walls that were cracked and waterstained, with green mold
growing in little tufts along the cracks. There were cracks across the floor, too, and some
curled chips of perished plastic were all that was left of the composition tiles. I saw this
by the light of a small hand flash that Jess played over the floor and held on a door across
the room.
    I went across to it and turned the old-fashioned doorknob and went into a small office
drifted half an inch deep in dust and scraps of paper as brown as autumn leaves. There
was a collapsed jumble of leather scraps and rusted springs in one corner that had been a
big chair. Across from it was a teakwood desk. There was a small bowl on the desk with
a little dust at the bottom, and a shred of something that might have been a flower stem,
once.
    "Daisies," I said. "White daisies."
    "Steve, do you know this place?" Jess whispered.
    "It's my old plant," I said. "This was my office."
    I went to the desk, opened the drawer, and took out a bottle. A scrap of label read
EMY ARTIN.
    "What else do you remember, Steve?"
    I was looking at a picture frame hanging on the wall. The glass was dirty but intact,
but there was nothing behind it but a little ash. I lifted it down and uncovered a steel plate
with a round knob, set in the wall. It was a safe, and the door was ajar.
    "Someone's been here before you," Jess' voice grated.
    I reached far back in the safe and felt over the upper surface, found a pinhole. "I need
a wire," I said. Jess checked a pouch at his belt and produced one. I poked it up in the
hole and it snicked and the back of the safe tilted forward into my hand. There was a
drawer behind it. I pulled it out. Except for a few flakes of dry black paint, it was empty.

                                              ***
   "What did you expect to find here?" Jess asked me.
   "I don't know." I blew into the empty steel box and the paint chips danced and whirled
up into my face. I started to toss it aside and found myself looking at the bottom of the
drawer. The paint there was dry, peeling.
   "What is it?" Jess was watching my face.
   "There was no paint on the inside," I said. "It's black carballoy. . . ." I picked at the
paint with a fingernail, and more of it flaked away and I was looking at words etched in
the hard metal:

                                             ***
                                              6
   . . . . Frazier was looking at me with the kind of look you give a dog that's been run
over. Gatley was standing behind him and Smith and Jacobs and a couple of men from
the maintenance shop.
   "Follow your orders, damn you!" I was yelling, and the blood was thudding in my
temples like nine-pound sledges. "I told you to wall it off, and by God I meant I wanted it
walled off! I never want sunlight to shine in there again!"
   "We all know how you feel, Steve," Frazier was saying. "But there's no use—"
   Hobart pushed up beside him and his fat face came open and said, "Look here,
Dravek, we have fifty thousand dollars invested in this project—"
   I swung on him and somebody tried for my arms from behind and I broke his leg and
then they were all backed against the wall in a bunch but Frazier, who was always the
only one with the guts to face me. There was blood on his mouth. A mechanic named
Brownie was on the floor, groaning.
   "He's gone crazy!" Hobart was yelling, and Frazier was looking me in the eye and
saying, "All right, Steve, if that's what you want. . . ."

                                             ***

    "Do you know what it means?" It seemed like a long time had passed, but Jess was
still standing beside me with the light in his hand and I was holding the box. I tossed it on
the floor and the clatter was muffled in the dust.
    "Yeah," I said. "I know." I went back out into the outer room. The egg-crate ceiling
was a dark tapestry of sooty spider webs and the walls that had been a soft tan were
blackish-green, but I knew the way now. On the far side, a door was set in an alcove
beside a rusty pipe pushing up from the rotted casing of a water cooler. It squeaked and
opened and Jess' light showed us another room, full of dust and age and piles of shapeless
debris where chairs and tables had been.
    "Waiting room," I said. "Receptionist's desk over there." I went past the jumble of
rusted-out metal and along a hall where dust came up in clouds, through a pair of doors
that fell off their hinges when I kicked them and down steps to a pair of rusted steel doors
that were standing open.
    I looked at the doors, feeling the kind of feeling that Petrie must have had when he
read the inscription over King Tut's tomb. My pulse was slamming, slow and heavy, a
funeral march. I didn't want to see what was on the other side. I took a deep breath and
Jess came down beside me and put the light inside. It made long shadows in a wide, high
room, with piping and fallen scaffolding along one wall and a half-completed framework
of steel plating looming up in the background like a wrecked tanker. There was lots of
dust here, too, and a faint rotten smell in the air.
    Jess' light fingered the wall ahead, flicked up along the side of the big tank, showed up
piping and condensers and power transformers rafter-mounted up under the black ceiling.
    "What was it all for?" Jess asked. "What sort of work did you do here?"
   "We were a food packaging and processing outfit. The big tank was part of a new
process we developed."
   "Why wasn't it completed?"
   "I don't remember."
   Jess played the light around some more, and held it on the floor. Footprints in the dust
led toward the far wall. They skirted a coil of heavy cable with cracked insulation, went
on into shadows. My face felt clammy and the palms of my hands were numb. There was
something waiting for me up ahead and the fear of it was like cold lead in my stomach. I
stepped off, following the trail, and Jess came behind, lighting the way.

                                              ***

    On the other side of the big unfinished tank there was a deep bay with a railed gallery.
I went up the companionway, along past open-sided cubicles with stainless steel tubs,
still bright under the dust. The stink was stronger here. The footprints turned in at the last
bay. I ducked under the low hood, and stopped that way, bent over, looking through a
framed opening that had been made by tearing out a wall. The light made complicated
shadows across a room full of machinery. Cables and tubes and pipes led from the
apparatus to a ten-foot tank like an iron lung. A hatch at one end of the tank was standing
open. I could see something inside; something that took hold of my guts like a giant bird's
claw and squeezed. I reached and swung the door back and the thing inside glided out on
a white porcelain slab and I was looking down at a man's face, dry and brown as carved
wood, with shaggy, dry hair, sandy brown, and a glint of teeth showing at the edge of the
withered lips.

                                              ***

    The body was nothing but purplish-brown leather stretched over bones. There were a
couple of dozen tiny wounds visible on the skin.
    "This is a life-support tank," Jess said. "It's been sabotaged. See the broken wires?"
    "This is just a kid," I said. "Not more than sixteen years old. The hair's long, but
there's no sign of a beard."
    "He appears to have desiccated perfectly in the sterile atmosphere."
    "The guy that sent us here didn't do it just to show us this," I said. "There's got to be
more. Give me a hand."
    I took hold of the right arm; it felt as hard and dry as last year's corn husks, and about
as heavy. There was nothing under the cadaver except a blackish stain on the porcelain.
    Jess played the light inside the tank, showed up a tangle of conduits and wires. The
body was on its back, one leg drawn up a little, the arms at the sides, the fists closed. One
fist looked a little different than the other. I bent over and looked.
    "He's got something in his hand," I said. I broke off one of the fingers getting it out. It
was a metal tube three inches long, half an inch in diameter. There was a screw cap at one
end. I twisted it off and pulled out tightly rolled papers.
    I unrolled them and a couple of faded newspaper clippings slid out into my hand. I
smoothed the top one out and read it:
   Police today continued their investigation into the mystery surrounding the discovery
of an unidentified body in a midtown hotel late yesterday. Although the apparent cause of
death was suicide from a small-caliber gas gun, a small wound in the roof of the mouth
indicated possible foul play. The victim, apparently in his late thirties, was dressed in the
uniform of a major in the UN Constabulary. UN Headquarters has so far declined to
comment. (IP)

    The next one was a bigger spread, two long columns in small, crabbed type that had a
familiar look to it. The headline read: MAN GUNNED IN DAYLIGHT MURDER. The
story under it told me that just before press time a gray Monojag had pulled up to the
Waldorf and a man in the back seat had poked a 6mm Bren gun out the window and fired
a full clip into a man in a brown overcoat coming out the revolving door. An employee of
the hotel had been slightly injured in the knee by a ricochet. Examination of the body
failed to produce any indication of the identity of the murdered man. The Monojag had
driven off and made good its escape. Police were following up several clues and expected
to make an arrest at any moment.
    I handed the clip to Jess and another one dropped. I picked it up and was looking at a
picture of myself.
    It wasn't a bad likeness, except that it showed a little more hair than seemed just right,
and there was a small scar high on the right cheekbone that didn't look familiar. And
there was something wrong with the expression. But the part that hit my nervous system
like a fire hose full of ice water was the caption:

                                              ***

   The lines below read:

   Civil Peace Under-Commissioner Arkwright announced today that record search has
so far failed to identify the visaless body discovered late yesterday in Mid-city Tube
Central.
   The corpse, which had been ignored for several hours by Tube patrons who assumed
the man was sleeping, is thought to be that of a criminal sought by Peace authorities for
violation of the Life Act. See story page 115.

   "What is it?" I said. "A gag, or a fake, or a little slip in the editorial department?"
   Jess was reading the clip. He didn't answer. I looked at the picture some more. It was
me, all right; and something about it bothered me. . . .
   "This is no fake," I said. "The guy in the picture was dead when they took it, all right."
   Jess glanced at the photo. "Why do you say that?"
   "You prop the body up, get the eyelids open, and set the lights to give you a little
reflection off the eyeball, tuck the tongue back inside and run a comb through the hair. It
looks OK—unless you know what to look for. The Chinese used to use the trick to keep
the Red Cross happy about the prisoners."
   "Horrible. Still, since he was dead when they found him, I suppose it's
understandable."
   "Maybe I'm a little slow. Back where I come from, a fellow doesn't often get a look at
his own obituary."
   Jess gave me his pained look. "You talk as if you imagined that was a picture of
yourself."
   "Imagine, hell! I know a picture of me when I see it."
   "The coincidence in appearanceis rather striking—"
   "Ha!"
   "The clips could refer to relatives of yours. Perhaps it's a vendetta—a rather fantastic
vendetta, I confess—"
   "It's a swell theory," I cut him off. "Except that I don't know anything about a feud,
and I never had a twin."
   "You had a grandfather."
   "Make that a little plainer."
   "Take another look at the date on the clip," he said. "It's over sixty years old."

                                             ***

   My face felt like something chipped out of ice, but I pushed it into a grin.
   "That clears that up. I'm not a fresh corpse on a slab down at the city morgue; I'm a
nice settled cadaver who's been pushing up daisies the bigger half of a century."
   Jess nodded as if that meant something. Maybe it did. I was still hanging in the air
feeling for the floor with my toes. There was another paper back of the clips. Jess put the
light on it while I unrolled it. It was covered with typing. I smoothed it out on the side of
the tank and read it:

   Number Three gave me most of it. The major almost had it, but he slipped somewhere
and they took him. He had the best chance of any of us. Less time had gone by and the
organization he was up against wasn't as solid yet, and his taping was better. He spent ten
years getting ready, but they nailed him. Three had a tough time, but he picked up his
cues and carried it a little farther, and from what he found out gave me the tip that
brought me here. But none of it would have happened except for Frazier. He was the only
man that could have handled the Plan. He knew what he was doing when he picked him
for the job.

   What I'm going to try may not work, and if it doesn't, I'll wind up like the major and
this poor kid here who never even had a name. But it's what I have to do. Maybe I'm
wasting my time writing long chatty letters to a guy that doesn't exist, never will exist.
But I'm banking on it that I'm not the last. OK, you read the note Number Three left, and
came here, just like I did. The box was empty when I found it, too, but his tip to try the
sealed wing was there. The paint I put back over it won't last more than ten years, and
that ought to be long enough—unlesshe finds you first. But that's where he outfoxed
himself.

  Maybe the old devil knew himself better than he thought he did. The story about
making the setup torture proof was a little far-fetched. He couldn't afford to let himself
know. Maybe he even saw this coming some day. But if he did, why—[word scratched
out].

   To hell with that. Let's keep this short. I've got plenty of time, my trail's covered and
cold, maybe he thinks I'm dead. I tried hard enough to make him think so. Five years I've
laid doggo now. But now it's time to move. Can't stall forever. Because I found it.

    It's a place you know—but maybe you don't. The systems are getting old. There are
gaps in my briefing. Number Three said there might be. He had it all, right up to the
beginning of the Plan. I remember the trial, and the start of the project, but it all seems a
little academic, like a story you've heard too many times. Or it did. Now that I've seen
what I have, it eats at me. I haven't had eighty years to forget, like he has. But now I'm
ready to make my try. Maybe he'll be ready for me, and I'll wash up on a beach a
thousand miles from there. But I've got to try it now, before I get any rustier. Maybe I've
already waited too long, but I had to wait, give myself every break there was—because if
I fail, there may not be a Number Five.

     Funny how I can't stick to the point. I guess I want to talk to somebody; but there's
nobody a man can trust. ETORP's stranglehold is getting tighter every day. Now they
have private cops with little black lapel badges crawling every street in the city, and
there's a lot of talk about some kind of legalized euthanasia, with ETORP running it on a
contract deal. Some organization. Maybe I ought to feel proud; maybe I do, in a way. But
I'll break it, or get killed. I hope I make it. I've got to make it. It may be the last chance.
Just on the off chance something goes wrong, I'm leaving this for you. If anybody else
finds this it's got to be him, and what good is a code with him? You'll know what to do
with it. And if you don't, you've forgotten too much—or never got it—

   It's too complicated for me. Things moved fast after my day. We would have called it
magic, and maybe it is. Black magic. Bad magic. But part of it's a fairy tale. I make a
lousy prince, but I have to try.

  Funny, when you read this, you'll know I didn't make it; but here it is: MUSKY
LAKE. Third, fifth, fourth. 247.

   Cute, huh?

   Now it's up to you. I'm going to put this in a place that will remind you what he's
turned into, what he did to this poor kid, and left him here for us to find. I'll give it to him
to pass to you.

   Good luck.

                                                7
   "It's in Wisconsin, a few miles out of a little place called Oatavie," I said. "A lake,
about half a mile across, in a high valley with pine woods backing up the slopes all
around. The name on the map was Otter Lake, but I always thought of it as Musky Lake.
That's where I caught my first one."
    Jess looked blank.
    "A fish, a big one; a fighter. I took him on a ten-pound fly line. It's a thing you don't
forget."
    "That area is heavily wooded, a desolation," Jess said. "Why would he send you
there?"
    "I guess that's what we have to find out," I said, and stopped, listening for a sound off
to the left, back in what had been a freight-loading bay—or maybe I just smelled
something wrong. I grabbed Jess' shoulder and just had time to say "Douse the light"
before there was a smash of sound and a blue-white glare lit up the room like an
operating theater and men in black were coming through double doors that were swung
back wide from the old freight platform. We froze, watching them fan out along both
walls.
    The spot we stood in was still in deep shadow that narrowed in on us as a big dolly-
mounted light came through the doors. I ducked, felt over the floor, came up with a
ragged piece of steel plate the size of my hand. There was a nice zone of shadow cast by
a column that widened out in the direction of the gallery. I threw the piece of plate high
and hard, right down the strip of shadow. It made a hell of a clatter when it hit. The light
swung off-side and we ducked out and ran for it.
    Jess took the lead. He reached the brick wall and went flat against it and had his gun
out, firing. I took the door in a running dive, and something boomed in the room behind
me, and Jess came through and fell against me and we went down together. Blood was
pumping from a wound in his back I couldn't have covered with my hand. I hooked his
arm and he was on his feet; his legs were like broken straws, but his knife was in his
hand.
    "Leave me. . . ." he sucked in air and it bubbled. " . . . . by the door. . . . I'll
greet. . . . the first one. . . . through. . . ."
    I slung him over my shoulder and ran. It was a fifty-foot straightaway; I made it to the
far end and got the door to the receptionist's room open and a gun roared behind me and
slugs kicked chunks out of the frame. The only light was a faint glow like moonlight
from the ceiling strips. I crossed the room in three jumps and my foot hit something
under the dust layer and I went down with Jess on top of me. I grabbed for him and my
hand slipped on blood that covered his left side. Big feet were pounding close. I grabbed
Jess by the belt and pitched him into the office behind me, dived after him. Maybe my
feet cleared the door before the Blackie slammed into the room.
    For a second or two there was a silence like the one just after you pull the grenade pin.
Then a heavy gun racketed outside the door, one of those high-speed jobs that sprays out
slugs like a fire hose. The back of the door over me blew off in a hail of plastic splinters.
I hugged the floor and heard him come across and I set myself and the door banged and
he was through, bringing the gun around, and I grabbed his ankle; he arced backward and
fell across Jess, kicking like a bass hooked in the eye. I caught his gun before it hit the
floor and swung to see Jess' grin fade and his face set; and the knife in his hand fell in the
dust, with Blackie blood on the blade.
    I backed through the outer office trying to look two ways at once, and heard a soft
sound and got the gun around in time and blew the face off a Blackie coming in from the
hall. I got in the doorway, and put another burst out through it and went flat and
somebody chewed up the door frame above my head. I could see the door Jess and I had
come in by, half an hour before, standing an inch ajar, ten feet along the hall. Maybe they
hadn't seen it yet in the bad light. If I was going to use it, it had to be now, before the
place got crowded again. I came up and out and swung the gun and got off part of a burst
before the Blackie who had been waiting for me blew the gun out of my hands. The
impact of the slugs knocked me back against the wall. I saw blood on my sleeve, and I
could tell I'd been hit in the body, but there was no pain, just a numbness spreading from
the left side of my belly. I wedged myself against the door frame and watched him come
across to me. He swung the gun over his shoulder by the strap and reached for me and I
slid a hand in under the wrist and grabbed him and brought him in close and turned him
and locked my forearm across his throat and broke up everything in there. I threw him
away from me and waded across to the open panel and through it and got it closed behind
me. For a few minutes, I leaned against the wall trying to talk myself out of lying down
on the floor and having a nice long rest. I watched the blood flowing down the leg of the
black scuba suit through a blackish haze full of little lights. There was some muffled
noise racketing near me, but it didn't seem to concern me any more. . . .
    . . . . I was lying down after all, and there was a lot of pounding going on, about six
inches from my head. I felt like I ought to be on my feet, going somewhere, and I got up
on all fours and discovered an anvil was chained to my left side. I fumbled with the place
where the hook was in for a couple of minutes and then decided it was too much trouble.
I moved and the anvil dragged and the hook cut into me and I was on my face again,
resting.
    OK, Dravek; show your stuff. Jess looked pretty good back there. Full of surprises,
Jess was. Blackies will find that cute door pretty soon. Must be a nice trail leading to it.
Shame to make it too easy for the mothering worms. Jess used to say that. Some Jess.
Knew what he was getting into. A swimmer, Jess was. Better to go that way than here. In
the dust. Helpful, at that. Caked up on my belly, along the arm. Not losing as much blood
now. Blood Jess gave me. Nice place he had, good bed to lie in. Like to be there
now. . . .
    I had four legs and four arms—or was it six of each? Tricky, figuring which ones to
use when. Used to wonder if a horse didn't ever get mixed up, kick himself in the ankle.
Four arms, and two legs, or maybe three. Wires all crossed, hard to make 'em work right.
Missed then, hurt my face.My God, but the pain is there now, Steve-boy. Help keep you
awake, your mind on your business. Left, right, use the leg, drag the other one, keep
going. . . .
                                              8
   I could hear the big generator pulling hard, and the sparks fountained out, and Frazier
was yelling, but I couldn't hear what he was saying. I was watching the two-inch strip of
cherry red weld stitching another plate into what was going to be a million-dollar setup.
Million, hell, a hundred million, over the next ten years! Nobody could match Frazier
when it came to tech management; he had a nose for that kind of talent that could comb a
potential genius out of a crowd of downy-cheeked grads quicker than I could spot a
shaved ace in a set of bicycles. The new process was going to turn the food-processing
racket on its ear, and Draco, Inc. would be sole proprietor. . . .
   Frazier was there, hauling at my arm and pointing across the room. The outer door was
open, a white glare against the dark, and I could see them silhouetted in it for a second
before it closed behind them, her tall and slim, and the little one beside her. They were
coming down into the big room and I waved and started that way and something up
above shifted and sparks hissed and somebody yelled and the garish flicker of the big
welding torch cut out. Frazier waved his arms and went over that way, fast. Somebody
was yelling: " . . . . it's hot! Get that plate clear, Brownie! Nulty, shut her down! All the
way down!"
   I got over to where a section of plate had dropped and sliced into the big cables ten
feet from the side of the welder. There was a lot of smoke and a stench like burned cork. I
got a couple of choice phrases ready for the framer who'd let it happen, and something
made me turn and she was there, right in the thick of the smoke, holding something up in
her hand, and I yelled and started toward her and saw her turn toward the sound of my
voice and. . . .
   I was on the floor with my face against cold stone and I could still feel the scream that
had ripped the inside out of my throat, and the churn of the generator was a deep
throbbing coming through the floor and I got my head up and was looking at the open
mouth of a manhole. There was a black toolcase lying beside it. It was Jess'. He'd left it
there, after he'd used it to unlock the outer door. I was in the maintenance room above the
big duct, and the rumbling noise was the pumps down below. I didn't remember how I'd
gotten there.
   I made a move to sit up and a big hook I'd forgotten about came down and ripped into
my belly. I curled over it and rode the current of fire for a while; then I got a hand on the
edge of the manhole and pulled. The fire was still burning, but I knew how to put it out.
Down below the water was cold and black, deep enough to drown all the pain of living.
   My face was over the opening; I could see a black glint down below.One more pull,
Dravek; you can do it . One arm wasn't helping much, but who needs two arms? I used
the good knee and felt my chest go over the edge and I was sliding down and then falling
into soft black that closed over me. . . .

                                             ***

   The shock brought me out of it. For a while—maybe a few seconds, maybe longer—I
rolled with the turbulence. Then I slammed something hard and the pain went clear
through me from the top of my head to the end of my toes; and all of a sudden I knew I
was in a duct, being carried along by the high-pressure stream, with my head banging the
walls at regular intervals. I felt the duct widen, and I remembered the louvers ahead and
got a hand on the water jets and pointed myself upstream and gave them a blast. I
slammed the louvers hard, hung up there for a second or two—then slid between them
and was out in the deep river, rolling end over end.
    The cold was cutting through the suit, and I groped a little and thumbed the heat
control up some, but not too much, because a little low-temperature anesthesia was a
good idea for right then.
    While I was doing all this, the river was taking me along to wherever it was going,
which even in this day of improved methods for propagating human misery was probably
the sea. I've been a sailor, but I never liked the idea of Davy Jones's locker. I got my head
pointed upstream again and used my jets and steered for the right side of the channel. It
wasn't easy to maneuver, because one leg seemed to be dead from the hip down, and the
left arm had something wrong with it. The fire in my belly didn't seem important right
then. I figured I'd get to think about it plenty, later, if there was a later.
    I used the jets and edged forward and in less than a minute found an iron rung and
held on. I had one good leg, and about an arm and a half; the fingers on the left one didn't
seem to want to close like they should. I got an overhead grip and pulled up and got a toe
on a rung and made another foot. This went on for a long time. Two or three times I
forgot what I was doing and started to slide back, but each time an instinct that used to
keep monkeys from falling out of trees made my hand grab and hold on.
    The time came when I reached and there wasn't any rung, or any wall, and that seemed
like a dirty shame and I went on feeling the air for about as long as it takes to light a slow
fire under a missionary and watch it burn down. After a while I got a grip with a
fingernail and hauled the legs up over the edge, which was no harder than swinging a
piano in my teeth, and fell a couple of feet. That put me where I'd been trying to get: on
my back in an empty street, with four slugs in me and cops looking for me, waiting to
finish the job.
    I crawled over to the nearest wall and lay against it and tried to check myself over.
The trouble with the arm seemed to be due to a hole I could stick the end of my little
finger in, just below the elbow. The leg was a little more complicated. The hip was
broken up, but there was no wound on the outside; the suit was intact there. That meant
the slug had gone in through the belly and hit the pelvic bone from the inside.
    That brought me to the big one. I got my hand inside the suit just far enough to feel
what I knew was there, and passed out cold.
    When I came out of that one, I was lying on my side kissing cold pavement and
watching someone ducking along in the shadows cast by a light on a tall pole far up the
street. I thought about reaching for the little gadget Jess had told me was a reliable short-
range killer, but nothing happened. I was part of the stone; just an eye peering back from
that last thin edge, watching the show.
    The oncoming figure went into a shadow that was too black to see through and came
out, closer, and skittered across the street to my side and came along to me and stopped
and looked both ways before she looked down. It was Minka, the girl with the blue hair. I
started to open my mouth to give her my usual cheery greeting, and her face swelled up
and spread until it blanked out the light and I gave it all up and let the darkness take me.
                                              9
    Voices were talking.
    " . . . . say this cull's a Blackie-twister! That makes him fast freight!"
    "Don't be hasty. It's a prime hulk. This is no Dirtie. He'll fetch top price from a
Forkwaters stiff-hack, once he's patched a little—"
    "The insides are messed up bad, Darklord. It wouldn't be worth the expense to
rebuild—"
    "I saidpatch , Acey! Caveat empty, as the old saying goes. If he's moved quickly,
who's to know?"
    "I say slice him. The heart alone—"
    "Have you no sense of the fitness of things? Look at that skin! As white and smooth as
a star-lady's rump." A meaty chuckle. "And I speak from first hand. . . ." The chuckle
went out of the voice and a hard note came in. "But where's his cullmark, eh? Mmmmm?
He must have his tattoo; he must have. He must. He. . . ."
    "Too much talk! Talk makes trouble. Cut 'em pretty and they'll fetch enough. Don't get
greedy, that's the secret. Don't get greedy and don't listen to talk. He's no trimmed Cruster
on a drop. There's something chancy about this weed. I say slice him, slice him fine!"
    "Seems a pity, with wholemeat units bringing what they do; but perhaps you're right.
Very well, Acey; limb and gut, I think, and of course, epidermal—but cut it nicely, no
telltales—"
    Then I heard a new voice, one I'd heard before, somewhere.
    " . . . . that filthy little slicer touch him!"
    "My dear, you do Acey a disservice! He's the finest technician in the business,
ETORP-trained, mind you! If it hadn't been for a trifling indiscretion in certain informal
arrangements. . . ."
    "Where's Jess?"
    "Who knows? We found only this one—what they left of him."
    "Did he talk?"
    "My dear, he was fully occupied with surviving."
    "I want him fixed! You know I can pay!"
    "Ah, but will you pay in negotiable coin?"
    "Just fix him!"
    "Ah, Minky-pet, grudging affection is cold comfort to a tenderhearted man like
myself, hardly worth the bartering for. . . ." Heavy breathing. "Well, Minky-love. And
after you've been so precious formal with good Uncle Abdullah. . . ."
    "Do something for him! Can't you see he's bleeding to death?"
    "Patience, love. This hulk is in pitiable condition. It requires expensive internals. The
liver is a ruin; two of those nasty little darts have shredded it into sausage! Now where
am I to find a sound liver on such notice? Such organs don't grow on trees—"
    "Lucky for you they grow on men. You've got plenty of those."
    "You'd have me slice one of my own, for the benefit of this stranger?"
    "No. For the benefit of your own greasy flesh!"
    "Hmmm. Frankly, and most directly put. As it happens, I have a fine fresh liver on
hand, just gutted out, a trifle large for the trade, but this big fellow shouldn't mind that."
    "Give him whatever he needs. Just fix him, I don't care how you do it!"
    There was more talk after that, but I wasn't paying much attention—the pain was
rising around me like pouring day at a brass foundry. I heard some small, whimpery
sounds, figured out they were coming from me, tried to cut them out, gave up, and
groaned out loud. Somebody was hauling at my arm, somebody was sawing off my leg. It
didn't seem to matter much. I was off somewhere in the rosy distance now, floating on a
nice soft cloud with just a few needles in it that poked me when I tried to move.
Somebody came along with a skinning knife then, and cut me into slices and stretched
them out in the sun to dry, and somebody else collected the slices and sewed them back
together, swearing all the while. It didn't interest me a lot; but after a while the voices got
louder, more insistent, and I opened my mouth to tell them to go away and then there was
a thick smell like all the hospital corridors I ever smelled dumped in my face at once and
the cloud faded into a thin mist that closed over me and shut out the light and the sound
and I spun back down into nothingness.
                                             10
   I woke up propped in a bed, blinking across at a room lit like the seduction scene
fromDon Giovanni . There was a lot of flowery gauze curtain, pale yellow velvet drapes
pulled back from floor-to-ceiling glass, a tangerine rug, a couple of small paintings that
were swirls of pink and orange and burnt umber, a few sticks of furniture that looked as if
they would disappear if you pushed the right button.
   Minka was sitting in one of the chairs. She looked better minus the orange paint and
the blue hair and the ribbons. There was a filmy toga-like wrap around her now, that
showed off her figure better than a shower bath. Her hair was a soft brown, and her
mouth looked soft and young without the paint. I opened my mouth to say hello and a
grunt came out. She looked up.
   "How is it?" Her voice was soft, like somebody who's been there herself.
   "A little confused," I said. "But resting comfortably." It came out in a weak chirp, like
a baby bird. I had to lie back and rest up after the effort.
   She was standing by the bed. "Jess?" she said.
   "Dead."
   "I guess I knew; but they said you couldn't have come that far alone, with all those
spinners in you."
   I had a sudden thought and moved a hand down, not without a certain effort, and felt a
leg where a leg ought to be.
   "You're all right now," she said. "That little man with the rat's eyes is a wizard."
   "I seem to remember something about needing some replacement parts."
   "He grafted a liver, and some nerve tissue, and the femoral artery was in bad shape. It
was luck he had stock on hand. There was a man, a giant, who'd been killed just a few
hours before."
   I let that one hang in the air. She went away then, and I had another nice nap. I woke
up hungry, and she fed me soup. I ate it and watched her face. She was a girl with lots on
her mind.
   When the soup was gone, she made a lot out of fluffing pillows and getting the light
just right. Then she lit up a dope stick and said, "Why did you do it?"
   "There was some information I wanted. I had an idea I might find it there."
   "And did you?"
   "I'm not sure."
   "Jess thought you knew something that was very important for—certain people."
   "He was wrong about that."
   "Who are you? Where did you come from?" She sounded as if she hated to ask the
question and didn't want to know the answer.
   "This is going to sound a little screwy," I said. "But I'm not sure about that either."
   "You mean—amnesia?"
   "Maybe that's what you'd call it. I know my name, and I can tie my own shoes.
Outside of that. . . ."
   "Jess said he found you in the park. He said a cutter squad attacked you and
you. . . . killed them with your bare hands."
    "That's where it starts. Before that it's a little mixed up. I thought I had a few clues, but
I seem to be two other guys."
    "You're a strange man. You have a strange way of talking—and not only the accent.
You joke about death and suffering."
    "I was hoping maybe you could tell me something useful on those subjects."
    "What do you mean?"
    "About some of the funny angles of all this. About why Jess thought I was important
enough to bring home for a souvenir, and why the cops are after me."
    "I know what he told me," she said. "That's all. About the rest—I don't know
anything."
    "You must have a few ideas. You paid the fat man's price."
    She looked at me and a shudder took her and shook her like a dog shakes a rat.
    "I'm sorry," I said. "We're a cagey pair, sparring around and trying to sneak a look at
the other fellow's hand. Why don't we try it showdown?"
    "I've told you all I can." She looked past me. Her face was tight.
    "Sure," I said. "In that case maybe I'd better catch another few winks. We wouldn't
want all that fine craftsmanship to go to waste."
                                             11
   I did a lot of sleeping during the next few days. It might have been something the girl
put in my soup—or maybe it was just Mother Nature, stitching me back together. There
were a lot of things I didn't care for in the Twenty-second Century, but their medicine
was as far ahead of the old familiar GP as a 747 was a dog cart. Minka stayed close,
doing nurse's chores with a lot of efficiency and as little conversation as possible. Quite a
few days slipped by, while I lay on my back and watched the clouds out beyond a
balcony like Jess' and didn't think about a lot of things. Then one evening I had a sudden
urge to get out of bed and sample some fresh air.
   I got a leg over the side of the bed and that worked OK so I stood up and started across
toward the columns. I was halfway there when Minka came into the room.
   "What are you doing?" She was right there, with an arm around me, propping me up.
"Are you trying to kill yourself?"
   Her hand was against my bare back; it was smooth and soft and warm. The arm that
went with it was nice, too. I put an arm around her, pulled her to me.
   "Are you out of your mind. . . . ?" she whispered. But she didn't pull away. Up close
like this I could smell the faint perfume of her hair. My hands were on the slimness of her
waist, and I moved them down over the curve of hips that were the way hips ought to be.
The tissue paper thing she was wearing got in my way and I threw it into the corner. Then
her arms were around my neck, and her body was against mine, and her skin was like the
finest silk ever spun, and her lips were as soft as a whisper in the dark.
   "Steve," she said in my ear. "Oh, Steve. . . ."
                                             12
    "You're a strange, savage man," Minka said. She was lying on her side on the bed
looking at me, and the moonlight from the terrace reflected in her eyes and made pale
highlights in her hair. "I've never known a man like you, Steve."
    "You don't know me now," I said. "I don't know myself."
    "I brought you here because I wanted to learn things from you. But I don't care about
that, now."
    "I've got to go, Minka. You know that."
    "Stay here, Steve. You'll be safe here. Out there they'll kill you."
    "Out there is where the answers are."
    "Jess wanted answers—and they killed him. Why not forget all that—"
    "There are places I've got to go, things that want me to do them."
    "Things that are more important than what we might have together?" In the pale light
her body glowed like ivory.
    "You're all the woman a man could want," I said. "But this is something I have to do."
    "Why? Do you think you can change the world, like Jess did? You can't, Steve. No
one man can. We've made this world what it is. It's the way we wanted it: safe,
comfortable, plenty of food for all, plenty of leisure, a long life—for those who don't rock
the boat. You've been dirtside; you've seen how they live there. Do you want to go back
to that?"
    "I'm no world-saver, Minka. But I don't like unfinished business."
    "They've lost your trail; they'll never find you! I can get you a new tag, a cullmark—
everything—"
    I shook my head.
    "Why are you doing this? What could you possibly learn that would be worth risking
your life for?"
    "It's something I have to do for a friend. He's counting on me."
    She laughed, not a pretty laugh. "And you wouldn't be the one to let a friend down,
would you, Steve?"
                                             13
   I left the next afternoon, briefed to the ears, armed with a neat little watch-pocket
blaster, and feeling better than anybody had a right to, two weeks after having new
insides installed. I rode an elevator that dropped so fast my stomach was ready to climb
out and have a look by the time the door opened and palmed me out onto a pavement
halfway between a street and a corridor. A cold light like a winter afternoon was filtering
down from a high glass roof. There were lots of people, pushing along on important
business; the grim looks on their faces were normal, but the clothes they wore were like
something from Westercon II. A tired-looking fellow in bulbous, color-slashed bloomers
pushed past me using his elbow like an experienced commuter. A fellow in baggy-kneed
tights and floppy sleeves jostled a woman in pink ruffs out of his way; she passed it on to
a young kid in a tight coverall with dummy laces at the wrists and shins. Nobody looked
at me. I felt like I was back home.
   I moved off along the walk, mingled with men in capes and three-cornered hats,
women in all-over ruffles and stand-up lace collars and some stripped to the waist and
painted like barber poles, and a few of both sexes wrapped in old bed-sheets. They
looked like survivors of a three-day fancy-dress ball.
   There were signs plastered over the walls in screaming pink and electroshock blue and
agony yellow. I picked one that read DRINK in purple script and turned in at what
seemed to be an open doorway, but something banged me on the nose like a glass wall,
and something else wentbzapp! and I was back out on the pavement. To hell with it. I
didn't need a drink anyway.
   Up ahead, there was a big TV screen ten feet square sticking out over the walk, with
words and pictures flickering across it. Letters across the top said "THRVEE MALL
WEST-OFCL." I watched it for a minute while quick flashes of strange faces and factory
smokestacks and desert landscapes and explosions came and went over subtitles in
condensed headline prose.
   A little farther along I came to what Minka had told me to look for: A wide frosted-
glass front over blank doors with cryptic signs that said things like "PVR SLD II (9)" and
"OUT—Z99-over."
   I went through one of the doors and was in a narrow chute like the bull comes out of,
with a turnstile blocking it. There was a slot at one side about the right size for a silver
dollar, but I didn't have a silver dollar. I leaned on it and it leaned back. There was
nobody around to ask questions of, even if I'd been in the mood to attract attention that
way. I braced a foot against the crossbar and tried again. Something inside made little
tinkly sounds and it spun free.
   Ten feet beyond it, the passage right-angled and I was looking at a blank screen
dazzling with little points of light. There were a lot of buttons beside it. I pushed a couple
of them, as instructed, and said: "Routing for West Bore."
   The screen blipped red and white and blanked. So much for the kind of cooperation I
get out of inanimate objects. I opened my mouth to ask the question again, louder, and
something clacked behind me and I did a fast turn and a female came out of a doorway.
She had a hard, good-looking face with no paint except a green dot on her right cheek and
dull silver on her lips. Her figure looked good enough, what I could see of it under a gray
overall.
   "Passengers are restricted—" she started her pitch.
   "I'll bet they are, gorgeous," I cut it off. "I asked it a question and it gave me a smart
answer. Maybe you can do better." Her expression slid sideways a little, not quite as
cocky now, but ready to be, as soon as she got the lie of the land. "The entry monitor
indicates an all-categories tag," she said in a tone that had shifted a couple of points
toward civil. That would be a reference to the sounds of breaking metal that had come out
of the turnstile when I leaned on it.
   "Right," I gave her a significant look. "You know what that means."
   She didn't meet my eye. "You're with the Commission?" she tried to sound brisk but
there was just a hint of a quaver in her voice.
   "Would I be here if I wasn't?"
   "If I may record your credentials—as a matter of routine—"
   "We're dispensing with the routine, Miss—what was that name?"
   "Gerda. I. L. Gerda, nine-three, Second, provisional."
   "All right, Gerda, let's not waste the Commission's time."
   "If you'll give me your authority reference—"
   "This is hush-hush," I said. "Off the record. If it wasn't I wouldn't need you, would I,
Gerda?" I sweetened it with the sort of smile her turnkey personality seemed to call for.
   She twitched a couple of cheek muscles at me and said, "If you'll come this way. . . ."
   I followed a nice hip action along the corridor to an iron gate, and about then I noticed
a bell dinging somewhere in the distance.
   "What is it, Gerda, a cross?" I grabbed her arm and she tried to kick me. She was
looking mean enough to bite, now.
   "You entered on a forged tag," she'd gone shrill on me. "Don't try to leave!" I pushed
her out of the way and she went for my eyes, and I slapped her, hard. Her nose started to
bleed. Something clanged back of the grill and a red light went on. Another bell racketed,
nearby.
   "Don't dare leave here," Miss Gerda squalled. "You're under criminal arrest!"
   "Sorry," I said. "As it happens, I'm late for a Ping-Pong date at the YW. Better open it,
Gerda."
   Her eyes hated me, but she pushed the right spot and the gate snapped back. There was
a sound from back the way I'd come and the girl twisted and threw herself down and
something wentssstt! and a gnat's wing brushed my cheek and kicked a chip out of the
wall. I got a quick flash of two men in tight black coming through the door twenty yards
back along the passage. I cleared the gate just as a second shot whanged off, kicked it
shut, and ran like hell.
                                            14
    An hour and a half of fast travel later I stepped out into a concourse crowded with
people looking like travelers have looked ever since home got to be a place to get away
from. I saw a few lads in dark uniforms standing here and there eye-balling the scene, but
the uniforms were gray and had MVNT CNTRL lettered on their pocket patches. But
they packed guns, just like real Blackies.
    There was a railing on the right, and below it a spread of pavement with a rank of big
torpedoes lit up like Christmas trees. Little cars like U-dodge-ems were ducking around
between them, ferrying passengers. I went along the gallery, took the down escalator.
Two of the men in gray were standing at the bottom looking at faces; two pairs of eyes lit
on me. I felt them all the way down and across the tarmac, but it must have just been my
conscience bothering me. They let me go.
    I crossed the big glassed-in concourse full of people and flashing lights and noise,
went down a sloping ramp and was outside, under open sky. There weren't many people
here. In the distance, the city lights were a jeweled wall.
    The signs here weren't much help. Over on the left, beyond half a dozen sets of what
could have been roller-coaster rails, something whooshed and a low-slung vehicle riding
on two fore-and-aft-mounted wheels came slamming down the track and stopped and the
lid popped up and a fat man and a thin woman got in. It racketed off and another one
came down the line and curbed itself.
    There was a low rail between me and the cars. I jumped it, went along a narrow strip
that looked as if it might not electrocute me; I went around the back of the car and put a
hand on the door and behind me a cool voice said, "Stop there."
    I turned around, not too fast. Two gray uniforms were coming over, relaxed, taking
their time. One of them said, "Movement control," and the other one said, "Step over
here." No pleases and thank-you's for these boys.
    I came around the car and across in the indicated direction. The one on the left went
past me toward the car, which put me between them and a yard from his partner. I
doubled my fist and hit him low in the stomach and grabbed the front of the gray blouse
and swung him around. The other one had heard something; he came around, reaching for
his hip. I threw his friend at him and socked him in the throat and vaulted into the car and
slapped the big red button and the wheels screamed and I was off.

                                            ***

    For the first hour I drove with my shoulders tight, listening for the sirens or whatever
they might have thought up to replace them in this new, improved-model world. Then I
had a thought that cheered me some. This was an Autopike; the coppers probably had
ways of pinpointing any vehicle operating on it anywhere—as long as he was locked into
the system. But I was on manual. As long as I stayed with the pack, there was no way to
pick me out—maybe.
    I held the car at 200 mph for five hours. About a hundred miles northwest of where the
little map unrolling on the dash screen said the sprawl of light called Chago was, I pulled
off on a lay-by marked with big arrows of luminous rose paint. Inside my left jacket cuff
there was a plastic button Minka had put there to fool the scanners. I ripped it loose and
tossed it on the floor. Then I flipped the controls to AUTO and hopped out. The car
jumped off from the rail and curveted on her two wheels along the metal strip in the road,
angled out, and joined the main lane, picking up speed fast, running empty. She went
over the rise howling, with her controls pegged at top emergency speed. I went over the
guard rail and down a grip on the edge and felt for a toehold and started down.

                                              ***

   By the time the sun was an hour in the sky, I was five miles north of the pike, working
my way through a swampy patch toward higher ground north and west of me. The years
had made a lot of difference in what had been farming country and tame woods back in
my hunting days. Now it had the look of a forest primeval. The oaks and elms and maples
were four feet across at the base, and there was a new tree I'd never seen before, a
tapered, smooth-barked conifer that probably all started from a salted nut dropped by a
tourist along the roadside. It was late in the year, later than the temperature would make
you think. Leaves were already turning red, and the smell of fall was in the air.
   This part of the route was easy; I steered by the sun, stayed away from the right-of-
way of the few roads I came to that had cars on them. It seemed that the national passion
for touring the country in the family station wagon had finally worked itself out. People
either stayed in their hives, close to the buttons they needed to push for life's necessities,
or did their traveling by air or cross-country tube. I saw a few high contrails, and once a
copter whiffled past a mile away at treetop level; but whatever the boys used to sniff out
fugitives wasn't geared to a guy without the little telltale set in the bone back of the ear. I
was an untagged man, and as invisible to them as an Indian was to General Braddock.
   Just before noon I crossed a strip of broken concrete with a rusted sign fallen on its
face that seemed to say US 30 A. As well as I could remember the map, that would put
me somewhere to the east of Rockford. I had a full set of blisters, but otherwise was
holding up swell. The leg gave me a little trouble, but Minka had told me that I was
walking on the best permanent-oil titanium alloy hip joint money could buy, so I let that
thought console me.
   Late in the afternoon a pair of copters came pretty close, crisscrossing the country to
the north. They seemed to have a general idea where I was, and that worried me some;
but maybe it was just coincidence. They worked their way on to the east and I had the
world to myself again.
   Just before sunset I came up onto a clear stretch covered with concrete foundations
and broken-down chimneys and a few walls still standing, well blacked by a fire. Letters
cut into a piece of cornice from what would have been the town's best building said
BRODHEAD NATIONAL BANK. That put me over the line into Wisconsin, about
thirty miles south of where I wanted to be.
   I spent the night there, on the back porch of a brick house at the north edge of town. It
wasn't that it was more comfortable than a nest in the woods, but maybe by then I was
getting a little lonely. And even in ruins, the little town was something that was almost
familiar.
   I went on before the sun was up, hit a little stream west of the town, followed it
northwest. About noon I saw an airplane, a short-coupled job with vertical jets that made
a big noise and curled leaves in the tops of the trees. It went past, a quarter of a mile north
of me, moving slow enough to make me stand under a tree and pretend to be a natural
formation. A few minutes later, I crossed another road trace and was into rising ground. I
picked a route along a ravine between wooded ridges and in the next hour hit the dirt
three times when little one-seater aircraft came whistling over at low altitude. It began to
look as if the Blackies were closing in on me. How, I didn't know. There didn't seem to
be any posses combing the underbrush with dogs so far; that was something. I went on,
keeping to cover now. But I was starting to feel hemmed in.

                                              ***

   By midafternoon I had crossed three ridges and was coming down into a valley that
had a half-familiar look. The trees were a hundred years bigger than they should have
been, but otherwise it all looked just the way it had the last time.
   I couldn't exactly place the last time.
   I went on down to a gravel strip that had been a road, thought it over and tried the left-
hand direction and ten minutes later recognized the turn-off that led up to Musky Lake.
   Things got a little more rugged after that. Twilight was coming on, and it was chilly
up here on the high ground. There was a lot of loose shale that made the footing tricky,
and the light was no help. It took me an hour to reach the top of the ridge. The growth
was heavy here. I picked a route back toward where the road sliced through and saw a
light through the trees and hit the dirt. It seemed that Musky Lake wasn't the unspoiled
wilderness it was in the old days, after all.
   I counted the lights shining through the dusk. There were eight of them, spaced at
regular intervals on the other side of the rise of ground ahead. I was still admiring this
view when something big and dark with lots of blue and red navigation lights whiffled
overhead and disappeared over the ridge. The place I was heading for seemed to be a
popular spot with the airborne set—and the look of the jobs I'd seen spelled military.
   In front of me, a deep black shadow angled across my route, the same gully that I'd
bridged once with a pine log. The log was gone, and I had to go down through a healthy
growth of brambles to get across it, but up ahead was the ridge, and on the other side of it
was the spot I was aiming at. I made it in another five minutes and pushed my face out
between broken rock to take my first look at what had been the prettiest spot this side of
Wales, with the lake in the center like a star sapphire laid out on green velvet.
   It wasn't like that now. In the late twilight I could see trees that thinned out for fifty
feet down the rocky slope to a stretch of open ground a hundred feet wide and a cluster of
buildings beyond, all of it lit like a prison yard on hanging night.

                                              ***

   It was full dark now, with no moon. A couple more copters had flitted overhead, and a
big VTOL job had made a noisy descent a couple of miles away, on the other side of the
valley.
   I backed off below the ridge line and started around. An hour later I was on the east
side of the valley, looking up at a tall building with lots of windows with lights behind
them, and fenced grounds all around. The rest of the enclosure seemed to be nothing but
virgin forest. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to wall in a patch of woods no
different than the seventy miles of the same thing I'd traveled through for a day and two
nights getting here. Maybe the place had been converted into a private resort for the big
shots of this day and age. The big building would be the ritzy hotel, and the blockhouses
over on the other side were the servants' quarters. And the air traffic wasn't looking for
me; they were ferrying the rich tourists in to enjoy a rustic weekend back of a wall that
kept the peasants out.
   It was a swell theory, but I still kept my head down and looked for the angle.
   It took me half an hour to find a route in the dark. The old drainage ditch, choked level
with weeds, was it. It wasn't over two feet deep where it went between the lights. I
hugged the dirt and did it with my fingers and toes, an inch at a time. Fifteen minutes of
this put me far enough inside the lights to risk sticking my head up. The coast was clear. I
moved off in the cover of some deep grass to take a closer look at the big building.

                                             ***

    An eight-foot fence made of black iron spears with big barbed heads was only the first
obstacle. Beyond the bars a sweep of manicured lawn broke like green surf against a line
of tailored shrubbery, and back of every clump a light was placed just right to cover a
section of the perimeter. There were Blackies here—squads of them, pacing around the
grounds like a bunch of butlers looking for the duchess's lost diamond choker. They had
packs clipped to their belts with wires leading to the sides of their helmets, and I didn't
need a set of technical specs to tell that these were something that worked a lot better
than leashed bloodhounds. I stepped on a dry stick about then and two of the boys turned
and started drifting my way. I backed out softer-footed than the time I stumbled into a
cave that had a sleeping cougar in it, and moved back a couple of hundred yards into deep
woods.
    It took me an hour to scout all the way around the fence. It enclosed about fifty acres
of park with the fairy palace in the middle and a nice little pad for short take-off aircraft
at one side, well stocked with everything from one-man hoppers to a deep-bellied
heavyweight big enough to carry a full battalion complete with artillery. Nothing I saw
gave me any encouragement.
    About then I noticed some activity over on the left, not far from where I'd made my
first approach. A section of fence swung out and a small air-cushion car came through it
and moved along in a puddle of yellow-white made by its bow and stern lights and the
gate closed again. There was nothing in that for me.
    The car came along my way, and I faded back along a sort of trail until it dawned on
me it was using the same trail. I did a fade into the brush then, and lay flat with my cheek
in the dirt while it whirled its dirt cloud past and snorted on off toward the barracks
across the valley.
    I stayed there for a while and told myself I was watching the lights moving beyond the
fence. After a while my chin bumped the ground and woke me up. I got up and moved
back deeper into the woods, with a vague kind of idea of finding a nice dark spot to hole
up in and nap until the next brain wave hit me.
   The going was easier in among the big timber. There was a slight downward drift to
the ground, and not much in the way of underbrush. Then I saw a gleam ahead that
looked like riffled water with moonlight on it and came down the last slope and clear of
the trees and was looking at Musky Lake.

                                             ***

    For a long, timeless minute I looked out across the water and listened to the old
voices, whispering to me over all the years, as if no time had passed at all. From here,
you couldn't see the barracks or the fenced-in tower; just the lake, stretching to the far
shore with the rising wall of big pines behind it, and over to the left the point where the
cabin had stood, the one Frazier and I built barehanded one summer just after the war. I
looked toward it and at first the shadows there under the big trees fooled me, and then I
blinked hard and was still seeing the same thing. The cabin was still standing, right where
we'd left it.
    I took the path along the soft ground at the edge of the water, and had the feeling that
if I blinked again, it would go away. I came up on it from the left, the way we used to
come down from shooting in the woods, and even the melon patch was still there, a little
overgrown, but clear enough in the moonlight. The dock was off to the right, and the old
flat-bottomed skiff was tied up at the end of it, with the bow offshore, the way I'd always
anchored her. I had the damnedest impulse to yell and see if Frazier would come out the
door, waving a jug and telling me to hurry up, the serious drinking was about to
begin. . . .
    I came up with the little gun in my hand, skirted the place at a hundred yards, then
worked my way in, ready to drop or shoot first, whichever way it worked out. Fifty feet
from the cabin I lay flat and watched the back windows. Fifteen minutes went by, with
nothing but a few mosquitoes whining around my head to prove I wasn't a ghost. Part of
that shrewd calculating machine that was what passed for the Dravek intelligence was
telling me I was taking chances, wasting time leafing through the faded gardenias of my
yesterdays; but another part didn't give a damn. This was a place I knew, that was part of
my life, the life I remembered. From here, strange people like Jess and strange places like
the slum they called dirtside and man-eating corporations called ETORP seemed like
something you'd think up in the dark hours of the night after too much lobster and
fruitcake.
    I made my final approach standing up. If anybody had the place staked out they could
nail me as well creeping as walking, as long as I was coming their way. But nobody
jumped out and put a spotlight in my eyes. I came around the side of the cabin and heard
a bullfrog say moo, like a cow, down by the water. There was a small window to the left
of the door. I came up to it and looked in, saw nothing but some reflected moonlight,
went on past it to the door. It opened without an argument. The hinges squeaked; they
always squeaked.
    Inside nothing had changed, not even the dust on the floor or the soot on the ceiling
above the fireplace. I tucked my toy gun away and started in to search the place.
                                            ***

   An hour later the sky was beginning to gray up and I had covered the one-room cabin
three times and turned up nothing.
   I sat on the edge of the bunk and chewed my teeth and tried to be as smart as the note-
writer expected me to be. He said as soon as I got here I'd know where to look.
   The cabin was a lousy place to hide anything. The walls were plain one-inch ship-
lapped redwood, with open studs, no paneling inside. The ceiling was bare rafters and
boards. There was one cupboard, with a few chipped plates and cups in it. The fireplace
had a liberal drift of ashes and a few chips of charred wood. The bathroom had nothing
but what you'd expect, and the flush tank hadn't yielded any secrets suspended by a string
from the float, or inside it. And if there were any compartments under the floor, they
weren't anything I'd had a hand in. The trick drawer back of the strongbox in my office
had been the extent of my instinct for conspiracy.
   A little pale light was coming in past the red-and-white checked curtains that had been
some short-term girlfriend's idea of woodsy atmosphere. I went over to the door and
eased it open and stepped out and looked out across the lake and just like that, I had it.
                                            15
   It was one of those days that stick in your mind down through the years; a hot day,
with a breeze on the lake that riffled the surface just enough to bring the bass out of the
deep hollows and up from under the sunken logs to snap at the big juicy flies the wind
was bringing out over the water. Frazier and I had landed half a boat full before the wind
died and they stopped hitting. The two girls—Gwen and Rosanne—had laid out a nice
table while we cleaned the haul and packed what we couldn't eat in the freezer. After
dinner we went down to the shore and sat under the trees and finished off the bottle—the
third bottle of the day. We had a big laugh with it: the third fifth on the Fourth of July.
   There'd been a big pine stump outside the cabin. We counted the rings; two hundred
and forty-seven. Then we buried the dead soldier under it, with full military honors. . . .

                                            ***

   It took me under ten minutes to find the stump, grub away enough packed leaves and
hard dirt to find the gap down among the roots and pull out the bottle. The label was gone
and the metal screw cap had been replaced with a hard, waxy plug, but it looked like the
same bottle. I held it up to the light and made out something inside it, pale through the
brown glass.
   My mouth felt a little dry and my pulse was rocking my hand a little, but otherwise
there was just the feeling of unnatural awareness you get when all the days of anticipation
focus down to the second you've been working toward. I made a couple of tries to get the
sealing wax loose, then cracked the neck off the bottle and reached in and teased the
paper out.
   It was just one sheet, folded and rolled, and all it had on it was two words:

   COUGAR CAVE
                                             16
   It was a stiff half-hour's climb up through dense timber to the escarpment on the east
side of the valley where the bare rock pushed up a hundred and fifty feet higher than it
did anywhere else along the rim. There were boulders there as big as London buses, piled
where the glacier had left them; and in among them there were a lot of cozy little caves
where Frazier and I had flushed everything from weasels to a mothy brown bear. The one
where I'd met the cougar was up high, with an approach across a rockface that made it too
hard to get to to interest most critters, or most hunters. The time I'd gone up there I was
chasing a wolverine with a 30-30 slug in him who didn't know when to lie down and be
dead. It wasn't the kind of chore that was any fun; I did it because if I hadn't, a long line
of hunting Draveks would have come out of their graves spinning like roulette wheels. I
went up soft and easy and my carcajou was there, a yard inside the overhang, dead. I had
one foot up to make the big mistake when I smelled cat and saw him, curled up in the
back, logy after a kill maybe, just starting to move. I faded back and slid all the way to
the bottom and spent the next week growing new skin on my palms and the seat of my
pants. I'd never been back.
   The sun was making rose-colored patterns up high on the rockface. I went up fast, not
being any fonder of the climb than the last time, but even less fond of doing it in broad
daylight. I made it to the ledge in ten minutes and came up over it and went flat, and
looked back into shadows. It was no different than the last time, except for no kitty.
   Inside, there was the same smell of wet rock and animal droppings that all these caves
had. I had to duck to get in past the outer vestibule where the wolverine had died, and
was in a bigger chamber, about right for garaging a VW, if you could get it inside. The
floor here was the dirt that had drifted in during the last few thousand years, more or less
smooth-packed; the walls slanted up to a craggy ceiling with air spaces with roots
showing in them. That gave me enough light to show me that things were just like I left
them, without a hiding place for anything bigger than an aspirin. If I was hoping to find a
ten-volume journal telling me what it was all about, I was out of luck.
   The trip in had taken forty minutes; the search consumed another thirty seconds. I
prowled the cave again, used up that odd half minute. This was the end of the line. It had
been a swell chase up to now, but it looked like I was going to go back to the frat house
minus the motorman's glove after all.
   I went back into the outer cave and looked out over a view of pine tops down to the
sparkle of the lake a mile away and tried to think like a guy sitting in the dark beside a
coffin writing notes to a stranger about something that he had to do that he knew was
going to kill him; but all that got me was an attack of claustrophobia.
   I looked over the anteroom, went out and studied the front porch and wondered how
many little men with binoculars were watching me, went back in and scraped my foot
across the spot where the devil cat had used up the last of his chips, and saw the shine of
metal. . . .

                                             ***
   It was a stainless steel lock box, not locked; all it had in it was a heavy plastic
envelope, sealed. I got that open and took out a sheet of paper with typing on it and read:
   In the back room. Look up high, on the left. The opening looks too small, but you can
make it. About fifty feet.

   Brace yourself.
                                              17
   The hole was there all right, and it looked too small, just like the man said. But I got
up there and got my shoulders in and twisted over on my side and started in.
   The tunnel slanted down after the first couple of yards, tight going but just on the right
side of possible. In a couple of places I felt smooth clay where somebody had done some
excavating.
   Twice I thought I'd been stopped, and had to back off and try again, at a new angle;
and once I got my head through into a pocket my shoulders wouldn't pass and I was stuck
there for a minute, feeling the weight of a mountain crushing me flat before I worked an
arm up and pushed a fallen stone out of the way and went on through.
   It was pitch dark once I was below the broken rock level and into the solid stuff. This
part of the tunnel was wider. I did it on my hands and knees, using my head for a bumper.
Even in the dark I could tell this was a man-made shaft now. It dropped at a thirty-degree
angle, after about twenty feet cut hard to the left, then left again and down twenty feet,
and there was light ahead.
   I stopped there and felt of my gun for whatever good that did me and listened hard,
trying to make up my mind whether I heard a faint sound coming from down below or
not, decided it was just a ringing in my ears, and did the last few feet to another right-
angle turn and was in a room.
   It wasn't a cave. The walls were cut smooth and faced with concrete. The floor was
natural stone, ground smooth. The ceiling was high enough that I didn't have to duck. The
light was coming from a strip down the center of it that shed a pale green light on
something bulky that almost filled the little room. It was a cylinder, ten feet long, five
feet in diameter, looped and hung with plastic piping and wires. I'd seen something like it
once before, in the sealed wing under my old plant. That one had had a corpse in it. This
one felt different.
   I came up to it easy, as if there might be something there that I didn't want to startle. I
put a hand against the side of the big tank and felt a vibration so faint that if I hadn't been
alone under forty feet of solid rock I wouldn't have thought it was there at all. The curve
of the top of the thing was a little above my eye level, but there was a platform there for
me to step up on. I did, and looked down at a clear plastic plate about a foot square, set in
the top curve of the tank. It was misty, and I had to lean close to see through it and when
I did a big hand as cold as death closed on my chest and squeezed.
   The face behind the cloudy glass was that of a child, a little girl no more than six years
old, pale and translucent as a china doll.
   It was the face from the dreams.

                                              ***

   I found the letter lying on the platform and got it open and by holding it three inches
from my face I could read it:
    She's here. Number Three was right; a billion dollars' worth of security systems, but
our route slides under all of it. Frazier built it when he was building the Keep, right under
his nose. He knew him; too tough to know when he met a man that was tougher.
 There's just one place more to go now. I think I've got a chance, maybe even a good
chance; but I'm leaving what I've got for you, in case I slip. Maybe I was a little too
tricky, feeding it to you in pieces, but it makes a broken trail that can't be cracked by an
outside man with one lucky find. Except the one man, and I'm counting on the trick paint
to take him out. What I planted in the box for him to find should make him happy enough
to call off his dogs, at least long enough to give you your chance, if it comes to that. He
knows I'm here, somewhere, and I don't know how. He knows how I'd figure the play;
but I know his touch too, so maybe it will be OK.
 What's on the next sheets cost a lot of lives and years to get; it's the genuine article.
 Now I'm going to take one more look, and remember some things, so when the choice
gets tough I'll know which one to make. Then I'm going in, and I won't be back this way.


                                             ***

   The drawing on the sheet tacked to the back of the note showed me the valley and the
lake and a spot on the north side that matched the town, labeled "Keep." There was an X
marking the cougar cave. Another sketch below showed the details of a door and a shaft
cut to below the valley floor, and a tunnel down there that crossed to the Keep and then
some more detail on a hatch that led out into a false wall behind a furnace room. Another
page had the layout of the Keep, including more dummy passages and double walls than
Canterville Castle. They led all the way to a big spread on the top level, with a couple of
alternates and a few question marks, just to give me the feeling it hadn't all been done for
me.
   I read it through again, looking for some useful clue I might have missed, but I didn't
find any more details of what I was expected to do. There was just the chart and the map,
and the note, full of confidence that all I lived for was the chance to go where he'd gone
and not come back from.
   He was quite a guy, was my letter-writer, and he expected a lot of me. More than he
was likely to get.
   I was supposed to know a lot of things I didn't know, and maybe those were the things
that would have made me hot to tighten my belt and go looking for the kind of trouble
that would be waiting for me at the end of that cute tunnel and those neat rat holes in the
walls.
   I thought these thoughts for half an hour or so. Then I went over to the door that was
cut into the wall behind the big tank and got it open and saw steps and started down.
                                             18
    There was enough water in the tunnel to make a spotty reflection of the glow from the
ceiling strip and show up the rats that moved away ahead of me just out of BB gun range.
I stopped a couple of times to listen, in case somebody was waiting for me up ahead and
making noises. I didn't hear anything. That made me feel lonelier than ever.
    The tunnel ended at a stair like the one I'd come down. The steps went up forty feet
and ended in a landing just big enough to stand on. There was a wooden panel in front of
me, with something chalked on the back of it in block letters: HINGES AT LEFT.
WATCH FOR TRAFFIC FROM KITCHEN.
    He was still with me. The thought didn't help much. From here, with all he knew, he'd
gone on to get killed, an item that had probably netted two inches on an inside page; I felt
over the panel, put a little weight against the right edge, then a little more. Nothing
moved. That meant I could go back home and forget the whole thing. I gave it one last
push and it swung out and dust sifted down and I could see a light coming through a
vertical space at the end of a passage about a foot wide between the wall and a slab of
sheet metal that would be the back of the heat plant. Past that, there was a big room with
long tables and cabinets built in along one wall and a half-open door into another big
room with a light and men in black sitting around a table. Just then something behind me
made aclack! like a round sliding into a chamber, and I went as stiff as Automat Jell-O.
Then a blower started up and sheet metal around me started to thrum. I let some air out
and got my mouth back over my teeth and moved out along the wall. From here I had a
better view of the room beyond the door. There were four men in there, with cards in
their hands. A clock on the wall over their heads said seven-twenty-eight. It was well into
the morning, but there was no sunlight shining in, which meant no windows. I filed that
observation away and one of the men laid down his hand and stood up. So did the other
three. One of them said something and they moved out of sight, acting like fellows
remembering a missed appointment.
    I worked my way along the side of the walk-in reefer and located three bolt heads that
looked like the other ones but which turned, with a little persuasion, and let a piece of
solid-looking wall ride straight back on oiled rails. I rushed in past it into a tight space
and got it closed behind me. What I was in now was a tight vertical shaft thirty inches in
diameter with six-inch rods going up in a spiral and a smell of old dust. The wall of the
shaft and the rods both had the soapy feel of a high polymer plastic. I checked to be sure
my gun was riding around front where I could get at it, and started up.

                                             ***

    It was a nice easy climb for the first few dozen turns. Then my back started to ache
from the bent-over position and my arches started to feel the rods and my hands were
slippery with sweat and it was a long way down. All the light I had to see by was a
creepy pale green glow that came from the plastic itself. I reminded myself of one of
those restless corpses that grandpa used to tell me about before the DTs got him; the kind
they had back in the old country that used to come out from under tombstones on the
night of the new moon. Only this time I was the spook. I decided to give up that line of
thought before I scared myself to death and just then somebody tapped me on the
shoulder.
                                             19
    Now, maybe you think a tough Hunky with a gun in his pants can absorb that kind of
surprise with no more reaction than a curled lip and a reflex move toward the hip. I made
the reflex move OK: I jumped so hard I bent one of the rods an inch out of line with my
head and one foot slipped off and I was hanging by my hands looking up at bones.
    There was enough light to see a set of fingers and a wrist joint and above that what
was left of an arm leading up to some less clearly defined anatomy. There was no flesh
there, just the clean yellow-white skeleton, glowing a little, like old neon, in the dark. I
made out the skull with the lower jaw hanging wide open as if it was getting ready to take
a bite, and the other arm, and the torso and legs, just sort of folded down against the
spine, which was broken in two places and doubled back on itself and jammed against the
rungs.
    I held on there for a while and then got my feet back on the rungs and made three tries
and swallowed and felt sweat drip off the end of my nose. I got one hand unglued and
reached up and got a grip on Mr. Bones above the wrist and pulled. The forearm came off
at the elbow and flopped back and broke at the wrist and small bones made a light clatter
going down the shaft. I dropped the ulna and went up a step higher and my face was in
front of the spot where the hand had been and there was something on the wall there: a
stain in the form of a couple of lines that made a straggly "T". I touched the lines and a
dry, brownish powder crumbled away. Dried blood. Before he'd died, the skeleton with
the broken back had tried to write something, and almost made it.
    T. T for Treachery, or for Too late. I couldn't think of anything good that started with a
T. T for Trouble, T for Turn back.
    T for Trap.
    I looked up and the empty sockets met my look. Number Four; the letter-writer. The
letters that had still been there, left there for me to find—like these bones—warning me
to look out for trouble ahead; tipping me off that I was walking into ambush. But why
hadn't the man that killed him taken the dead mouse out of the trap and dusted off the
cheese and set it, all ready for the next one?
    Or maybe I was building it all on a set of cold feet. Maybe the skeleton was just a
careless carpenter left over from the construction phase. Maybe he was the guy who
designed this back stair, tossed in on top of it after it was finished, to seal his lips. And
maybe I was a fan dancer.
    It had to be the fourth man, because this was his route, and nobody had used it after
him, because he was blocking it solidly with his bones. Yeah, maybe that was it. He'd
gone up, walked into the trap, taken a load of slugs in the stomach, and then instead of
lying down there to die, he'd made it back to his rat hole and fallen down it, so the next
man would find him and think what I was thinking.
    I looked up past the bones and saw the faint cylindrical shine of the tube, leading on
up to the place I had to go, to find the man I had to find.
    "Thanks, pal," I said to the skull. I pushed at the bones and they fell away into
darkness. The rungs led upward another hundred feet and ended at a door that opened
into a small, dark room.
                                              ***

    I crossed the room without falling over anything much, put an ear to the door. That
told me nothing. I eased it open half an inch and looked out into a lighted hall.
    There was a Blackie standing with his back to me about twelve feet away. He had a
gadget like a stopwatch in his hand and he was aiming it at the wall and his lips were
moving. I waited in the shadows until he worked his way close enough. Then I stepped
out and he came around fast but too late and I hit him up under the angle of the jaw, the
one that breaks the neck if you do it right. My aim was OK. He started his dive and I
caught him and took him back into my lair.
    It took me ten minutes to get him stripped out and tucked away in the closet, another
five to get his pants and coat on. They were a lousy fit, and hadn't been out to the dry
cleaner lately. I had to pass the boots; the ones I had on were close enough. I checked his
gun, but it had too many colored buttons I didn't know about. I ditched it and tucked
Minka's little one in the holster and headed for a door down the hall. I was almost there
when a foot scraped behind me and a heavy voice said, "OK, all you culls are wanted up
to Comsat on the triple."
    I kept going, reached the door, had it halfway open when the voice yelled after me,
"OK, Wallik, that means you, too."
    I slid inside and was in a tiled room with a dirty window and plumbing. Great.
Trapped in the john. The window was two feet high and a foot wide, with obscure glass
in it. A light-and-shadow pattern on it looked like bars. It didn't give much light. I got
behind the door and palmed the gun and waited. A minute went by. It was quiet outside
now. Then feet came across and a fist hit the door and a heavy voice said, "OK, it don't
take that long," and the feet went away.
    I gave it another five minutes and came out, cautiously. The hall was all mine again.
Faint sounds came from the far end of it. I went the other way, found stairs, went up them
to a landing, listened, went on up and came out in a wide corridor with lights and open
doors and crossed the hall and went into another door. Somebody was arguing with
somebody, saying, "I don't care if you've replaced all of them, check them again, high
and low scale. . . ."
    I could see the foot of a wide staircase along the hall. It didn't attract me. I went to the
right, checked a plain door that might have been a service stair, was looking at a vacuum
cleaner and a shelf with cans and bottles. Maybe it was a good find at that. If the chase
got hot I could hide in there and pretend to be a broom.
    I went on to the end, turned left, smelled breakfast cooking somewhere. It made my
jaws ache. There was a carpet here, and the lighting was recessed and muted, the way it is
when there's money around. A Blackie came out of a room and started my way. I took the
first door to the left and was in a room with a couple of easy chairs and a divan long
enough to sleep two in-laws. A window looked out on a garden with flowers and another
wing of the building on the other side. The steps outside went by softly. I waited and then
opened up and looked out. He was standing at the intersection, looking back at me. For a
long second we stared at each other. Then I winked. He staggered back a step as if I'd hit
him in the gut with a wet towel and whirled and disappeared. I came out and went on and
a few doors farther found an open elevator door and stepped in and palmed a panel full of
buttons and started up.

                                             ***

    The car went up one floor and stopped and two men got in. I got my fingers over the
gun and one of them gave me a hard look and said to the other, "By God, things have
changed since I pulled the duty." The other one did some noisy breathing through his
nose.
    We rode along in silence together and the car stopped and a woman with a pale
doughy face got on and the two men got off without looking back. The woman gave me a
look and patted her back hair. At the next stop a girl got on and stared at me. She stared at
me through two more stops. At the next one a man in a gray coverall got on and she
opened her mouth to say something and I said, "Excuse it, kid, I was up all night, and I
don't mean walking the baby," and patted her hip going past. Her mouth was still open as
the door closed.
    There were more people here, moving up and down the hall, which was neat and clean
and full of that office smell. Nobody seemed to see me. I went along fast to the end of the
hall and found the service stair and went up two flights and dead-ended at a landing that
needed sweeping. There was a small window here that showed me a nice sweep of early-
morning lawn and the fence in the distance, inconspicuous behind the screen of
shrubbery. There seemed to be a lot of Blackies out on the grass. I was estimating my
altitude at ten stories now. From outside it hadn't looked that high. The lonesome feeling
was back, strong. I hadn't met any live people, to talk to, for quite a few days now. I
pushed through a narrow door and out into the whisper of air conditioning and the dead
white of artificial light. It was a big room with chairs and tables with magazines on them,
like a room where you wait for one of those dentists who hate to talk about money. A hall
led away from the other side of it. There was nobody in sight, in the room or in the hall.
Everything seemed quieter than it ought to. I looked at two plain wood-slab doors with
shiny hardware, and another door with a used look around the knob. It looked friendlier
than the others. I went over to it and tried it. It swung in on a swell storeroom full of
sealed cartons and a fat voice behind me said "Hey!"
    I came around fast with the gun all set to go and a big fellow with eyes bugged behind
lenses like biscuits pointed toward the door I came in by and said, "I've warned Alders
about you people intruding here!"
    "Sorry, chief," I said. "I guess maybe I kind of lost my way—"
    "I heard you'd staged another of your ridiculous false alarms—the third this week,
wasn't it? Every time a bird flutters over the building looking for a worm it starts bells
ringing and lights flashing! You don't delude me with your show of activity! It's all an
excuse for prying here in Tabulation!" He grabbed his glasses and pushed them back into
his head, like coal eyes on a snowman. With his kind of vision, contacts wouldn't help.
    "Yeah, I'll just be on my way. Guess we can't fool you, Doc—"
    "Mind your tongue, you! You're aware that I detest that flippant epithet! Has Alders
instructed you to add insolence to your other offenses?"
    "Sorry, Doctor. I was just on the way out—"
    "The other way!" He pointed a finger that was just a little longer than it was thick. I
went the way it pointed and had a choice of up or down on a narrow stairway with dope-
stick butts. I went up past a little landing with a couple of empties parked in the corner,
up six more steps, and was stopped by a black door with panic hardware on it. I tried it
and it gave and I came out into brilliant sunshine. I was on the roof. The tower apartment
I was looking for wasn't here.
                                            20
    In the next five seconds a couple of things happened. The first was that I looked across
seventy feet of open space and saw a second tower going up thirty feet higher than the
one I was in, with a wide terrace tacked to one corner. The other was a noise off to the
left that made me fade back behind the monitor and slide down flat against hot tarred
roof.
    "What was that?" somebody said.
    "What?"
    "I thought I heard Waxlow come up."
    "You got ten minutes yet."
    "I heard—" The door I had come through banged open and feet stepped out.
    "Yah! Waxlow, you're early!"
    They moved off talking. I sneaked a look. There was nothing on the roof but a
platform with what looked like an ack-ack gun except that it had a set of cooling fins
along the barrel, and some heavy cable snaking off to a big panel with dials, and on to a
standpipe by the parapet. There were three Blackies, all wearing helmets and side arms.
They jawed for a few minutes and one of them came back over my way and went through
the door and it closed behind him. The other two settled down by the gun and squinted at
nothing. One of them yawned. The other one spat. A bird flew over and dropped guano in
a white streak and went his way. A fly came and checked me out. I stayed where I was
and waited for the big break.
    An hour later I was still waiting. Another man came up and relieved one of the
Blackies and the other man took a couple of turns around the roof, but I was pretty well
hidden in the shadows between the stairhead and a ventilation intake. Another hour went
by. All I wanted was ten seconds with both boys in sight and looking the other way so I
could sneak back inside, but it was no go.
    Lunchtime came and went. The sun beat down and the roof soaked up heat and I
sweated inside the black suit, and the tight seams galled me under the arms and around
the neck.
    The sun came over on the other side and made the boys shift position a little, but not
enough. I tried to move a little to get back in the shadow and touched hot roof and raised
a blister on my knee.
    About midafternoon an NCO came up and poked around the gun and squinted up at
the sky and came over and stood four feet from me and belched and went back inside.
More reliefs came up. The sun went back of the high tower and I started catching dinner
smells from below.
    The roof had cooled some by then, and I shifted and got into a better position and
could see the terrace across the way. A man's head showed over the edge once, bobbing
around as if he were doing something fussy like weeding a flower box or laying a table.
A little later lights went on up there and some music floated down. It was twilight now.
The sky was a silent pink explosion. The pink deepened and scarlet ships flying purple
banners sailed away toward the west. Then there were stars and a chill in the air and a
mosquito bit the back of my neck. Over by the gun I could see little red and green and
blue lights of instruments that could probably pinpoint a nosy aircraft at fifty miles; but
none of them pointed at me, lying doggo twenty feet away.
    A bell dinged down below and the watch changed again. When the door opened, a
blaze of light shone out. Not much chance of a quiet sneak through that.
    At a rough estimate, I'd been pinned in this spot for twelve hours now. The chances for
improving my position didn't seem to be getting any better. Another few hours and I'd be
too stiff to move and too weak to go anywhere if I did move. It was time to make a
play—any play.
    From my spot back of the stairhead, the gun emplacement was off to the right, near the
parapet. To the left of that, the line ran straight back for thirty feet and then went into a
series of setbacks and angled across behind me. The other tower was over that way, just a
set of lights floating on the night now. I slid backward and got up on all fours and did a
little silent groaning and made it to my feet, with the stairhead and the ventilator between
me and the gun crew. The roof surface was smooth but gritty; I took off my boots and
shoved them inside my blouse and went over to the parapet and had a look.

                                             ***

   What I saw wasn't encouraging: A sheer drop of fifty feet to a ledge where light shone
out on plants growing in a box and below that another drop of a couple hundred feet to
the walled court, looking the size of a postage stamp. Off to the left, a connecting wall
went across to the other tower, at the level of the planter ledge. To the right there was a
swell view of the string of lights in the distance along the perimeter of the reservation.
None of that gave me any ideas. I backed off, feeling that vulnerable feeling that high
places give me, and heard a sound that made me spin and grab for the gun and then lights
went on all across the roof. They were big dazzlers, mounted on six-foot poles. The air
around them looked like blue smoke and they highlit the shape of every pebble on the
roof like a die-cutter stamping silhouettes out of sheet steel. There was one patch of
shadow, as black as a chimney-sweep's T-shirt, cast by the doorhead; and I was in it.
   The men on the gun were shielding their eyes and swearing and other men were
coming out on the roof and fanning out. There was no talking; the guns they had in their
hands told me all I needed to know.
   They formed up on the far side of the roof and started across. I had maybe thirty
seconds to think up a scheme, check it over for flaws, and put it into execution. They
were almost over to the stairhead. I backed away, which put the parapet against the back
of my thighs. I didn't think about it; I swung one leg over and found a toehold in the
rough stonework and ducked and heard feet walk past and stop and come back. That was
enough for me. I got a grip on the ledge I was squatting on and let my legs down and felt
around for a place to put them, and started down.

                                             ***

   Two minutes later I was on the ledge I'd seen from above. It went straight on for forty
feet to the fancy corner. The cross wall to the other tower joined there. I put my cheek to
the wall and went along to the end. Then I turned to put my back to the wall and jumped
for the cross wall. I was prepared to fall on the roof side if it worked out that way; but I
landed square, went forward on all fours, and headed for the deep shadow at the far end.
The light went past behind me. I reached the wall and pushed my face hard against it and
breathed with my mouth open. The light traveled back along the ledge and up the wall
again and went out. I sat up and felt around in the dark and found a heavy stone
balustrade, got over that and was on a narrow terrace with a row of pots big enough for
Ali Baba. Vines were rooted in them, growing thick and black up the wall. Up above I
could see a little light on the railing of the higher terrace. The vines grew there, too. It
looked like it might be possible, for a trained athlete in top condition, with spiked
climbing shoes and a Derby winner's luck. I stepped up on the stone railing and got a
fistful of tough vine and started up.
    The first few feet were as easy as getting into trouble. The main stems were as big as
my wrist, and clamped to the wall like British plumbing. Then they branched and I
started hearing little ripping sounds. I stopped there for a few minutes with the night
breeze blowing across my face and thought about what might be waiting for me up
above, versus what I knew was down below. Then I unclamped my hands and tried for
new holds higher up.
    Half an hour later I got a hand on the bright-plated railing of the upper balcony just as
the pencil-thick creeper I was hanging onto let go. There were a few seconds of fast
living then, while I grabbed for a two-handed grip and waited for my life to flash before
my eyes. Then I was hanging on by a knee and an elbow, looking across polished tiles
into a deep room full of subdued light and oiled teak paneling, and a desk no bigger than
a Cadillac with a man sitting at it, facing away from me. He was leaning back in the
chair, smoking a cigarette. He had a wide back and a solid neck and a little gray in his
hair. As far as I could tell, he was alone. While I looked at him, he reached and stubbed
the butt out in an ashtray hewn out of a chunk of glass the size of a football. Then he
pushed a button and a drawer slid open and up and he lifted a big decanter and poured
dark brandy into a glass; while both hands were busy stoppering the decanter I came up
and over the rail and slid the gun into my hand and went over to the open doors behind
him and said, "Don't even breathe, pal."
    He checked, just for an instant; then he hit the stopper with his palm and put the jug
back in the drawer and swung around to face me.
    The man I was looking at was me.
                                            21
    For about ten seconds we stared at each other; then I saw that he wasn't so much
looking at me as he was giving me a chance to look at him. He was something to look at.
    I've never had a delicate look, but this face was hewn out of the earth's primordial
rock, weathered to a saddle brown and lined a little by time's erosion, then polished with
a hand finer than Cellini's to a portrait of power held in restraint. He could have been
anywhere from a tough forty-five to a smooth sixty. He was wearing a wine-colored
dressing gown with a black collar; his neck projected from it like the trunk of an oak tree.
His expression was somewhere between a smile too faint to see and no expression at all.
    "All right, you got here," he said in my voice. "Come in and sit down. We have things
to talk about."
    I moved a step and then remembered I was giving the orders. "Stand up and move
away from the desk," I said. "Do it nice and easy. I'm not good enough with this thing to
try any near-misses."
    He pushed the corners of his mouth up half a millimeter and didn't move. "I tried to
find you before you took the risk of coming here—"
    "Your boys are second-rate. Soft from too much easy duty, maybe." I motioned with
the gun. "I won't tell you three times."
    He shook his head; or maybe my eyelid quivered. He wasn't a guy to waste effort on a
lot of unnecessary facial expressions.
    "You didn't come here to shoot me," he said.
    "I could change my plans. Being here makes me nervous. Not having you cooperate
makes me even more nervous. When I'm nervous I do some dumb things. I'm going to do
one now." I raised the gun and aimed it between his eyes and was squeezing and he came
out of the chair fast. He gave me a big smile. You could almost see it.
    "If I'd meant to hurt you, I could have done it any time since you crossed the line," he
said. "It's wired—"
    "The perimeter fence, maybe; not inside. Your own troops would be tripping it a
hundred times a day."
    "You think you could have gotten this far without my knowing it?"
    "You can't lock the world out unless you lock yourself in. Eighty years of waiting
could make a man careless."
    He gave me a little frown to look at. "Who do you think I am?"
    "There are some holes in the picture," I said. "But the part that's there says you're a
guy I used to know. His name was Steve Dravek."
    "But you're Steve Dravek." He said it the way you tell a kid his dog died.
    "I just think I'm Steve Dravek," I told him. "You're the real article."
    He frowned a little more. "You mean—you think I'm the original Dravek, born in
1941?"
    "It sounds a little funny," I said. "But that's what I think."
    He tilted his head a quarter of an inch and did something subtle that changed the frown
back into a smile.
   "No wonder you're nervous," he said. "My God, boy, put the gun down and sit down
and have a drink. I'm not Number One; I'm Number Five!"

                                             ***

    I moved around him to a chair and waved him to one and watched him sit, and then I
sat, and rested the gun on my knee so the shaky hand wouldn't be so obvious. I wanted a
drink the way Romeo wanted Juliet.
    "What happened to Four?"
    "What you'd expect. He was past his prime—over fifty. I tried to talk to him, but he
wouldn't talk. Why should he? He owned the world."
    "That would be how long ago?"
    "Over forty years. As soon as I'd established myself here—there was a certain amount
of pretty delicate maneuvering involved there—I tried to find out if there were any more
of us. I drew a blank." He almost blinked. "Until you turned up."
    "Tell me about that part."
    "The tanks were rigged to signal when they were opened from the inside; just one
quick squawk on the microwave band. You'd have to know just where to listen to pick it
up. Unfortunately, there was no R and D feature; just the signal saying you were on the
way. I tried to find you, but you dropped out of sight."
    "It seemed like a good idea; even if your Blackies are lousy shots."
    "They were instructed to fire anesthetic pellets."
    "Some of those pellets packed quite a wallop."
    He nodded. "It was too bad about that little man, Jess Ralph; when the men surprised
you there, they jumped to a couple of conclusions—"
    "Somebody tipped them. They were waiting."
    "Naturally the ETORP reserve is under close guard—"
    "Pass that. If you wanted to talk to me, why didn't you leave a message where I'd find
it? You would have known where. And it would have been simpler than telling your
Blackies to wing me with a needle full of dope."
    "Would you have trusted me? As I remember the final instructions Frazier added to
my 'cephtape, they painted a pretty black picture of the Old Man. I thought it was better
to handle it as I did, let you follow the same trail I did. And it had the added advantage of
bringing you here in secret. I think you can see it might complicate things to have the
word get out that there were two of us."
    "Uh-huh," I said, "maybe. By the way, let's see your wrist."
    He looked thoughtful. Then he turned back his right cuff and showed it to me.
    "It was the other one, remember?"
    He showed me that one. The skin was perfect; there was no sign of the scar that only
Number One would have.
    "Satisfied now?" He was looking a little more relaxed. Maybe I was, too.
    "Suppose you're telling the truth," I said. "How does that change things?"
    "It ought to be pretty plain. The Old Man was nuts, power-crazy. I don't share that part
of his personality."
    "You took over where he left off," I said. "Nothing's changed."
    "The world he built wasn't something I could rebuild in a day. It all takes time; if I
tried to reform the whole thing at once, I'd have chaos on my hands."
    "I got the feeling things were getting worse instead of better."
    "It's not surprising you had a few wrong slants, considering the company you were
keeping."
    "What company would that be?"
    "The little man, Jess. I thought you knew. He was Frazier's grandson."

                                              ***

   "There seem to be a lot of things I don't know," I said. "Maybe by the time it got to be
my turn the brainwashing machine was slipping its clutch. Maybe you'd better give me
the whole story, right from the top."
   His face tightened and his eyes looked at me and beyond me into the past.
   "The first part of it, I remember myself, as if it was really me it happened to—the
tapes Frazier took were good ones. Every detail is there, as if it had happened
yesterday. . . .
   "It started like any other morning. I had breakfast out on the terrace with Marion,
drove to the plant, spent some time going over some tax figures with Frazier; then we
went down to the new basement wing to see how things were going. It was a big pilot rig
for a new process that was going to make us a mint. A new principle that would put us
years ahead of anything else on the market.
   "It was about half past ten when it happened. Marion was on the way into the city to
do some shopping. The kid was with her. They stopped because she had some flowers
she'd picked for me. White daisies, the first of the year. There were a lot of them down by
the pool. . . .
   "They went to the office and when I wasn't there some damned fool told them I was
down in the new wing. They came on down.
   "Frazier and I were over by the big cryo tank, watching Brownie stitch a plate in.
Something slipped, and a piece of quarter-inch got away from the lift and it dropped and
cut the high-tension lead from the portable welding rig. There was a lot of arcing and
smoke—and right in the middle of it they came in.
   "I started over there and waved them away and yelled to them to go back, and she saw
me wave and started across and before Marion could grab her, she got into the smoke and
lost her bearings, and I yelled to her again to go back and she heard me and turned my
way and put a foot on the edge of the plate that was carrying sixty thousand amps.
   "I was the first one to her. I grabbed her and yelled for the plant doc and the son of a
bitch was off playing golf and there wasn't anybody else near enough to do any good. She
wasn't breathing; there was no pulse. I knew five minutes of that and her brain would be
gone forever. . . .
   "I did the only thing I could do. We had a liquid nitrogen setup running in glass. I took
her in there and told Frazier to get the top off the big receiver tank. He argued and I
knocked him down. They all thought I'd gone nuts. I got it open myself and came back
and Marion was holding her and wouldn't let her go. I had to take her. I carried her in and
injected her and got her wrapped and put her inside and closed up and charged the coils
and watched the plate frost over. In less than a minute it was done. Then I came back out
and they were waiting for me, with guns and a cop they'd gotten in from somewhere. I
could have torn 'em apart with my bare hands, but I knew I couldn't afford any mistakes
now. She was in there, frozen, at six degrees Kelvin; but it was no good unless I
convinced them I knew what I was doing, that it was the only chance.
    "I talked to them. I kept calm and I talked to them and told them the kid was dead, and
that what I'd done hadn't killed her any deader; and that as long as they left her where I'd
put her, she'd stay just the way she was then. If any damage had been done, it was already
done, and if it hadn't—well, if it hadn't, it was up to the medics to find out how to bring
her back. And that meanwhile she stayed where she was.
    "Frazier was the first to see it and side me. He'd been crazy about the kid. He got them
under control and cleared the cops out and got a bunch of big-domes from Mayo over
there and I went back home and drank a year's supply of booze in the next week. I didn't
know where Marion was. They said I'd hit her pretty hard. But I wasn't thinking about
Marion. I was only thinking about the kid.
    "Some sob sisters got hold of it, then, and the newspapers got into it, and I was
indicted for everything from murder to grave-robbery. There were laws that said a body
had to be buried within two days, and a lot of other junk.
    "Well, I beat 'em. She was underground. The research wing was twelve feet down.
And I had witnesses that there was no pulse and no breathing. The papers kept playing
the story for a few months, but after a while that stopped, too.
    "I had the room where it happened walled off. I never wanted to see it again.
    "We went ahead with the new process, and it worked out like I said it would. Food
quick-frozen to under ten degrees K would keep forever, and come out as if it had been
fresh that morning. Even the leafy stuff, lettuce and potatoes; everything. In a year we
had a hundred licensees. In two years we'd stopped licensing and had our own plants, in
forty-two countries. I poured every dime back into research, and the more we learned the
quicker we learned. I didn't give a damn about the business; all I wanted was the money
and the know-how to push the medical program. I went on working like six demons and
waiting for the day the docs would give me the go-ahead.
    "But they were a cagey bunch. In a year they told me they thought they were on the
right track. In two, they were talking about breakthroughs. In five, it was unanticipated
complexities in the mechanics of submolecular crystallization. By the time they'd been at
it for ten years, to the tune of a hundred million a year, they were doing a lot of cute
tricks with frozen mice and cats and lambs and telling me about critical thresholds and
optimum permeability mass-ratios and energy transference rates and all that other
gobbledygook their kind use to keep the laymen shelling out.
    "I called for a showdown, and they said, of course, Mr. Dravek, certainly. Mr. Dravek,
whatever you say, Mr. Dravek. But we won't be responsible. . . .
    "What could I do? I hired and fired medical directors like baseball managers, but they
all gave me the same pitch; wait another year just go be on the safe side. . . . Five more
years went by, and another five, and meanwhile Draco Incorporated had grown into the
biggest international combine on earth. We were in foods and medicines and the
equipment that went with them, and had sidelines that were bigger than most of the
world's industrial giants. The government had tried to step in ten different times to break
us, but by then I'd made some interesting discoveries about politicians. They bribe easy,
and a lot cheaper than you'd think. And for the big boys—the ones who would have
laughed at money—we had some other little items. Those sawbones hadn't been just
rolling pills; they'd come up with tricks that could make a man look and feel twenty years
younger; and the Draco Foundation had been doing a lot with grafts and regeneration. We
didn't publicize all this. It was strictly hush-hush, behind-the-walls stuff. Only our friends
got in on it. And by then we didn't have a lot of enemies. So they left us alone, and I
waited, and now they were talking about next year, maybe, and then a few more months
and we'll be ready to take the chance. . . .
   "You see, by then they had the techniques for deep-freezing and thawing. Hell, they
were doing it on a commercial scale. But we were doing it under controlled cryolab
conditions, with everything from tissue salinity to residual muscular electric charge
controlled every step of the way.
   "But with the kid, I hadn't had time for anything fancy. I'd just injected her with an
anti-crystallizer we used in vegetable processing and put her under. That made it
different. It gave them an excuse to stall. Because that's what they were doing. Stalling.
They figured as soon as I had her back, I'd pull the rug out from under their operation.
The damned fools! As if I'd sabotage the program that had made me the richest tycoon
that ever lived—and with the power to appoint the whole damned Supreme Court if I'd
wanted to!
   "So they stalled me. And I was getting older. By then I was over sixty, not that I
looked it. Like I said, the pill rollers had come up with some tricks. But I knew I couldn't
last forever. And I had a board of directors who were looking ahead, jockeying for the
day when one of them would take over where I left off. I knew if I dropped dead the day
would never come for the kid. They'd leave her there. But she was my heir, you see? If
she was alive, she'd own it all, and they'd be cut out of the pattern. So I had to do
something. I had to work out a plan that would carry on after my death, so some day
she'd come back, and find her inheritance waiting for her.
   "I thought about it, and worked out one plan and then another, and none of 'em were
any good, none of 'em were foolproof. Because there was no way to be sure there'd be a
man there I could trust. Frazier would have done it, but he was my age; he wouldn't
outlast me long. And anyway, the only man I could really trust was—me. And that gave
me the idea.
   "I called in my Chief of Research and told him what I wanted. He told me I was out of
my mind. I said, sure, Doc, but can you do it?"
   "He was a long time coming around, but in the end he had to admit there was no
reason it was impossible. Illegal, maybe—we'd had some trouble with a bunch of fanatics
and we'd had to let a few token laws get on the books—but it wasn't any trickier than
what we'd been doing for some of our chums in Congress.
   "It was simple enough. We'd been using test tube techniques for growing livestock for
a long time; our brood plant in Arizona covered ten acres and produced more beef in a
year than the State of Texas used to in ten. They took germ cells from me and started
them growing, then planted them in automated life support tanks, like the stock brooders,
only fancier. I gave Frazier the job of picking the spots for the vaults to be built out of
indetectable nonmetallic material. I gave him orders not even to tell me. That way
nobody could squeeze the secret out of me, or step in and act in my name and break up
the playhouse; because I didn't know myself where they were.
   "The first duplicate was rigged to mature in twenty years. I figured to be around that
long. I'd brief him myself, and he'd take over from me, and they could scratch their heads
and say that the Old Man was holding up a lot better than anybody figured; and when
he'd run his time, the next one would be ready; and so on down the line, until the medics
were ready to unfreeze the child. They could stall a long time, but they couldn't stall
forever. And when they quit stalling, I'd be ready."
   The man behind the desk took a deep breath and looked at me.
   "That's where my tape ended. I came to in an abandoned mine shaft in Utah. The tank
was set back into a side passage and covered over. There was information waiting for me,
food, a full briefing up to the time Frazier had last been there. The rest of the story I had
to put together from the Old Man's records.
   "It was a swell plan he'd worked out; practically perfect. Just one thing went wrong.
He got a hurry-up call from the Old Lab one day. He went over and they told him all bets
were off. There'd been a freak power failure and the special tank she was in had lost its
chill and the body had been at about a degree Centigrade for a couple of hours when they
discovered it. So now Duna was just a corpse like any other corpse. She looked the same,
but that little spark they'd been keeping alive all those years—or trying to—was gone.
   "It hit him hard, but not as hard as it had the first time. Over thirty years had gone by.
He'd learned to live with it. She'd been the biggest thing in his life, once; he could still lie
awake at night and remember her voice, the look on her face when she'd come running to
meet him when he came home. But that was all it was: just a recollection out of a fairy
tale that he'd had once, a long time ago, and lost forever.
   "He gave orders to Frazier for the body to be embalmed and buried; but by then
Frazier was a little nuts on the subject. He didn't believe the medics. He wanted them to
go ahead with the thaw, and when the Old Man wouldn't, he said some things to him that
he'd have killed any other man for. Then he left.
   "The Old Man went on with the funeral. And just before the grave was closed he had a
thought and told them to open the box, and they did; and it was empty. Or almost empty.
There was a little scale model of some kind of Indian temple in it, made out of solid gold.
Frazier's idea of a joke, maybe. He'd been a good man once, but he was getting old. The
Old Man tried to find him, but couldn't. He'd made some plans of his own. He was quite a
boy, was Frazier. A billionaire in his own right. He knew how to cover a trail.
   "So the Old Man called off the hunt. Frazier had been a good friend for a lot of years.
It was too bad he'd gone off his rocker in his old age, but the thing to do was to let it go
and forget it. As for the body—well, it was just a body now; in time Frazier would realize
that and bury it and it would all be over.
   "Meanwhile, there was a business to run. In a way, it was a relief to the Old Man to
have the other off his mind. He'd been living in the past too long, trying to hold onto a
dream that was a long time dying. Now he could put all his efforts into the important
things.
   "By this time the food processing empire was the tail that was trying to wag the dog.
The sidelines were the big business. Rejuvenation methods that could keep a man looking
young at ninety; artificial organs that he manufactured under his own patents—and some
he didn't patent, because he didn't want any information leaks through the Patent Office.
That was where the money was—and the power.
    "After that things moved fast. The Old Man was already running the United States; he
branched out then, took control of the French Assembly, then the Scandinavian
Parliament, most of South America, Africa, Southeast Asia. He changed the name of the
company, and reorganized it along lines that took control out of the hands of the board
and put it where it belonged—in his pocket."
    "You said you changed the company's name," I butted in. I already knew the answer,
but I wanted to hear it from him.
    "The Draco Company was all right for a small food-processing firm," he said. "When
the outfit grew and moved into the life sciences field, the Old Man decided he needed
something with a little moreélan . He came up with Eternity, Incorporated."
    "Commonly known as ETORP," I said.
    He nodded. "He had it all in the palm of his hand; and then one day a man came
gunning for him.
    "The Plan; the one he'd worked out to insure that things were done his way, even after
he died—was backfiring on him. Frazier's work. He'd been the one who set it up; he was
the one the Old Man trusted. He'd matured the duplicate Dravek in an LS tank and
briefed him to kill. It was a clever scheme. Who else was tough enough to kill Dravek—
but Dravek?
    "But it didn't work. Dravek Number Two found the Old Man; but the Old Man was
too smart for him. He shot first. He had the body dumped where it would be found, so
Frazier would hear about it and get the message.
    "But Frazier was stubborn. Eighteen years later, another killer made his try. He went
the same way. This time the Old Man knew Frazier had to go. He spent three years and a
billion dollars, and he found him. But the medics weren't quick enough, and all he got out
of him was the one fact: That each vault was set to signal when it opened. He got the
details on that and nothing else.
    "But when Number Three came out, he was ready for him. He was well over a
hundred years old now, and still vigorous, but time was running out. He wanted an heir.
So when Three showed, he knocked him out with a sleep gun; and when he came out of
it, he told him the story. And he took him in and treated him like a son.
    "A few months later the Old Man died in his sleep and Number Three went on where
he'd left off.
    "But the machine was still grinding. Twenty years later, Number Four came along.
There was an accident. Three was killed. And then I showed up.
    "I guess Number Four was a little greedy. He didn't try to talk to me, just took a shot at
me. But my aim was better.
    "Things ran quietly for quite a long time. There were problems, but what Dravek
Number One could do, Number Five could do again. I had an idea there'd be a Number
Six along, about twenty years back, but he never showed up. I figured the Draveks were
all used up. And then you came."
    "And where do you figure we go from here?"
    "I'm not quite as greedy as Four was, Steve. And like the Old Man, I'm getting along
to an age where I'm thinking of an heir. I don't have a son."
    "Make it plainer."
     "There's plenty here for both of us. In a way, you have as much right to it as I do. I
want you to stay; share it with me. The whole world, Steve—and everything that's in
it. . . ."
     He leaned toward me, and some of the deadness had gone out of his eyes, and the
smile he was playing with was starting to be a real smile.
     "I've got a lot to show you, Steve, a lot to tell you. . . ." His hand went out to a little
table beside him and dipped into a recess under it, and I brought the gun up from my side
and shot him through the chest.

                                               ***

    The shock half-spun him, knocked him out of the chair. I went after him fast, ready to
fire again, but his face already had death written across it. His hand opened and the little
silver-framed picture in it fell to the rug. The sleeve that had slid back when he reached
was still pulled back almost to the elbow, and I could see the faint white line that ran all
the way around his forearm six inches above the wrist.
    "Whose arm did you steal, Old Man?" I got the words out. "Number Two's? Or
weren't your boys good enough at their graft techniques back then?"
    His head turned half an inch. His eyes found me.
    "Why. . . . ?"
    I stooped and picked up the picture he had reached for. "I thought you were trying for
your gun," I said. "But it would have ended that way anyway, as long as we had this
between us."
    A light crossed his face, like a cloud shadow crossing a field of grain.
    "Dead," he gasped out. "Dead. . . . long. . . . ago. . . ."
    "She's alive, Old Man."
    His eyes were holding mine, holding back death.
    "Why did you do it, Old Man?" I gave him back his look. "Afraid a living heir might
get in your way, after you'd learned how to make yourself immortal?"
    He tried to speak, failed, tried again:
    "Searched. . . . all these years. . . . never knew. . . ."
    "Frazier outsmarted you after all. You ran the world, but in the end he took it away
from you. I wonder what your boys did to him, to try to get him to talk. But he never did.
He was loyal to you, Old Man, even after you'd stopped being loyal to yourself."
    His face was the color of old ivory under the tan. His mouth opened and moved. I
stooped to hear him.
    "Tell Duna I said. . . . hello. . . ." His eyes were still on mine, dead eyes now, claiming
their last wish.
    "Sure," I said. "I'll tell her."
                                       Epilogue
    They brought Duna up from the vault under the ridge where Frazier had hidden her,
and for forty-eight hours the best brains in ETORP's cryothesia lab worked over her.
Then they called me in and I was there when she opened her eyes and smiled and said,
"Daddy, I brought you some flowers."
    That was twenty years ago. She's grown now, and a member of the first Mars
Expedition. All the programs that had been stalled for a hundred and fifty years are
moving ahead now, pushed by a force of nature that's like the grass root that cracks open
a mountainside: population pressure.
    I released the immortality drug for general distribution, free, the same day I opened
the Ice Palace and started bringing the Old Ones out. Some talk has started up that I ought
to reconvene Congress and hand the reins back over to the politicians, but I've got a
theory that the world's not ready for that yet. I've set up a system that makes education
tapes available to everybody, as many as they can absorb, on any subject. Some day I'll
see signs that the race is growing up, and that there are men around who are wise instead
of just smart; when that day comes, I'll retire and take that trip to Alpha, if I'm still
around. Maybe that's arrogance; or maybe it's a sense of responsibility. Sometimes it's
hard to tell the difference.
    The Old Man kept a journal. It gave me the answers to a lot of questions that had been
on my mind. The skeleton in the shaft was Number Six. He'd been shot, but managed a
getaway back into the shaft via a fake air intake in the top-floor equipment room. It didn't
look big enough, but it was. He killed two Blackies on the way out, and no one saw
where he went; so he kept his secret.
    The reason the Old Man hadn't closed off the route in via the tunnel was the easy one:
he never found it. Frazier had concealed it so it would stay concealed.
    The dead boy Jess and I had found was Number Two. He'd killed him and left him like
that, as a warning to the next one; if there was a next one. By that time, he was a worried
man. And then he had another idea: he meant what he said about taking me in. He wanted
somebody else to do the sitting up nights, while he had a brain transfer to a new body—a
young, anonymous one—and settled back to enjoy owning the world.
    I brought Minka to the Keep, and married her. She and Duna got along swell. They
should have. She was Marion's great-granddaughter, which made Duna some kind of
great aunt. She told me about Jess and his Secret Society. It didn't amount to much, after
being handed down by word-of-mouth tradition for four generations. Most of it had been
forgotten, and anyway, Frazier hadn't tried to saddle his descendants with a load of
fossilized hates. But he'd left them the job of fighting ETORP, any way they could. Jess'
way was hunting Blackies in the park. As I said, Jess was a guy who was full of surprises.
    There was one thing that stumped me for a long time: how had Frazier gotten the jump
on his boss, gotten the frozen child away from him? But I finally worked it out. Back in
the early years, when the Old Man had had about the same life expectancy as the rest of
the race, he'd set up a corporation to take over his affairs after his death, and operate it in
Duna's name, hold it in trust for her until she was revived. He'd used all the pressure he
had to set it up so it couldn't be broken, and to hire the best brains he could buy to run it.
   It was a good idea—until the day when his top medical boys told him they'd cracked
the Big One, and that now a chosen few could go on living as long as ETORP and its labs
held out. That made a difference. He didn't need an heir, then.
   By that time, there was a power struggle going on inside the organization that would
have made the battle among Alexander's successors look like a pillow fight. That
charter—and Duna, alive—was all the opposition needed to take over ETORP, lock,
stock, and freeze tanks. And he couldn't have that. In the end Frazier realized the Old
Man wouldn't be content for very long to have that small body waiting in the vault,
hanging over him day and night; in the end he'd have turned the switch himself.
   So Frazier set up the fake equipment failure, the phony funeral, and took Duna to a
place where she'd be safe. The Old Man had really believed Duna was dead.
   Oh yeah, one other thing. Yesterday a bell rang in a private alert station that's manned
twenty-four hours a day, just down the hall from where I sleep. Number Eight is awake
and moving—somewhere. I've sent my men out to try to find him, but he seems to be an
elusive character.
   I'm waiting for him now. When he shows up, I hope I can convince him that what I'm
doing is the right thing. If I can't—well, I've got all the weight on my side, but Steve
Dravek at twenty was a hard man to beat.
   We'll see.