The Multiplex Man
James P. Hogan

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright ©1992 by James P. Hogan

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57819-7

Cover art by Patrick Turner

First Baen printing, July 1999

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 92-215964

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Brilliant Press
Printed in the United States of America

To Henry Palka
With thanks for being a lot of help
with a lot of things

I'M NOT WHO I THINK I AM
Jarrow reached over to the keypad and entered the Chicago number he'd found in the pad in the hotel room. The legend call ringing appeared on the screen, then was replaced by a head-and--shoulders view of a woman. He recognized her as the redhead in the dream he had awoken to that morning. But that was crazy. He didn't know anyone in Chicago, or a woman who looked like that, anywhere.
And the even crazier part was that, from the way her expression changed, she evidently knew him.
"I wondered when you'd call," she said as Jarrow stared speechlessly. "You just vanished into thin air."
Jarrow swallowed and found himself shaking. "You recognize me?" he whispered. "You know who I am?"
The narrowing of her brows signaled she was worried, but with a hint that she had been prepared for something like this. She nodded. "You're Tony Demiro," the woman said.
Jarrow slumped back in his chair and stared at her numbly. "Who's Tony Demiro?"
"Warrant Officer Demiro? Of the Army?" She intoned the phrases like questions, as if trying to coax his memory. She paused, reading his expression of total bemusement. "You don't know who I am, do you?"
"I'm sorry. No, I don't. And you're certain that I—this person you're talking to now . . . what did you say that name was?"
"Tony Demiro." Her voice caught. She bit her lip and brushed a hand quickly across her mouth.
"What is it?" Jarrow asked. "What's the matter?"
Rita swallowed audibly, and he could see her brace herself. "Tony Demiro was killed five months ago," she said.

By James P. Hogan
Inherit the Stars
The Genesis Machine
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede
The Two Faces of Tomorrow
Thrice Upon a Time
Giants' Star
Voyage From Yesteryear
Code of the Lifemaker
The Proteus Operation
Endgame Enigma
The Mirror Maze
The Infinity Gambit
Entoverse
The Multiplex Man
Realtime Interrupt
Minds, Machines & Evolution
The Immortality Option
Paths to Otherwhere
Bug Park
Star Child
Rockets, Redheads & Revolution
JARROW
one
The flashing signs on both sides of I-94 south into Minneapolis read: police check ahead. prepare to stop. Farther on, past a disused overpass, the morning traffic was slowing to a crawl as barriers with winking red lights funneled it into a tailback along the inner two lanes. A line of delinquents stood pulled over on the shoulder. Jarrow was glad that Larry had picked him up earlier than usual. It would all clog up quickly, even though traffic these days wasn't as heavy as the moving nose-to-tail jams of times gone by. He was due to see Valdheim at 8:45, and the thought of being late for doctors' appointments was one of the things that made him anxious.
"They do it on purpose," Larry muttered as they eased into line. "This time of morning everyone's in a hurry and snarly, and they just want you to give them a hard time. You talk back, and then they hit you with the works. Their scores go into their records. The meanest ones get the promotions."
Larry liked to think of himself as a man who believed in saying what he thought, with the result that no topic escaped without receiving the imprint of his opinion. Jarrow saw it more as an inability to refrain from airing views that most people would have considered better left unsaid. That would have been careless at best on anyone's part, and bordering on foolhardy for a halfway-prudent professional—which in itself would have been enough to make Jarrow uncomfortable. But for a teacher at junior high school, charged with a responsibility for the shaping of young minds, it crossed the line into recklessness and invited suspicions of subversive designs. And that made Jarrow positively nervous.
"Get a load of this guy coming up behind," Larry said, nodding at the rearview mirror. Jarrow moved his head to see in the side mirror mounted on the door. The vehicles following them were squeezing over to make way for a limousine impatiently flashing an official blue-and-yellow light. From the silver badge on the front, Jarrow guessed it to be from one of the international regulatory agencies. Larry stayed in the center of the lane, pretending not to see the irate wavings of the state trooper marching forward from among the uniformed figures ahead.
A two-note siren blast came from behind, and then a voice cut in over the pop jazz playing from the vehicle's sound system. "Pull over ahead. You're obstructing official business."
"Now, there's what I call creature comfort," Larry said, contemplating the lines of the limo, now thrusting up close behind them like a motor yacht trying to nudge past a tugboat. It was large and majestic, probably capable of cruising at 150 on smooth-burning hydrocarbon synthetic. By contrast, the electric getabout that he and Jarrow were riding in was stark and utilitarian, and could putter along at fifty with up to four people, at a squeeze, and hundred-mile hops between cell changes.
"For God's sake let it through," Jarrow grated, rubbing his moist palms together. He had an inborn dread of confrontations, and more than suspected that Larry was -doing this deliberately to rattle him. Larry had a strange sense of humor that way.
Larry spread his hands briefly. "That's our money they're driving around in, isn't it? Why should we be kicked out of the way like trash on the street?"
The siren sounded again, insistently. Larry stayed put for several more agonizing seconds until Jarrow really thought that he was about to get them a ticket, or worse, and then pulled over at the last moment. The limousine swept by disdainfully and was waved on past the barrier.
Jarrow wiped his hands on his knees. "If you want to complain about the system, there are proper channels," he said tightly.
"Right. And they'll get you the same place as the other tubes too." Larry opened the window and turned on an inno-cent expression as the trooper hove to, purple-faced, outside.
"Is something the matter with you, mister? You deaf as well as blind? Maybe you shouldn't be out on the street."
"We were talking. I guess I got absorbed."
"Well, that's not good enough. If you're in charge of a vehicle, you're supposed to know what's going on, okay? Let me see your papers."
The traffic check was nominally to catch cars with even-date-only tax stickers being driven on an odd day of the month—the enforced ride-sharing that this imposed was the only reason for Larry and Jarrow to be traveling together—but no cop was going to let a chance go by of grubbing for other morsels too. Larry passed out the wallet containing his operator's license, owner's registration, road-tax receipt, insurance certificates, vehicle-inspection certificate, environmental-compliance certificate, metropolitan area usage permit, medical statement detailing blood type, drug allergies, and current treatments, and whistled silently to himself while the trooper scrutinized them. From Larry's other side, Jarrow watched the blue-chinned mouth framed by the window, bunching in a downturned line and snorting as each document failed to show a fault. Larry glanced across and winked confidently.
The trooper fished a compad from one of his tunic pockets and punched in the registration, but he was already scowling in anticipation of the clear of violations response that appeared on its screen a moment later. He backed off a couple of paces and stood, fists clenched on hips, surveying the vehicle from end to end.
"That wheel's wearing low. There's vibration at the rear end. Get your bearings looked at."
"Yep, reckon I'll just do that."
"On your way."
"You have a nice day too." They moved on through, speeding up and staying to the right to continue south, skirting the downtown area of Minneapolis. Larry waved to indicate the direction ahead, in which the limousine had disappeared. "You know, there was a time when anyone who had the money could own a machine like that. Now you have to convince some bureaucrat that you've got the need. Why the hell should it be anyone else's business?
Jarrow sighed. "Oh, come on. You know how it was with those gasoline burners." Everyone knew how it had been. Why did Larry have to ask pointless questions all the time?
"Well, I'm not so sure about that, Dick," Larry said. "I know a guy who used to be an engineer in the business. He says that ten percent dirty cars caused fifty percent of the problem. All they needed was a tune-up. It could have been fixed for peanuts compared to what they spent tearing the industry apart. So maybe it wasn't the way everyone gets told. Maybe a lot of other things back then weren't the way everyone gets told, either."
They were passing Loring Park. An exit sign ahead indicated Groveland. Jarrow leaned forward in his seat and pointed, glad of the chance to drop the subject. "That's it, this one coming up now. Stay over on the inside. We need to go right at the first intersection."
"There at the light?"
"That's it."
The light changed to red as they approached. Larry grunted and eased to a halt. He drummed his fingers on the wheel, humming tunelessly to himself, then glanced across at Jarrow while they waited. Jarrow stared ahead, waiting for him to pick up the theme again, but Larry read his mood and decided for once to leave it at that. For him simply to remain silent, however, was too much to hope for. "What is it that you need to see this doc for—just a checkup or something? If it's not personal."
"No, that's okay. . . . It's a neural thing. Not anything wrong, really. More just something they're curious about—some kind of irregularity in the brainwave pattern, to do with the sleep rhythms." Jarrow shook his head. "I don't really understand it myself."
"Is it anything to worry about?"
"They're not sure. Apparently, it's a new area they're just getting into. There's a theory that it could trigger unconscious stress patterns and affect all kinds of other things. That's why they're interested."
Larry grinned as the light changed, and they moved off again. "You see, Dick. It's what I've been telling you all along: You take life too seriously. Try easing up a little."
"So now it's medical advice, as well, eh? You're an M.D. as well, all of a sudden?" Jarrow hadn't meant to sound that sarcastic. Really, he was reproaching himself for being more forthcoming with detail than was called for, as if he needed to justify himself.
But if Larry noticed, it didn't show. "Just a detached but perspicacious observer of life. . . . Anyhow, it didn't cost you a nickel. Where do we go now?"
"Straight on past the trees. . . . It's one of the houses now, the green one with the laurel. . . . Okay, this'll do fine."
The car pulled up in the service lane, separated from the road by a strip of grass. Its two occupants made a contrasting pair: Larry younger by at least ten years, easygoing and relaxed with his collar-length yellow hair, and dressed casually in a fleece-lined jacket and wool sweater against Minnesota's April cold; Jarrow in black overcoat with collar and tie, trimmed mustache, hair graying at the temples. Jarrow felt that working for the State was to represent the State, with a duty to project an appropriate -image. Larry's kind didn't worry about things like that.
"Need a ride into the school later?" Larry asked as Jarrow was getting out. "I have to go into town at lunchtime on an errand. I could detour this way if you like."
"It's okay. I can catch the mono."
"Wouldn't be any trouble."
"No, I'll be fine. Besides, I'm not really sure how long it's likely to take. . . . Er, thanks."
"Okay. See you around later, then. Oh, and I'll catch you later this afternoon sometime for that book."
"Book? Oh, yes, sure." Jarrow had promised to let Larry have a book that he still had out from the staff library.
The car pulled away, and Jarrow turned toward the house. Larry was young and headstrong, but really not so bad inside, he told himself. He had been wondering if a quiet word with Irwin Shafer, the principal of Linden Junior High, about some of Larry's indiscretions wouldn't be out of place. But on reflection, as he came to the end of the path and stopped at the door, he decided against it. It was something that could keep until another day.
He extended a finger and pressed the bell push beside the engraved brass plate reading: dr. m.r. valdheim, m.d., ph.d., m.a.p.a., m.i.p.n. consultant neurophysiologist.
 
two
Dr. Valdheim, wearing a white coat over shirtsleeves, appeared in the hallway while Jarrow was still completing formalities at the reception desk. He was in his sixties, Jarrow guessed, a tall, gangling man with thick, metal-rimmed spectacles, who managed to combine a broad, straight-shouldered frame with a gaunt, hollow-cheeked face topped by a balding dome, looking as if it had found its way onto the wrong body.
"Mr. Jarrow, good morning. Right on time as always. And how are you feeling today?"
"Not too bad. At least the weather's easing up."
"It has been a tough one, yes. I thought the snow was here forever."
Valdheim's voice had a trace of a foreign accent that Jarrow had never been able to place but hadn't asked about. Despite his senescent features, his manner was always brisk and sturdily robust. Jarrow wondered if that was his way of seeking to impart professional reassurance. If so, it never quite worked, for Jarrow always found himself with a feeling of something sinister in the background, like a shadow lurking just beyond his limit of vision. He wasn't sure why.
Marje, the receptionist, ran Jarrow's verification coder through a slot on her terminal to confirm the details she'd entered, and handed the card back. "That's fine, Mr. Jarrow. How are those kids treating you at the school?"
"Oh . . ." Jarrow fumbled for an answer. He had always suffered from an acute awkwardness with women, which taxed his thinking faculties even over questions as innocuous as this.
"I guess you've been there long enough to know how to look after yourself," Marje said.
"Er, yes. I guess so."
"This way please." Valdheim rescued him with a gesture in the direction of the passageway leading to the treatment room. "You're the first," he said over his shoulder, indicating the empty waiting room with a nod as Jarrow followed. "We can go straight through."
Jarrow had been attending these sessions periodically for almost six months now, although the circumstances leading to them had begun some time before that. In the course of his mandatory annual checkup the previous summer, he had described periodic attacks of lethargic depression and emotional confusion, sometimes bad enough for him to take time off work. Suspecting an incipient cerebral disorder, the local clinician referred him to a specialist for diagnostic tests, who in turn brought in a neurologist from the Regional Health Authority's Ramsey Hospital in St. Paul. The condition turned out to be a mild inflammation that soon yielded to a course of antibiotics and drugs.
But to Jarrow's consternation, he was informed that the tests had revealed certain irregularities in underlying patterns of neural activity, which were thought to have induced the condition. In other words, although the prescribed treatment appeared superficially successful, the suspicion was that it had addressed the symptoms rather than the cause. Nobody could be really sure, however, since that area of psychopathology was on the fringe of contemporary research. However, Minneapolis had been selected as one of several national test sites for a new piece of diagnostic equipment that was being developed for decoding and analyzing deep-seated brain activity, and Jarrow was -approached to volunteer as a model case study. Jarrow agreed, and the introduction to Dr. Valdheim had followed soon afterward.
They entered the treatment room, which Valdheim had once described as housing a "glorified video reading head." All the same, it still managed to require the inevitable carts with rubber tubes, glassware, and trays of implements that doctors everywhere seemed incapable of functioning without, and the sight of which always made Jarrow feel slightly sick. The room itself had a bench and a sink along one side, with shelves and a glass-fronted cabinet full of jars and bottles above. A control console with a keyboard and several -display screens, along with two cabinets of electronics, took up most of the wall opposite. The centerpiece of it all was an -assembly of electrical apparatuses, focusing guides, windings, and cooling coils that dominated the space in between. From its center, a leather-topped couch extended into the room, its head end surrounded by a radial array of metal tubes and crystal plates laced by wires and optical fibers, around which the room's other fittings seemed to stand in respectful reverence like the lesser trappings in a chapel before the main altar.
It was called QUIP, which Jarrow now knew stood for Quantum Interferoencephalogram Processor. Valdheim had told him so. Valdheim had also been more than generous with his time in trying to explain about superconducting current loops, quantized molecular magnetic moments, and resonant phase patterns deep in the brain; but that kind of thing really wasn't Jarrow's field.
Although he tried to nod and shake his head and say the right things at the right times, he still didn't have a clear-enough grasp of how the device worked to have hazarded any attempt at describing it to anyone else. But apparently the detectors could sense changes in electrical current as small as a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of an ampere, which Jarrow gathered was about the same fraction of the current in a small flashlamp as the thickness of a piece of tissue paper was to forty times the sun's distance from the planet Pluto. After that, he hadn't even bothered trying to follow. His first impulse had been to flaunt this newfound knowledge at Larry, but it would only have given Larry, who taught sophomore math and physics, the satisfaction of snowing him with more techni-calities. So in the end, Jarrow had decided against it.
Valdheim went over to the console, flipped some switches, and commenced a dialogue with one of the screens via the keyboard. "You're becoming something of a celebrity, you know, Mr. Jarrow," he said over his shoulder.
"Oh, really?" Watching Valdheim checking the responses and then entering another command put Jarrow in mind of a virtuoso organist enraptured with his natural medium. He himself found the ubiquitous thickets of buttons and cryptic symbols, which barred the way to seemingly everything he wanted to do in the modern world, -incomprehensible. You had to be under fifteen or Japanese to understand anything these days. Or one of those people whose business it was, like Larry—and which Larry never let slip an oppor-tunity to demonstrate.
"Yes," Valdheim said. "Your case is being talked about in professional circles."
"It is?"
"Well, a certain rather specialized group of profes-sionals, anyway. It has some interesting features."
Jarrow had never thought of himself as important. He felt mildly flattered.
Valdheim touched another button, entered a code, and looked up expectantly as one of the screens that had been blank came to life. "Let me show you a little of what we found last time," he said. Jarrow followed his gaze obediently. The screen showed a mass of what looked like scores of richly branching trees of various colors, all densely inter-twined and enmeshed together. Some seemed to flicker in highlights, with branches suddenly disappearing from some places while others added themselves elsewhere, darting their way erratically through the forest like fingers of multiple-forked lightning feeling pathways to the ground. Other patterns came and went spasmodically, while still others propagated smoothly, changing and distorting like smoke rings moving through turbulent air. Valdheim had shown Jarrow similar things before. And still, none of it meant anything. To Jarrow, it could all just as easily have been a computer reconstruction of autogenesis in a petri dish, or a surrealistic vision of colliding -galaxies.
Valdheim stepped a pace back and explained, still looking at the screen. "Here's a recurring cycle of activated dendritic arboration paths occurring in a region of your inferior temporal cortex. That's one of the regions where visual primitives resolved in the striate cortex are combined into coherent imagery. It also receives an input of emotively significant associative weightings from the neocortex. But the configuration of synaptic modifications estab-lished as a consequence is inhibited by oscillations correlating with the conscious state, which are communicated from the thalamus." He pointed from one -entanglement of meaningless, pulsating luminescence to another, then turned to look at Jarrow inquiringly.
"Fascinating," Jarrow said.
"We are looking at what goes on inside your brain, you see," Valdheim went on. "This is where the images that you see begin to come together. Man is a visual animal. -Images are very important to us. We weight them with various emotional associations, depending on our experiences." He gestured again. "Normally, of course, the images are driven by signals coming in from the world outside, which is how they keep in step with reality and hopefully reflect what's happening there. But the region can still function when there are no signals coming in to direct it. Then it invents images of its own."
At last, a glimmer of something that made sense. "As in dreaming," Jarrow hazarded.
Valdheim returned a perfunctory nod, as if to a moron who had just grasped the connection between A and Apple. "What we have here is a repeating pattern of just such a nature, which represents a persistent set of images and connotations that will affect the processes taking place in the further areas that this region maps into. And this, we believe, might be the root of the depressions and disturbances that you described when you came to us."
Jarrow thought he followed that part. "These images . . . am I supposed to know what they are?" he asked -uneasily.
"No." Valdheim shook his head. "As I said, the activity is suppressed during the waking condition. Hence you have no conscious awareness of the form in which it manifests itself. And our techniques at present are not sufficiently sophisticated for us to tell you. But later, we would like you to take a series of psychological tests to help us try and establish that." The doctor rubbed his palms together. "In the meantime, back to work, yes?" He showed his teeth in a skull-like parody of a smile. "Or at least, I shall do the work while you relax. To activate the pattern, we will have to put you to sleep again."
Jarrow knew the drill by now and was already removing his jacket. He hung it on the stand by the door, added his necktie, then slipped off his shoes and sat down on the leather couch. Nurse Callins—Valdheim's stern-faced, middle-aged, and terrifyingly efficient assistant—entered through a rear door as Jarrow settled himself back and lowered his head onto the rubber headrest at the center of the radial array.
"Good day, Mr. Jarrow," she said, at the same time handing Valdheim a folder filled with papers, charts, and printouts.
"Hello again."
"A three-seven soporific, please. Same dose as before," Valdheim said. Nurse Callins turned toward the bench and the sounds came of tablets being dropped into a beaker and liquid being stirred. Valdheim moved over to the couch and began positioning supports and fittings around Jarrow's head. Jarrow felt soft pads tightening snugly beneath his ears and cold contact heads probing through his hair to touch his scalp. Although he knew that the procedure was noninvasive and painless, an involuntary nervous reaction asserted itself, and he found himself talking reflexively.
"It must be pretty expensive—all this stuff you've got here."
"You wouldn't want to pay the insurance premium," Valdheim agreed.
"I'm surprised that a private practice would have equipment like that."
"I'm cooperating with a national trial program, don't forget. The government owns it."
"Isn't it kind of unusual for it to be in a place like this? I mean, why wouldn't they set it up in one of the state hospitals somewhere?"
Valdheim watched a readout while he adjusted a control. "Head still now, Mr. Jarrow. No more talking please."
Nurse Callins moved into view and lowered a shallow drinking cup with a shaped lip. "Here you are. Easy, now."
The liquid tasted mildly tannic. Jarrow drained the last of it, then raised his eyes to find Valdheim's face peering down at him, seemingly from afar and yet filling his field of vision. The drug was taking effect already. Valdheim's voice sounded distorted and hollow. "That's the idea. Nice and comfortable. Watch my fingers as I count. You'll be away before I get to ten. We'll see you later in the recovery room. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . ." The fingers blurred into each other, and Valdheim's face receded to become a pink smudge. For some reason his eyes, gleaming through the metal-rimmed spectacles, still remained -distinct.
The voice boomed, emanating seemingly from everywhere: "Six . . . seven . . . eight . . ."
 
three
Jarrow regained consciousness slowly, to a feeling of softness and warmth enveloping him. Subdued light penetrated his eyelids, gently tugging him back to wakefulness.
A muted voice, a man's, was babbling in the background. Jarrow stretched his legs and felt smooth sheets sliding against his skin. He turned onto his side, and his face pressed into yielding pillows. His arm came up to rest on another pillow alongside. Cool air found a chink by his shoulder; he pulled the blanket closer around his neck. He hadn't felt so relaxed in years.
The babbling voice resolved itself into the vibrant logorrhea of TV announcers everywhere—which should have been illegal when people were trying to sleep. Jarrow pulled the blanket over his ear and tried to burrow deeper into the pillows, but the voice infused itself through the cracks like water into a leaky shoe.
". . . announcement of a new national enforcement agency to be set up under the Bureau of Environmental Control. Modeled on Europe's 'Green Police,' the organization will employ agents at federal and state levels to secure tighter compliance with regulations and planning requirements. The agents will have arbitrary powers of search and entry to conduct spot checks, and—get a load of this—will operate on a percentage basis of the fines imposed by a delinquency tribunal. In Stockholm last night, conservation secretary for the Western Consolidation, Gustav Moller of Germany, applauded the news, but called for stronger moves to pressure the Southern World and FER states into line. We'll have more on that later. Meanwhile, a time check: it's just coming up to seven-thirty on this chilly but clear Tuesday morning. . . ."
What? Jarrow rolled back over and opened his eyes.
"And to lighten things up a little, we've got a story about two penguins who've decided to live in a city fountain. And here to tell you about it is Mavis Young. Mavis, good morning. I must say, you're looking great today."
It wasn't Tuesday, it was Thursday! And how could the time be 7:30 a.m.?
It came to him then, suddenly, that a lot of things were wrong. What was a TV doing here? The bed was too big for a doctor's recovery room. And Jarrow was naked in it. Then he realized to his consternation that the pillows had an odor of perfume.
"Hi, Brad," a woman's voice said from the TV. "Why, thank you, kind sir."
"So, what's this about vagrant penguins?"
"Well, it all started with . . ."
Jarrow sat up. There was another queen-size bed alongside, untouched except for some women's clothes strewn on the quilt. On the bedside unit between the beds was a cigarette pack and lighter, an ashtray with several butts, and two glasses, one with an inch of amber liquid.
He gazed around in bewilderment. There was a vanity-cum-bureau running along the far wall, and on top of it, he could see a black briefcase, a lady's purse, a man's wallet, loose papers, a set of keys, and some change. None of the items looked familiar. Along with them was a part-emptied bottle of Canadian Club and an ice bucket. Near the bed was a chair with a striped shirt and underwear tossed carelessly over the back. A table with a tray holding dishes and what looked like the remains of a meal stood with two more chairs by a window. The drapes of the window were closed. There was an armchair nearby. On the other side of the room, opposite the window, was a folding luggage stand bearing a leather traveling case and a shoulder bag. A double closet completed the room, which appeared to have two doors opening off from it. One of them was half-open, and Jarrow could see from the view in the mirror above the vanity that it led to a bathroom.
The place had every appearance of being a hotel. This whole situation was insane. Jarrow hardly ever touched alcohol; he abhorred tobacco. Even raunchy jokes embarrassed him, never mind sleazy amourettes in hotels. And the men's clothes thrown over the chair weren't his.
He scrambled up hastily, but hesitated when he caught a glimpse of his reflection. There was something odd about his appearance. For the moment he wasn't sure what. Then, feeling insecure in his nudity, he went into the bathroom for a towel. There, he found a man's traveling kit by the sink, with toothbrush, shaver, nail clippers, and hairbrush—and again nothing was familiar. There was also a woman's red zip-up cosmetic purse, pushed to one side and spilling lipstick, compact, nail polishes, and hair grips; nearby was a pack of Band-Aids. Jarrow hitched a bath towel around his waist and went back into the main room to check the window.
Wherever this was, it lay among high-rises in what was clearly a large city center. But whichever way he tried projecting the angles, he couldn't reconcile it remotely with any view of Minneapolis. He let the drape fall back and stood rubbing his brow, eyes closed, as if hoping to massage the illusion away. But nothing had changed when he opened them again.
Baffled, he turned away from the window, and his eye came to rest on the plastic stand on the table beside the tray, containing copies of the hotel directory and various promotional materials. He picked up the directory and opened it. The introductory page carried the face of a smiling black woman in a yellow blouse and blue tunic. "Welcome!" the caption read, ". . . to the Atlanta Hyatt."
Atlanta?
Jarrow hadn't been to Atlanta since a weekend over ten years ago, when he'd attended an educational conference. He could think of nobody that he knew in the area, nor any business that might have brought him there. He swallowed hard as the realization sank in that something very strange had happened to him; his confusion began giving way to fear.
First, he needed to get dressed. He went back across the room to inspect the closet. It contained a couple of suits, one light gray, one dark with a thin pinstripe, several clean shirts, neckties, a pair of casual slacks, a maroon bathrobe, and a blue, hip-length topcoat. As with the other items in the room, he had never seen them before. The other side of the closet revealed a blouse and skirt, a pair of blue jeans, a woman's green coat, and an orange dress. No sign of any of his own clothes.
He tried the leather traveling case: socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, clothes brush, and other personal items—all a man's, but not his. A plastic bag inside at one end contained laundry. He looked briefly in the shoulder bag, but as he had anticipated, it was the woman's. Frantic now, he searched the drawers of the vanity, the cupboard units at either end, the shelf above the closets, and even the space beneath the sink in the bathroom. Nothing. He straightened up, filled one of the tumblers from the cold faucet, and took a long drink. Then he came back into the main room and stood, staring at the clothes in the closet again. As was his tendency when he was thinking, his hand came up unconsciously to pinch at his mustache. But his fingertips met a smooth upper lip.
He turned and looked at himself again in the mirror at the closet door. There was a bruise, a day or two old maybe, on his temple. And he had a Band-Aid on one side of his neck a short distance below his right ear. When he explored the spot with his fingertips it felt tender and slightly sore.
But the face was familiar: clear-skinned and clean-shaven, with black wavy hair and dark eyes; and he could detect nothing unusual about the lithe, swarthy-skinned body. Yet the sight seemed to jar with strange stirrings half remembered. He'd had the same kind of feeling, momentarily, when he first caught sight of himself in the larger mirror upon getting up from the bed.
He was sure that he had a habit of pinching his mustache when he was thinking or brooding; indeed, hadn't the reflex just manifested itself? But how could that be, when he didn't have a mustache? Maybe he'd had one once, and—along with a lot of other strange things that seemed to have been going on—had forgotten getting rid of it. Or could it be simply the remnant of an uncommonly vivid dream? . . . He needed a shave, he noted. But that could wait.
A door opened and closed somewhere nearby in the corridor outside. Voices sounded loudly for a few seconds, then receded, reminding Jarrow of the impending confrontation that could come at any moment. He looked at the woman's things scattered around the room, the remains of the meal and the drink, the untouched second bed. The vision of casual, abandoned intimacy repelled and unnerved him. Even without the disorientation of his predicament, facing the aftermath would have been ordeal enough. He had to get away and find somewhere to think alone without this kind of complication. And there was only one way. . . .
He took down the pants of the gray suit and measured them against his leg. They seemed to be about his size, anyway. He draped them on the edge of the bed and held the jacket against himself. It was the right width and length. Fumbling in his haste and anxiety, he took some socks and underwear from the traveling case, pulled on the pants, and buttoned himself into one of the clean shirts hanging in the closet. He found a pair of men's black leather shoes tossed near the wall by the bathroom door, which again fitted perfectly, and selected a plain dark blue tie from the rack. Finally, he slipped on the jacket and moved across the room to survey the items on the bureau-vanity more closely.
His next shock came when he opened the black briefcase and found a pair of guns staring up at him. He knew nothing about weapons, but one was a large automatic pistol and looked powerful, while the other was small and slim, lighter in construction, probably intended for concealment. With them was a plastic case containing an assortment of what looked like tools, drills, and other gadgets that didn't mean anything, along with a number of electronic devices, equally baffling. Jarrow stared in horrified fascination for several seconds, then closed the briefcase decisively and pushed it aside. He didn't have time now to worry about what it meant, and he certainly wasn't about to risk complicating this situation further by taking it with him.
The loose change went into one of the pants pockets, and after a moment's hesitation the keys. There was also a hotel memo pad with the top sheet turned over and several phone numbers scrawled on the one that was -exposed. They didn't convey anything. He turned back the top sheet and found scrawled on it the words:
Headman to ship out via J'ville, sometime Nov 19. Check ref "Cop 3."
Jarrow shrugged and dropped the pad into one of the side pockets of his jacket, along with the room's electronically coded passcard. He took a handkerchief from the traveling case and then picked up the wallet. Inside was a personal ID card in a transparent window—and that was when he got the next shock, causing him to gasp aloud. The ID card was made out for a Maurice Gordon, said to be from Philadelphia; but the face looking back out at him—smooth-shaven, olive-skinned, with black wavy hair—was his own. A hasty check of the wallet's other compartments revealed that Maurice Gordon was cleared by the IRS to leave the country at will, belonged to the Eastern Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce, and had recently visited Washington. Also, he believed in being prepared for emergencies: the wallet contained almost $2,500 in cash. Jarrow stuffed the wallet into an inside pocket, went to the door again, paused for a deep breath to steady himself, and let himself out.
A sign a short distance away directed him to the elevators. When he was halfway along the corridor, a woman came around the corner, heading the other way. Certain that it was his unknown companion, Jarrow tensed for the encounter, but she passed by with just an uncertain half smile, sensing his apprehension. Getting too jumpy, he told himself as he pressed the call button at the elevator. Calm down. Got to calm down.
The car arrived. Despite his admonition, he felt himself tensing again as the door opened, but the car was empty. "Which floor do you require?" a synthetic voice asked from a grille as he got in.
"Main lobby."
In his present state of mind, a thousand-mile overland trip back to Minneapolis was out of the question. Flying was a far more restricted affair than had once been the case, and a ticket would only be issued on production of a valid internal passport carrying a certificate of compliance issued by the taxation department of one's state of residence. Since the only travel category authorized in Jarrow's internal passport was the low-priority grade that came with his junior high-school teacher's status, he had resigned himself to the prospect of a long wait at the airport.
But the thought occurred to him as the elevator -descended that the ID he was carrying meant that he would have to collect the mysterious Maurice Gordon's passport from Reception on checking out, and from the quick assess-ment he'd made from the contents of the wallet, there seemed a good chance that Gordon might have a higher-category authorization. So one small blessing could be that he'd get home sooner.
When Jarrow came out of the elevator, a man in a white hat was disputing something with the clerk at the desk, gesticulating furiously and then starting all over again whenever the clerk tried to answer. Jarrow watched from behind a pillar. The problem seemed interminable. Another woman came out behind him from the adjacent elevator and again he froze, but she ignored him and went out the front door. Finally, the dialogue at the desk ended, and the man in the white hat stomped away. Jarrow emerged and approached warily.
The clerk greeted him matter-of-factly. "Good morning, sir."
"Hello. Er, room . . ." Jarrow looked at the passcard in his hand, then realized that he didn't know the room number. For security reasons the code printed on the electronic passes wasn't the same as the door numbers. He slid the passcard across the counter without finishing the sentence. The clerk inserted it into a terminal.
"Mr. Gordon, room 1406?"
Jarrow nodded, at the same time swallowing involuntarily. "That's right."
"How can I help you?"
"I need to leave right away."
"Okay. Let's see, there are a few extra charges I have to add in here. It won't take a second." The clerk consulted unseen oracles and tapped at keys.
Jarrow looked around anxiously, expecting at any moment to hear a shout or see somebody coming toward him from the elevators. A call-tone sounded from a phone behind the desk. Another clerk took it. Jarrow watched uneasily. The clerk said something into the handset, listened, and his eyes came to rest on Jarrow. In his mind, Jarrow could picture security staff already rushing to the lobby, police cruisers drawing up outside. He felt perspiration rushing down his back, certain that every line on his face was a beacon broadcasting that something was amiss and screaming for attention. But the clerk's gaze drifted casually away again, then he grinned to himself and started ribbing whoever was at the other end. Jarrow looked away, telling himself again to calm down.
"If you'll just okay that, Mr. Gordon."
"What? . . . Oh, yes." Jarrow inspected the bill that appeared on the customer screen built into the top of the counter. "It says three nights. Is that right? I've been here three nights?"
"Today is Tuesday, sir. According to the record, you arrived late Saturday afternoon without a reservation. Isn't that correct?"
"Sure. I was just checking. That's okay."
"I need your coder, sir."
"Er, pardon?" He hadn't thought to check that he had one.
"Your personal verification coder, Mr. Gordon. I need it to verify the bill."
"Oh, of course." Jarrow reached inside his jacket and drew out Gordon's wallet. Rummaging inside he found a PVC with the name maurice j. gordon embossed in visible print. The clerk took it and pushed it into a slot while Jarrow watched woodenly, waiting for the inevitable rejection, or for some other irregularity to signal itself.
"That's fine, Mr. Gordon. Here you are." The clerk returned the coder, along with a U.S. internal passport. Numb with relief and not a little surprise, Jarrow accepted them and nodded mutely. He looked at the passport and saw that it was made out in the name of Maurice J. Gordon. The picture alongside the thumbprint was his own. It was in order and carried a high-priority flight authorization. "Thanks for using the Hyatt. Come and see us in Atlanta again sometime."
"Thank you. Can I get a cab to the airport?"
"Sure. There should be a couple outside. The doorman will take care of it."
"How far away is it?"
"This time of morning, aw, about twenty, twenty-five minutes. What time's your flight?"
"I haven't booked one yet. Thanks. . . . Thanks again."
"Have a good one."
Jarrow got a cab straightaway at the main entrance, but it was several miles before he felt safe and could settle back in the seat to begin taking stock of his circumstances.
"Driver, what day is it?" he asked, leaning forward, just to double-check.
"Tuesday, all of it, last I heard."
Jarrow sat back again, shaking his head. It was crazy.
 
four
It had been several years since Jarrow last flew. He didn't enjoy it. The terminal had a worn and shabby look, seeming to exude the weariness of a world that was running down. There was growing concern about the effects of jet exhaust on the stratosphere, and the government had been talking about cutting the annual mileage allocations auctioned to airlines and raising rates to reduce the number of flights further. Jarrow hadn't realized that the measures were so far advanced, however. Half the airport's facilities appeared to be closed, and the departure lounge into which Jarrow eventually found his way was packed with anxious and harassed travelers milling around the check-in desks as they jockeyed for places, or sitting out interminable waits amid piles of baggage and restless children. Taking in the scene, Jarrow resigned himself to the inevitability of a long -delay. But to his grateful relief, Gordon's passport got him onto a United flight due to depart, as luck would have it, in less than an hour, with a stop at Chicago. He hadn't realized that the fares had gone up so much, either, but Gordon's cash reserve took care of that.
The man who lowered himself ponderously into the seat next to Jarrow's was fifty pounds overweight, breathed wheezily, and smelled of stale perspiration. He overflowed the armrest with his elbows and invaded the aisle space on one side and Jarrow's legroom on the other with his knees. Jarrow pulled himself in as far as possible and prepared himself for an uncomfortable flight.
The man leaned back, spreading his elbows wider to unfasten his necktie, then sideways, thrusting a shoulder across, to fish a pack of gum from his jacket pocket with the other hand. "These flying sardine cans don't get any better," he drawled.
"Right." Jarrow had the sinking feeling that this was the prelude to something that could go on all through the flight. During the cab ride from the hotel and amid the bustle of the airport, he had been waiting for a few hours of quiet to pull himself together and collect his thoughts.
"You do this route often?"
"Er, no."
The wrapper came off one of the wafers of gum, and the gum went into the mouth, which proceeded to chomp noisily. "I used to do it all the time. I know the scenery from here to the Windy City like my local road into town. Had to cut it back some in the last six months, though—with the new restrictions."
"Oh."
"I'm in tiles and flooring. How about you?"
"Pardon?"
"What line are you in?"
"Oh. Teaching. I teach."
"That's nice." There was a short silence, apart from the gum cracking. The information had evidently provoked no further thought or curiosity. Jarrow was beginning to hope that perhaps he would be permitted some peace for his own reflections after all, when the man shifted his bulk heavily again and leaned closer. Jarrow caught a whiff of bad breath mixed with the odor of gum. "Of course, you know what it's all about."
"What?"
"All this cutting back and clamping down. Why we can't catch a plane anytime we want anymore, or why you can get fined for running an air conditioner if it's below -seventy-five. You know what's really going on?"
Jarrow sighed. Everybody knew why such things were necessary. He didn't want to get into this. "It's a limited world," he recited. "The Profligate Era overstretched every-thing. We have to get back to a proper balance, conserve resources."
A thick-fingered hand waved itself in front of his face. "Nah, that's not why. It's because they know what's down the line. The Russian heap of cards came apart, right, and now it's all a mess over there. The old firm's supposed to be junked, and now they're all going their own way, okay? . . . But that ain't the way it is. See, the way I -figure it is, them Communists are still out there, in the space bubbles and on the Moon. That's who's really running things out there. And one day they're gonna be coming back to settle the old action, and our people know it. So everything's gotta be put into the military, and it's why we have to have all this security. We can't afford luxuries for now."
Jarrow groaned inwardly. Yes, Earth had to remain on its guard against the Offworlder threat, but this half-wit had it all wrong. The danger was simply one posed by economic reality: their reckless expansion of industry and population was bound to outrun the capacity of their resources to sustain, and when that happened they would look to Earth's, which were strained enough as things were. Anyone who couldn't see that, or who needed to conjure up the ghosts of defunct political ideologies to explain the situation, wasn't someone to waste breath arguing with. And just at this moment, Jarrow wasn't interested in arguing with anybody.
"I'm sorry, I've had a couple of tough days," he said. "Nice talking to you, but I need to catch up on my sleep." Without waiting for a response, he slid down in his seat, closed his eyes, and began going over what he could -remember.
Three days. . . . The clerk at the Hyatt had told him he had checked in on Saturday. And it seemed that Jarrow had acquired all the trappings and identity of Maurice Gordon by that time. His visit to Dr. Valdheim's had been on Thursday. What had happened during those missing forty-eight hours?
The fat man crashed about in the seat next to him again, derailing his thoughts. The ceaseless noise of gum--chewing sawed at his nerves.
The last thing he could recall before waking up in the hotel was looking up from the QUIP apparatus as he went under. At the thought of the probes and contacts around his head, all his misgivings about anything technological—and medical technology in particular—returned. Was it possible that he hadn't awakened at all, and all of this was taking place in his mind?
Weariness came over him with the effort of trying to make sense of it, and he drifted into a genuine, if fitful, sleep. At Chicago the fat man, thankfully, deplaned. His place was taken by a wan-faced woman who said not a word and was no trouble. After takeoff, Jarrow dozed again, awakening only when the cabin attendant roused him for the descent into Minneapolis. Through the window on one side as the plane banked, he caught a glimpse of a curve of the Mississippi and the plains to the south of the city, and saw to his surprise that there was plenty of snow about. He thought it had just about cleared. Maybe there had been a freak storm late in the season while he'd been gone, as sometimes happened.
When he got out, he decided that must have been the case: the weather had turned cold. He was glad that he'd brought Gordon's topcoat with him.
* * *
Since his divorce, Jarrow had lived alone in what was called Brooklyn Center, eight miles north of the metropolis. The apartment, one of sixty in a twin-tower layer cake of gray concrete and aluminum-ribbed glass shamelessly flaunting the name Orchard Lea Court, had seen better days. With the extension of urban rent controls, landlords and builders had been showing typical social irresponsibility by pulling out of the private-residence business, and it was now necessary for dwelling space to be allocated on a number-of-occupants basis. In fact, Jarrow was above par in getting what he had. That was one of the areas where being a teacher could help.
It must have been quite a storm, he concluded, seeing the piles of cleared snow along the sidewalks as he began tottering and slithering the two icy blocks from the nearest autoshuttle point. But when he had gone no more than a few yards, he saw that the snow was dirty and in many places lay on top of the compacted slush that looked as if it had been there a lot longer than three days. He puzzled over this oddity as he walked—and then stopped dead as the realization hit him that the assumption he'd been carrying uncritically all the way from Atlanta was completely without foundation.
He had presumed that his visit to Valdheim had been last Thursday, two days before he checked into the Hyatt. But there was no reason, of course, why it should be so. In fact, it was now so obvious from the changes that had taken place that whatever had happened must have involved far more time than three days, that he could find no explan-ation for taking so long to see it. Perhaps it was all affecting him even more than he realized. He began moving again, his pace quickening despite the treacherous surface underfoot, in growing disquiet and agitation.
And then, on reaching Orchard Lea Court, he stopped again to stare at the block across the street. Unless he'd been walking in and out for weeks without noticing, it had suddenly acquired a whole new frontage. Surely, the last time he'd seen it, hadn't it been empty, with a sign advertising a takeover by new owners and plans for converting it into offices? Now it was in business, with a new door and entrance hall, fresh paint, and logos on the windows advertising several brave enterprises now in residence. That hadn't happened over the weekend, either. More puzzled than ever, Jarrow turned and walked up the steps to the entrance of "B" tower.
Inside, he paused and stood looking around. The lobby area looked even more run-down than he remembered, with walls scuffed and scratched and the carpet on the stairs by the elevator worn threadbare at the edges. He walked over to the elevator and pressed the call button. The machinery inside responded with creaks and rumblings. And then as he waited, mentally playing through the picture of enter-ing his apartment and wondering if any new surprises were lying in wait for him there, he realized that he probably didn't have a key to get in. He felt inside his pocket and pulled out the keys that he'd picked up in the hotel room. As he'd feared, none were his own. The car arrived and the door in front of him slid aside. But there was no point in getting in. He stood looking around him in a quandary.
There was a movement in the janitor's room by the main entrance, and a figure rose behind the window facing out over the lobby. Moments later, a gnarled, wispy-haired Hispanic shuffled out, wearing a blue workshirt beneath a tan, kapok-padded vest. Jarrow had never seen him before.
"You looking' for somebody in here, or sump'n?"
"Ah, just the man." Jarrow tried to force a disarming grin, but it wouldn't quite work. "Look, I've got a small problem here. I've lost my key, and I'm locked out. Can you come up and let me in? It's 703."
The janitor flashed him a suspicious look. "703?"
"Right."
"I can't let nobody in except a resident. Who are you, anyhow?"
Jarrow wasn't in a mood to be given even more of a hard time than he was having already. And he didn't like the man's tone. "Look," he said tiredly, "if you're new to the job, give yourself time to learn all the faces before you try that kind of stuff. I am the resident, okay?"
"Get outta here."
All the tension that had been accumulating since early that morning erupted. "Look at your list, for God's sake," Jarrow snapped. "The name is Jarrow. I want to get into my apartment."
"Jarrow, huh?"
"Right." The janitor wasn't budging. Jarrow's voice rose higher. "Look, what the hell is this? I've been out of town, and I haven't had the best of weekends. So will you quit trying to be a hardass, or whatever you're playing at, and just do what I'm asking you to?"
The janitor backed toward the doorway he had emerged from. "What kinda asshole are you? I ain't never seen you before, an' I ain't never heard o' no Jarrow. Now I'm warnin' yuh, if you don't get out I'm callin' the cops."
Jarrow sighed, then changed tactics and spread his hands imploringly. "Look, I'm telling you I'm Richard Jarrow. I live in number 703. Why is that such a hard thing to believe?" Inwardly he was seized by a sudden misgiving as he realized that all he needed now was for the janitor to ask for some ID. Jarrow didn't have a shred that he could produce.
"What are you talkin' about?" the janitor rasped. "People called Ryan live in 703. Have done as long as I've worked here."
"And how the hell long is that?" Jarrow challenged, getting angry again.
"Three months now, just over—if that's any o' your business. So don't you go tellin' me I need to learn any faces."
Jarrow gaped, all the belligerence evaporating out of him. But even that didn't add up. He turned and stared out through the doors at the mounds of snow piled along the sidewalk. Three months would put them into midsummer: June or July. This was getting even crazier.
He turned a baffled face back toward the janitor, who was hovering just outside his cubbyhole with obvious doubts as to Jarrow's motives or sanity.
"What's the date today?" Jarrow whispered.
The janitor retreated into his room and reappeared with a stained copy of the Minneapolis Star & Tribune. "November seventeenth."
"November? That's impossible!"
"That's what it says, right here. Think I can't read or sump'n? Take a look yourself." The janitor thrust the -paper out, at the same time keeping his distance. Jarrow took it and read the line below the banner disbelievingly. The janitor's voice mumbled on in the background. "Comin' in here tellin' me I don't know my job, sayin' he lives here. Asshole don't even know what month it is."
Jarrow handed the paper back numbly. His last recollection before finding himself in Atlanta was his visit to Dr. Valdheim. That had been on the third of April.
He had lost over seven months of his life.
 
five
When he was ten years old or so, Richard Jarrow had become a Galactic Ranger. Membership was acquired by filling in an application from the back of a breakfast -cereal box and sending it in with ten dollars and five tokens. In return, the prospective interstellar lawman received a visored communicator helmet; space navigator's equipment belt and sidearm; official ID card and badge; a top-secret manual containing various codes and signaling procedures, instructions for dealing with a host of unlikely situations, charts of the organizational command structure, rules and regulations, and the Ranger's Code of Honor. It also included a tear-out registration form to be completed and returned for filing at Galactic Strike Command Headquarters, care of the Krispbix Foods Corporation, which among other things listed height, weight, color of hair and eyes, and any other distinguishing features.
In response to the last question, young Jarrow had described a birthmark on his left forearm, vaguely shaped like South America. For some strange reason he couldn't actually summon to mind any visual recollection of what it looked like. But he remembered quite definitely filling in the answer. The stranger thing was that there was no trace of such a mark on his arm now.
He was also becoming aware of other, similar peculiarities concerning events he was certain he remembered as having happened, but that he was unable to reconcile with his circumstances now. There had been an occasion in his teenage years, for example, when he went on vacation with some friends to Texas in July and had been badly sunburned. He remembered the doctor who treated him commenting that with his fair skin he should have taken it easier for the first few days. But how could that have been, when Jarrow had olive skin and a Mediterranean complexion?
He sat on the edge of the single bed in a nondescript room with wallpaper and cheap drapes, and tapped a number into the keypad of the viewphone. For refuge, he had sought out one of the small hotels in downtown Minneapolis, which, for cash, would waive the regulations requir-ing ID. Maurice Gordon, he'd decided, would be better buried for the time being, until he found out more about him.
The girl who answered the call was thin and pallid, with dark hair fluffed out around her head like a smoky halo. She wore a bored and indifferent expression. "D.K. Properties."
"Hello. You're the company that handles the rentals at Orchard Lea Court in Brooklyn Center?"
"Yes, we do."
"Ah, I wonder if you can help me. I'm trying to trace a Mr. Richard Jarrow who used to be in number 703. Can you tell me—"
"Hang on one second." The girl turned away, and the sound of computer keys being hammered came over the audio. A phone rang somewhere in the background. "703, you said?"
"Right."
"What was the name again?"
"Jarrow."
"Right. . . . Well, he ain't there no more. It's let in the name of Ryan. Jarrow's contract terminated end of May last year."
"Er, do you have any indication of why?"
"We're not into life histories here. We just rent apartments, okay?"
"I understand. Oh, one more thing. Does it say where he went? Do you have a forwarding address, anything like that?"
"All it's got here is that the contract ran out at the end of May. That's all I can tell you."
"I see. Thanks anyw—" The screen blanked out.
Jarrow touched a key to disconnect, swung his legs up off the floor, and lay back against the pillows stacked at the head of the bed. He had been lying there like this ever since he checked in, groping for a hint of a lead that never came. A whole chunk of his life, from the April 3 that he remembered through to November 17, which he had to accept as the current date, had vanished. On top of that, even his recollections from before—from times that he had no reason to view as having been abnormal—were sprinkled with details that couldn't be true. And as if that wasn't disconcerting enough, he had returned to find himself surrounded by evidence of a life-style that wasn't his, and in possession of the clothes and ID of somebody he'd never heard of.
He stared at the picture of buffalo hanging above the brown-painted chest of drawers on the other side of the room. The buffalo didn't have an answer to offer. Jarrow thought for a few minutes longer, then got up, took the blue topcoat from the hook behind the door, and went back down to the street.
* * *
The time was just coming up to four in the afternoon when Jarrow arrived at Linden Junior High. After his exper-ience with the janitor the day before, he was wary of -relying on being recognized to get him past the security desk—especially since he had no documentation to verify who he was. Respect for authority and the kinds of safeguards necessary for the orderly functioning of society were essen-tial in the makeup of future citizens, and the educational environment was designed to instill familiarity and acceptance from an early age. Students carried electronically coded IDs, filled in forms, and had to get permits for just about everything, and were organized into progressive levels of seniority that taught due deference to higher ranks. They were reviewed periodically in a "personal profile" that included assessments of such qualities as group conformity and social adaptability, as well as academic performance, and this constituted the beginnings of a cumulative record of appraisals that would accompany them through, and in many cases have much to do with determining, their -careers.
However, the buildings also contained a number of staff doors that could be opened by number codes, which Jarrow knew. He went around to the side of the central building, which contained the staff rooms and offices, entered the digits into the touchbox, and a few moments later appeared from a side corridor leading into the main hall. There, he paused to take stock of the general situation.
A new door had been installed at the end of the corridor leading to Ms. Filey's and Chet Orne's classrooms, but by now Jarrow was learning to expect things like that. The posters around the bulletin board were different. One was a chart of the human body populated by caricatures of directors in suits inhabiting the head and sending out -orders, and depictions of assorted professionals, public servants, tradespeople, and workers in various places carrying out their assigned tasks. The slogan above read: each part has its place. so do we. Another extolled the virtues of group conformity by showing a ridiculously portrayed pig with artificial wings strapped to its back about to leap from a tree, while other pigs looked on from below in various attitudes of scorn and derision. be smart: play your part, the caption exhorted. Farther along, some shelves had been put up in the hall area to accommodate overflow from the library.
Jarrow had arrived as classes were changing, and students were free to move in the corridors without passes. The younger faces were unfamiliar to him, which was to be expected if they were from the September intake. As he moved on past the library, heading for the staff living room and general office, a group from one of his own freshman social integration classes came around the corner from the refectory. Sally Bolin was giggling as usual, sharing a joke with Wendy Redcliff; behind them were Jerry Hodge, a few pounds heavier, and Abud Taraki, the large-eyed Iranian, still wearing the same red neckerchief with gold--embroidered eagles' heads. They'd all be sophomores now.
All at once, being in familiar surroundings again, seeing faces that he knew, brought the first feeling of respite from the confusion that had been racking Jarrow ever since his strange awakening that morning. Relief flooded through him, drowning the doubts and bringing a conviction that somehow, everything would work itself out now. Forgetting all misgivings, he changed direction to intercept the group and grinned at them delightedly, yet in a way that couldn't come close to expressing what he felt at that moment.
But the two girls looked through him as if he weren't there and went on their way sniggering and chattering, while Jerry and Abud exchanged glances just long enough to confirm to each other that this guy was acting strangely. Abud stopped to look at Jarrow inquiringly, while Jerry slowed a few paces ahead.
"Are you looking for someone?" Abud asked cautiously.
"Abud. Don't you remember me? I can't have changed that much." Jarrow spread his hands in appeal, at the same time broadening his grin to a point that he realized too late was inane.
Abud backed off a pace. "No, I don't."
Jarrow's smile faded into incomprehension. He turned to Jerry. "You must know me. Don't you?"
Jerry shook his had. "Sorry." He looked at Abud. "Come on. We'll be late. Pass-break'll be over in less than a minute."
Abud retreated after Jerry. "The school office is that way," Abud threw back over his shoulder, pointing. "They'll be able to help you in there."
And then a commanding voice spoke from a speaker somewhere behind and above. "Attention, person wearing the blue coat." Jarrow spun around and looked up. One of the surveillance cameras was trained on him. He was so used to walking about the place oblivious to them that he had forgotten. "This is security. You have not been identified as authorized to be on the premises. Remain where you are."
Panic hit, a desperation to find somebody who would know him. He turned and fled for the staff lounge, opened the door, and went through.
The first impressions to filter through his muddled senses were of everything inside being much as he remembered: the same pair of worn armchairs and a couch, the mural TV framed by bookshelves, forming the centerpiece of the far wall, the coffee urn on its table by the door into the cloakroom. But a couple of the faces that looked up in surprise at the hastiness of his entry were new. Louise Kreishner, who taught first- to third-year English, was filling a mug from the urn; Ivor Nimmo, the gym coach, was talking to another man, unknown to Jarrow, in the easy chairs by one of the two low tables in the center of the room; and Jenny Lauer, who taught conservation and deindus-trialization, was marking papers at the long desk by the window.
There was an awkward silence as whatever conversation had been going on a moment before ceased. Then Nimmo raised his eyebrows inquiringly, without a flicker of recognition. He was a solid, loose-limbed man with a healthy, ruddy-skinned face and fringes of golden curls hanging on doggedly to a head that was mostly smooth. He had on a maroon track suit and blue-and-white sneakers. Jarrow was not fond of sports and had always found Nimmo -intimidating.
"Yes? Can we help you?"
Jarrow shook his head incredulously. "Ivor. It's me."
Nimmo's brow knotted. "Sorry, but it's not obvious. . . . Have we met?"
"Met? We only worked together for three years." Jarrow waited. Nimmo showed his palms and shrugged. "Well, I'm Richard Jarrow, for God's sake!"
At this, Louise Kreishner straightened up from the coffee urn and turned, holding her mug in her hand, and Jenny Lauer stared from her chair at the desk; but neither of them showed any more sign of knowing him than Nimmo had.
Jarrow looked from Nimmo to Louise, to Jenny, briefly at the strangers, who were all attention by now, and then back to Nimmo. "What the hell is this, guys? Look, I know this might be something of a surprise, but people can reappear after long absences, you know. Why are you all looking at me as if I'd walked in with two heads?"
Nimmo frowned, then looked away at the others as if for support or suggestions.
"Go and get Irwin," Jenny muttered from the desk in a low voice, clearly meaning Irwin Shafer, the school -principal.
Then the door behind Jarrow opened again and a man in a blue police-style shirt stepped through, the flap of his gun holster unfastened and his hand resting pointedly on the butt of the weapon. Jarrow knew him at once: Chip Rogers, one of the security officers, but Rogers obviously didn't know him. "Who are you?" he demanded curtly. "Didn't you hear the order to stay put out there?" He looked at the others. "Does anyone know this guy? Has he got business here?"
Nimmo shook his head. "Never saw him before."
"You'd better come with me," Rogers said, loosening the gun further.
Jarrow looked from one to another protestingly. "But this is crazy! I know you. You're Ivor Nimmo. You teach phys ed here, right?" He stabbed a finger in the direction of each of the others in turn. "And I know you, Louise, and you, Jenny. Christ, doesn't anyone's memory go back as far as April? Is there some kind of mass blackout going around that nobody's told me about?"
The new people in the room exchanged uncomfortable glances and shuffled in their seats. Louise put down the coffee mug and crossed over to the door. "He says he's Jarrow," she explained, speaking with the low, overly calm condescension of somebody anxious not to provoke a luna-tic. "Will you come with us to Irwin's office, Chip?"
"I'll come too," Nimmo said, bracing his arms on the sides of his chair and rising.
Louise led the way back into the corridor, Jarrow following, and Nimmo bringing up the rear with Rogers. "We're going to Irwin Shafer's office, right?" Jarrow said, turning his head and making an empty-handed gesture. "You see, I know . . ." He saw that the words were making no impression. Suddenly he felt foolish, and his voice trailed away.
Minutes later he was standing by Shafer's desk, watching the same mixture of hostility and suspicion spread over the principal's heavy-jowled moon of a face as Louise -related the story. Behind them, Nimmo stood watching with his back to the closed door, Rogers alongside.
"Who are you, and how do you come to know so much about us here?" Shafer asked finally in his quiet but -intense, half-whispering voice.
"How else would I know if I wasn't who I say I am?" Jarrow demanded. "Irwin, we've known each other for years. You hired me. Will somebody tell me what the hell's -going on here?"
Shafer seemed to consider his options for a few seconds, then looked up. "Do you really believe what you're saying, or is this some kind of sick joke?"
"Why should it be a joke? Look, I'm Richard Jarrow. Check your files and I'll tell you anything from them that you want to know.
Shafer looked somberly at the other two, seemingly ignoring Jarrow entirely. Then he sighed and lifted himself from the chair. He moved around to the wall behind Jarrow, where a collection of group photographs was hanging in frames, and took one down. "Do you recognize anyone in that picture?" he asked, handing it to Jarrow.
Jarrow looked. The picture showed three rows of students, the front row sitting on the ground, second on chairs, third standing, with staff members clustered in the center. "Why, sure," Jarrow said. He pointed. "That's Jenny Lauer in the middle, who was back there in the living room just now. Ken Yallows is next to her. I know most of these students. Xedong, here, Matthews, Casey, Wilheim, Rostalli. . . . You want me to go through the whole list?"
"How about him, there?" Shafer indicated with a finger. "The one standing on the other side of Jenny Lauer."
Jarrow peered at the man. He seemed to be more or less medium in build, with graying hair, and a pink, babyish face masked by a mustache. Jarrow shook his head. "I don't think I know him."
Shafer took the picture back. His eyes had the steely look of a hanging judge who had just heard all the evidence he needed. "Well, that's very strange," he said huskily. "You should, because that is Richard Jarrow. And now mister whoever-you-really-are, I want you to tell me what the hell's going on, before I have the police called in. Richard Jarrow died from a stroke in May. All of us that you're talking to in this room attended the funeral."
 
six
Some of the stores in the mall a couple of blocks from the school were closed, with for lease signs and whited-out windows, but the Farm Griddle steak-and-pancake restaurant that Jarrow had frequented for over three years didn't seem to have changed. He approached it across the parking lot, walking quickly and glancing back as if he expected to have been followed. He had escaped from the school on the pretext of using the bathroom, and then left via a side entrance.
He wasn't conscious of having walked the two blocks, or of making any decision to come here, but driven by pure habit had stumbled in a fog of confusion, too stunned by what Shafer had said to know what he was doing. But once at the door, he hesitated. Would Shafer have dismissed him as just a crank and told the others to forget about it? Or might he have taken a more serious view and called the police? They could already be scouting the vicinity. Jarrow wavered irresolutely, wondering if he should widen the area farther before he stopped moving. Then the familiar sight of the food counter, the row of booths inside the window, and the large menu board by the door brought home to him that apart from a modest lunch on the plane, he hadn't eaten all day. And in any case, he told himself, if anyone was out looking for him, he'd be less conspicuous inside than on the street. He went in.
The girl taking an order from a table at the far end was Mandy from seven months ago, but the others that he could see were new. Eamon, the assistant manager, was still there and conducted Jarrow to a booth by the window, but with no sign of recognition. Jarrow was past feeling any surprise.
The menu seemed to have lost a few items since he was last in, particularly from the range of pancakes, waffles, and desserts. He noticed that the syrup dispensers had -disappeared from the tables. There had been talk of banning excessive-sugar foods from public places, he remembered. Egg, beef, pork, and chili dishes now carried health warnings, as well as regular coffee, alcoholic drinks, and chicken, which had done so before. Jarrow settled for a tuna salad with wheat crackers. As the waitress left with the menu, he caught the eye of Eamon, standing near the cash desk, and raised a hand to summon him over.
"Is everything all right, sir?"
"Oh, sure. I just wanted to ask you something. Tell me, do you happen to know of a Dick Jarrow who used to come in here?"
"Dick?" Eamon's face clouded. "I guess it's been a while since you were in here, eh?"
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Why?"
"You mean the guy who used to teach at the school just along from here, right?"
"Used to? Did he leave or something?"
Eamon shook his head. " 'Fraid it's worse than that. He died . . . gee, it must have been sometime early in summer. A stroke, somebody said it was."
"Oh." Jarrow had been ready for it, and accepted the statement woodenly. "That's too bad."
"He was kinda quiet, but okay. Were you a good friend of his?"
"Not that much, really. You know, bumped into him every now and again. I guess you don't realize how time flies. Scary isn't it?" On impulse Jarrow added, "What reminded me was, earlier today somebody mistook me for him. Would that seem likely to you?"
Eamon looked down and shook his head disbelievingly. "No way. Did the guy have dark glasses on, and a dog?"
"That's what I thought. I just wondered if he still came in here, that's all."
"Well, sorry I had to be the first to tell you. Is there anything else I can do?"
"I guess not. Thanks."
"Enjoy your meal."
Halfway through his salad, Jarrow's digestion was ruined when he saw a city police department cruiser drawing up outside, and two winter-jacketed officers came into the restaurant; but they sat down at the far end without giving the place a second glance. Jarrow returned to his meal, his chest thumping like a basketball being bounced. He wasn't sure how long he could go on like this; and there was no way of telling how long he might have to, because he had no idea what he was going to do. But Gordon's money would only last for so long, and that set a real limit, whatever other ideas might occur to him. He'd need to sit down tonight, back at his hotel, and do some budgeting.
Nothing made sense. If his appearance had been changed through some elaborate process—by whom? for what purpose?—why, apart from the oddities among his recollections that he was unable to explain, did he seem normal to himself? And it wasn't simply a question of appearances. The woman in the hotel room in Atlanta, the drink, the guns in the briefcase—all pointed to his having been somehow transformed into literally a different person, physically and psychologically, for over half a year. And then somehow, since this morning, the mental part only of that person had apparently reverted to its former self. It sounded impossible, but what explanation was there?
Yet even that didn't account for all of it. If he was transformed, who was dead? The only trail he had to follow was the memory of an ordinary, everyday routine that ended abruptly in April. What, then, had happened in the last visit to Valdheim?
He checked himself right there. Why did he assume that whatever had happened to him had anything to do with Valdheim? Only because it was the last thing he remembered. But the cause could have been something that happened after that, but with some kind of retroactive effect—as when people knocked out by a blow on the head supposedly lost all recollection of what went before. So, the first thing to find out more about was what had happened immediately after that visit. Had he acted normally? Had something else happened at a later date that might have led to the predicament he was in now? The last person he'd talked to, other than Valdheim, Valdheim's receptionist Marje, and Nurse Callins, had been Larry Banks, when Larry dropped him off outside. And Larry, he now recalled, had promised to catch him in the afternoon to pick up a book that Jarrow had borrowed from the staff library. Larry, then, would have been looking for him later. It would be interesting to know if Larry had found him. That would be as good a place as any to start, he decided.
Jarrow finished his meal and went to one of the phone booths by the door to consult the directory. It showed that Larry Banks still lived at the same address in Champlin. But after pondering the matter, Jarrow decided against calling him right away. He was still too shaky and mixed up to know, really, what he wanted to say. If people thought he was dead, and if the reaction of Shafer and the others at the school was anything to go by, he would need to have a better line prepared than simply blundering in and saying he was Jarrow. Hopefully he'd have things clearer in his mind by tomorrow.
He brought a local Champlin area map onto the screen to check the location, paid a quarter for a hard copy, and put it in his pocket. Then he went back to the desk to pay the check, nodded a good night to Eamon, who was back at his post near the desk, and went back out. It was getting dark, and the evening was already chillier. He went to the Kmart a short distance along the mall and bought himself some warmer socks, a scarf, and a couple of thick sweaters. The clerk there told him that a bus would be leaving the mall in twenty minutes that would take him back to Minneapolis center. That left the question of what to do with the rest of the evening. It was one of those rare occasions in his life, Jarrow decided, that he could use a drink.
 
seven
There had been a time when men plundered the planet to light empty buildings all the night long. But reason and discipline had finally prevailed over vanity, and the towers of Minneapolis now loomed dark and faceless into the wintery night.
Jarrow got off the bus a few blocks short of the Hen-nepin Avenue bridge, crossing the river at Nicollet Island. He avoided the area west of the avenue, where some of the plusher bars and lounges were to be found. They were places where people went to see and be seen. He just wanted to hide. Instead, he headed into the central city and eventually found one of the smaller downtown bars. It was a bit garish for his taste, but a lot warmer than the sidewalk, and homey in its own rough kind of way.
He ordered a gin, adding less tonic than he normally took, and installed himself on one of the stools. The TV above the bar was showing a police movie, complete with the virtually obligatory cast of ethnic tokens: white protagonist (angry, maverick), two blacks (police chief, mature and tolerant; protagonist cop's partner, streetwise and loyal), one Hispanic (Catholic, dedicated family man), one liberated female (naive, learning fast—but not fast enough to avoid getting laid by maverick cop). Jarrow personally found the formula tiresome, but he accepted that it was necessary to instill correct notions into the masses.
After a while, a bearded, dark-haired man wearing a black woollen cap and navy donkey jacket sat down on the next stool. From his exchange with the bartender when he ordered a beer, his name was Paul. Meanwhile, on the screen, the plot line delivered as trustily as Old Faithful: maverick cop finally pisses off overtolerant chief and gets suspended ("I'll take the badge and the piece"), but tries to hunt down villains independently, wasting family-man partner in the process. Official team arrives in time to save the mess, maverick cop consigned to deserved oblivion, while wiser-now female gets promoted and will manage okay from here on. All a packaged lesson in the ultimate wisdom of appointed authority and the folly of individualists who think they can go it alone.
A barrage of commercials followed, showing cute kids eating breakfast, cartoon knights in gleaming armor chasing mucilaginous germs through a drain, and a moron and wife barbecuing steaks (with requisite health warning) for their ilk on a patio. Jarrow ordered another drink.
Next came the news. The lead item concerned a ground laser station that should have been boosting shuttles up from Florida two years ago (Jarrow remembered it as over a year behind schedule). Apparently it had failed some more tests, and the National Directorate of Technology was now saying that a major section of the project would have to be redesigned and rebuilt. The leader of the European Moderation Party, which opposed any expansion into space, had said the whole thing should be scrapped, and environmental groups were gleefully derisive. Meanwhile, Aerospaceflot of New Muscovy, the capital province of the loosely tied Federation of Eurasian Republics—roughly speaking, what had once been called the USSR, plus a number of former Eastern European and Asiatic Moslem territories—had inaugurated a regular passenger service to connect with the Offworld lunar transporters plying between Earth orbit and bases at Copernicus and Tycho. The new enforcement agency to be set up under the Bureau of Environmental Control had been relegated to third place since morning, but the account was pretty much the same as Jarrow had awoken to in Atlanta. To underline the need for draconian measures, it was followed by a report of how, in a computer model produced by two of the Bureau's scientists, unreg-ulated emissions from FER industries could disrupt atmospheric ozone.
"Bullshit," Paul muttered from the stool next to Jarrow.
"Excuse me?" Jarrow said, turning his head automatically.
Paul gestured toward the screen without looking at him. "That's bullshit. They've been coming up with garbage about ozone ever since CFCs were banned at the turn of the century. What it was really all about was that the patents were running out, and what used to be called the Third World was about to take over a market worth billions."
"Really?" Jarrow said. For his part he considered the official position understated—he would hardly have held a job as a teacher if it were otherwise. But he wasn't going to get into arguments with strangers in bars over it.
Paul downed a swig of beer. "Now they're trying to build up world pressure on the Eurasians to meet Consolidation standards, which would undermine the FER's Offworld connection. What else do you think the Consolidation is for?"
He meant the political and economic union composed primarily of North America and the western states of Europe, which in the last few years had officially designated itself the Western Consolidation as a way of underlining its commitment to collective solidarity against the decadence and disorder threatening to engulf it from the east. "The new Mongol hordes" was how the danger was usually described.
Jarrow stated the obvious, which he would have thought everyone knew. "To protect the quality of our way of life and preserve our resources. They'll loot and strip Siberia, and when they've turned it into a waste, they'll come this way—first Europe, then us. Conserve now and be strong when the time comes. That's what Consolidation means."
"Boy, you must have graduated top of the class," Paul said with mocking approval.
Jarrow expected to feel himself reddening, but somehow he seemed to have lost the reflex. "What do you mean?" he demanded stiffly.
Paul laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Take it easy, eh? I know that's what everyone's told. But it's not the way it happened. The world could have been a great place when the smoke cleared after the Soviet empire fell apart. They wanted our products and we needed their materials. Everybody stood to be a winner."
"Hm. If turning the planet into a moonscape is what you mean by winning," Jarrow said coolly.
Paul shook his head. "That's just what the Green freaks who took control of everything over on this side of the world think. But it doesn't have to be that way."
"I fail to see why trying to curb the reckless spread of industrial technology should be considered freakish," Jarrow retorted.
"They don't understand anything about it. See, you can't stand still. Better methods give you better solutions. When you stop growing and plateau out at some fixed level of technology, that's when you eat up its resource base and screw things. The Greens could only think in terms of control and restricting, shutting everything down—and the irony was that it happened just when the other half of the world was realizing that central controls don't work and discovering what free individuals can do. There was a massive flight of capital and talent to the east, a redirection of Asian investment, and the turkeys in charge of everything here responded, typically, in the only way they knew how and started closing the borders to preserve captive markets for what was left. They had no concept of competition. They tried to shut out what they saw as a threat and created an economic concentration camp." Paul took another drink and wiped his mouth with a cuff. "The whole way it's structured is unnatural. What it's aimed at is eventual world government. Then they could put a fence around everybody and cut the Offworlders out, who are the ones really running with the ball. But the FER isn't interested, won't buy the Consolidation line, and that's the flaw in the game plan."
Jarrow looked at Paul more fully. He was in his thirties, lean in the face, and had mild gray eyes that confronted Jarrow with a direct, unwavering stare, but laced with a humorous twinkle. As a rule Jarrow didn't like talking about such things. His job gave him access to enough sources to know what was what, and he had no crusading urge to rectify offbeat opinions. "So where do you get your information?" he challenged, yielding nothing but at the same time trying not to sound provocative.
"I'm a scientist, would you believe—or at least I used to be." Paul gestured up at the screen with his empty hand. "I mean a real scientist, not one of those house-trained hacks who play games on computers that they parade across there. In fact I used to work on what that dummy there is talking about, so I know it's a load of crap."
"What happened?" Jarrow asked.
"Oh, you know how it is. I was what you'd call pure and idealistic—I believed what all the books said about how science was supposed to be the honest pursuit of truth. I was going to go public and tell how it really is. Except nothing got published. So now I nail packing crates together. Happens all the time. The people who are running things want problems, not solutions. That's what keeps them in charge. . . ." Paul stared down at his drink. "Aw, who cares? It's all going to hell, anyhow. You have your turn, eat, get drunk, screw; and fifty years from now none of it'll matter a ratshit."
"Philosophy," Jarrow said, glad to put the subject to rest. "There you go—that's more my line. I'm no scientist."
Paul's face split into a grin, revealing white, even teeth through his beard. "You're okay." He thrust a hand out. "Name's Paul."
"I know. I heard. I'm . . . Dick."
"Hi. So what is your line?"
"I teach . . ." Jarrow hesitated again, then added, "history." In the light of Paul's earlier remarks, it seemed less risky than saying "social integration."
"Do you think I'm crazy, saying things like that to somebody in a bar?" Paul asked him. "I mean, you could have been anyone: FBI countersubversives, local watch committee? Who knows?"
"Well, I'm not, so don't worry about it."
"I guess what I'm trying to say is, what could they do to me if you were? See what I mean? I nail crates together. And if they busted me out of that I'd fix fences or shovel snow. I'm not a scientist anymore. I don't need their approv-als, or their money, or their permission for anything now. See how free that makes me?"
"That's a good way of looking at it, I suppose." If Paul needed to rationalize his situation, it wasn't for Jarrow to disagree. "You see, I said you were a philosopher."
"So what's your philosophy of life?" Paul asked, sitting back and regarding him curiously.
"I'm not sure I've got one."
"They're like assholes. Everybody's got one."
Jarrow searched for something to oblige. "Just, keep it simple and try to stay out of trouble, I guess. Not a very exciting one, is it?"
"You live here in town?"
"I'm staying at a hotel a couple of blocks from here—the Lennox."
"I know it."
"And you?"
"Oh, I've got a place across the street. Wintertime, I like to stay in the city. When summer comes I'll head west and see what's going in the mountains. Maybe drift on up to Canada."
"Wouldn't you need a border pass? . . . I mean, if your name's been collecting penalty ratings in the Social Index computer . . ."
Paul gave Jarrow a conspiratorial wink. "There's ways. It's not like trying to get out of Consolidation territory into the FER or somewhere."
"What would you do there?"
"Hell, whatever's going. Swing a pick, lift a shovel. Anything where you don't have to give someone your life history before you can buy a meal or take a crap. Sometimes I think writing was the worst thing we ever invented. Once they can write your name down, you never get 'em off your back." Paul's gaze suddenly shifted from Jarrow's face to somewhere behind, in the direction of the door. "Hi," he said over Jarrow's shoulder. "Are you staying or just passing through?"
Jarrow turned and saw that two girls who must have just entered had joined them. One was tall and roundly filled out, with a heavy coat of brown suede and waves of black hair escaping from a tan bonnet. Her companion was smaller, a curly-headed blonde with an impish face and saucy blue eyes, dressed in an open gray parka and jeans. They were both in their mid to late twenties.
"What the hell, we'll stay for a couple," the taller one said. "You're better off in here than out there tonight, Paul, I'm telling you."
"Freeze your nuts off, eh?"
"You tell us," the blonde suggested.
Paul looked back at the other. "Did you talk to Harry?"
"Yes. He says he'll need another couple of days. Brian has to go out to St. Cloud to check the sizes."
"Jesus, I thought he already knew the sizes. Harry was out there on Thursday and he told me . . ."
As they carried on with whatever the matter was that needed to be cleared up, the blonde looked back at Jarrow with an interest that she didn't try to hide. Jarrow wasn't used to that kind of reaction from women and found it unnerving. "Hi," she said, smiling. She had freckles, and her cheeks dimpled.
"Er, hi."
"I'm Chris, since he hasn't bothered saying so. Who are you?"
"Dick."
"Another friend of Paul's? You'd think he owns this place."
"No. I only just met him."
"That's Paul—he talks to anyone. He's our resident -intellectual."
Paul broke off in the middle of his conversation with the other girl. "Hey, I'm forgetting my manners here. These are Chris—you already know that—and Donna. Guys, this is Dick. He teaches." He indicated each of the girls in turn with nods of his head. "Groceries, post office."
"Well, now that we've traded résumés, do you think there might be any chance of a drink?" Chris suggested.
"Sure, I'll get 'em," Paul said. "Usuals?" He looked around. "We don't have enough seats here."
"There's a table there," Donna said, gesturing. The girls led the way over.
"Same again, Dick?" Paul said to Jarrow. This was the strangest evening Jarrow had ever had in his life. Normally two would have been his limit, but to his surprise his metabolism was generating no alarm signals. In fact, he was warming inside now, and could feel himself loosening up for the first time all day. It was almost as if his body were tuned to this and could use a little more.
"Sure," he said.
Paul waved toward the table. "Go on over. I'll take care of it." Jarrow took off his topcoat, sat down with the girls. Paul joined them after giving the order to the bartender.
They talked about the day the girls had had, debated whether the winters were getting worse or better, and compared Minneapolis with other cities they'd known. Chris was originally from Oklahoma, Donna a Minnesota native. Jarrow repeated that he was staying at the Lennox.
Chris seemed attracted to Jarrow, sitting close and looking at him a lot. Then Paul and Donna went off into a private dialogue about Paul's business with Harry again. Chris cocked her head to one side, regarding Jarrow quizzically for a moment, then asked in confidential voice, "What happened, Dick? Wife throw you out?"
Jarrow frowned. "I don't understand."
Her eyes traveled down over him, then back up with a mischievous smile. "Quality suit, but staying at a place like that in this kind of neighborhood? Need a shave and a change of shirt. . . . It's either that or you rob banks." She winked in a way that said she didn't want to know which.
"Oh, you don't have to worry about that," Jarrow said. "I'm not exactly what you'd call adventurous. I hate any kind of violence."
"Good for you. That's what makes a real man," Donna said, catching the end of the conversation.
"Hey, me too," Paul put in. "Remember, I'm the intellectual."
"Right. And I could remind you of a few other things," Donna said.
"Hell, nobody's perfect."
Jarrow sat back. His glass was empty again, and he felt like another. "My turn," he announced. "Same again for everyone?" They affirmed. Jarrow caught the bartender's attention and signaled for another round.
"So, how did you handle being drafted?" Paul asked him, picking the thread up again.
Jarrow shook his head. "I disqualified on medical grounds." Then, through habit, he added, "Not exactly what you'd call a fighting physique, anyhow."
Chris looked him up and down again and shook her head. "Well, gee, Dick, you could have fooled me."
Jarrow became confused and talked on mechanically. "Although I think we have to have the draft. . . . I mean, the Consolidation's doing the right thing in setting the lead on restricting industry, and we've got to get the FER to follow. The Offworlders are going to outrun themselves one day, and then they'll be turning back in this direction." The expressions from around the table told him to forget all that for now. Then the bartender arrived with the drinks, and Jarrow gratefully let the subject drop.
Chris raised her glass before tasting from it. "Here's to you, Dick," she said. Donna followed suit.
"My pleasure," Jarrow said, and returned the gesture. Then he produced Gordon's wallet from his jacket and, still with his mind on what they had been saying, flipped it open carelessly to pay. In the shadows behind him a tall, hard-faced youth with cropped head, earring, and studded leather coat caught sight of the wad of hundreds and fifties and nudged his companion quietly. The other, pasty-faced but heavily built, with long, unkempt hair and tattooed knuckles, returned a faint nod.
"Good on ya," Paul acknowledged, raising a fresh beer toward Jarrow and taking a gulp.
"So, how long have you been in town now?" Chris asked. It seemed she just had to know all about him.
"Only today. I flew in from Atlanta this morning."
"How much longer will you be here?"
"I haven't made any plans yet."
"A real mystery guy," Donna commented.
"Chris, when will you ever learn to mind your own goddam business?" Paul said. "Can't you see the guy doesn't want to talk about it?"
Chris shrugged. "Well, I can't help being curious." She looked at Jarrow playfully. "Dick and I like each other . . . don't we?"
Jarrow's mouth twitched and he raised his glass hastily. He had never frequented such places and really didn't know the mores that were expected among people like these. Would acquiescence to Chris's overture be taken as confirmation that they were supposed to make a night of it? If so, what would be the best way to extricate himself cleanly? He had no inclination by temperament for any such liaison, and certainly no desire to complicate his situation further; on the other hand he was fearful of unwittingly giving offense.
But as the talk continued, he grew reassured that her teasing banter was intended as no more than that, and his apprehensions eased. Then some more acquaintances of Paul's arrived and began pulling up chairs to join them. Jarrow seized the opportunity to make his exit, pleading that he'd had a long day—which was no exaggeration—and left amid a profusion of customary "take cares" and "see you around."
Outside, he paused to check his bearings, pulling the scarf tight around his neck and zipping up his coat. Then he thrust his hands deep in his pockets and walked briskly away, his breath leaving a cloud in the cold night air. Above, the towers of the city stood dark and desolate.
Still to his surprise, the drink didn't seem to have -affected him much, apart from dulling his fears and doubts to the point where he felt he could put off worrying about them until morning. First he would check the records to make sure he was officially dead. . . . Christ, how weird could this get? Then he'd begin trying to pick up the trail, starting with Larry. He'd need to come up with a plausible line of approach there, he told himself again. But for now, he felt pleasantly detached from it all. Enough, anyway, to get a decent night's sleep.
He wasn't aware of the two figures who had been quietly gaining on him until a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, slamming him against a wall, and a knife was pushed up under his chin. A face contorted with malice, its hair cropped short and stark, thrust close and snarled at him. "Move and your throat spills. Where's the billfold?"
The other was already patting Jarrow's coat. "Okay, I've got it."
Jarrow had no awareness of reacting, no conscious knowledge of evaluating odds or deciding his action. What happened came out of nowhere. One hand twisted the knife away, and in the same movement his other shot upward, fingers curled, crashing the heel into the base of the punk's nose. Without missing a tempo, Jarrow seized the hand entering his coat and turned the wrist over savagely, forcing the second assailant's arm into a lever to double him over and jackknifing his face downward—straight into the foot flashing up to meet it. Three more lightning blows—each one delivered accurately and devastatingly enough to have finished matters on its own: edge-hand to the neck, fist to the hollow below the ear, elbow to the kidney—found their targets before the thug's knees had begun to buckle.
Jarrow, suddenly transformed into a totally dispassionate, high-precision, human-combat machine, wheeled as the crop-headed punk lunged back in, in the streetlight his lower face a mess of blood from his ruined nose, but still holding the knife. Jarrow evaded the slash and caught the punk's sleeve to draw him on, using his own weight and the other's momentum to whirl him around in an arc like a weight on a string, straight at a steel pole standing on the edge of the sidewalk. The punk's back hit it full force, snapping his head against the metal with a loud clang. Jarrow followed up with a kick to the groin and a straight-hand jab to the solar plexus as the form crumpled.
And then, just as quickly as the transformation had come over him, it left.
He stood bewildered, looking from one figure to another. The crop-headed thug was lying at the base of the pole, while the other, groaning feebly, was trying to pull himself up to his knees against the wall. A couple who had been walking along the other side of the street had stopped and were watching, petrified.
Jarrow stared back, as much at a loss as they were. The knife had nicked him below the chin. He took out a handkerchief, folded it into a pad, and held it to his neck.
"Are you okay?" the man called in a quavering voice. Hardly original; but it was more than Jarrow had managed.
It jerked Jarrow out of his state of shock. "You'd better call an ambulance," he retorted. Then, after feeling to make sure that the wallet was still in his jacket, he hurried away in the direction of his hotel.
When he got back to his room he was still shaking. He stripped for bed and stood looking at himself in the mirror. The cut under his chin didn't look serious, but it needed to be covered. He remembered the Band-Aids in the bathroom at the Hyatt in Atlanta and wished he'd had the presence of mind then to pick them up, along with the toilet articles and other things that he'd left there. Now, as things were, he would have to buy himself a new one of everything in the morning. Curiously, he removed the Band-Aid, which had been there when he woke up, from the side of his neck. Underneath was a mild, pink swelling and what looked like a tiny puncture.
Looking at himself generally, he saw that Chris from the bar had been right: he was athletic and muscular. But strangely again, although he could retrieve no mental picture of ever having looked different, at an intellectual level he remembered always thinking of himself as puny.
And then another thing struck him that should have been obvious, surely, from the time he'd woken up and first caught sight of himself: How old was he? What kind of a question was that? Everyone knew how old they were. He was forty-six. He could produce memories from every one of those years.
But the reflection in the mirror was at least ten years younger.
Baffled and exhausted, he fell asleep straightaway. But not to the relaxed, undisturbed sleep that he had hoped for. He had strange dreams of being in uniform, adrift in a strange, distorted military environment that included a colonel with gold-tinted glasses, whose eyes were never seen. And mixed among them were persistent images of a girl with red hair.
 
eight
An Army truck with ridiculously huge wheels, like those of a giant earth-mover, was rolling through a field of -tulips. The girl with the red hair was sitting on the hood, wearing an officer's cap and with her skirt hitched high, revealing long legs. The rear portion of the truck was a striped tent with tasseled ropes and pennants, like something from a carnival. A siren on the roof of the cab was blaring. . . .
The image dissolved, and the blaring became a car's horn outside in the street. Jarrow awoke sluggishly. His head ached, and there was a dry, acrid taste in his mouth. He opened his eyes, and then closed them again as the light coming through the cheap floral drapes turned the aching in his head into pain. He wished all the torments of the damned upon whoever was sounding the horn.
At last, mercifully, it stopped, and a void of quiet -descended outside, only to be filled a moment later by the sound of two voices yelling an exchange of obscenities. It took Jarrow a few seconds to reassemble the fragmented recollection of where he was. For a while he just lay there, swallowing and working his mouth in an effort to wash away the sour taste, and trying to reconstruct his plan for the day. The air in the room felt chilly on his face. He remembered that there had been a sign on the desk downstairs yesterday, warning hotel residents to expect power cuts that morning.
He rose, rinsed his face in the sink by the bed, and checked himself in the mirror. By now his appearance was a source of total mystery to him. It looked familiar, yet what he saw clashed with everything he remembered about himself. Chris had mentioned last night that he needed a shave, and by now his chin was black with stubble. But he recalled being light-bearded—it had taken him a long time to grow his mustache. Now he didn't even have a mustache. Everything was crazy. And what had come over him that enabled him to demolish a couple of punk muggers as if they were pastry puffs?
The cut under his chin and the mark below his ear were doing fine, but still needed to be kept covered. Chris had been right about the shirt too, he saw when he held it up: the collar was grubby from a day's travel. He should have thought to buy a few more when he was in Kmart. So, some shirts, Band-Aids, a razor, toothbrush, and some toilet gear were first on his list, and then to get himself cleaned up. After that, breakfast. And over breakfast, he could think about how he was going to approach Larry.
* * *
His first call when he returned to the hotel was to the Hennepin County coroner's office. A clerk there confirmed that Richard Jarrow, then residing at 703 Orchard Lea Court, Brooklyn Center, had died from a thrombosis of the brain on May 5. The body was cremated on May 8. Identification was made by the deceased's sister, Beatrice Ishen, from Duluth, who had taken care of the arrangements. Jarrow was referred to her for any further information. For a reverse-charge fee, the clerk faxed the details through to the hotel's receiver downstairs. Jarrow brought the copy up to his room and sat contemplating it for a long time with a curious mixture of emotions. He had read many literary allusions to people signing or reading their own death warrants. But never their own death certificate.
He thought of calling Betty—just to see if even his own sister didn't recognize him, he tried to tell himself, but he was just looking for somebody close to talk to, even for a few minutes. He already knew what the outcome would be. It would serve no purpose. He tucked the paper away in a pocket of the travel bag that he had bought to hold the things he was beginning to accumulate. Then he turned to the pad from the room in Atlanta, in which he had noted Larry's number.
Larry's girlfriend, Hilda, answered, but of course she didn't recognize Jarrow. He had moved the viewphone so that the window would be behind him, hiding the fact that he was calling from a hotel room.
"Hello, I'm trying to contact a Larry Banks. Do I have the right number?"
"Yes, you do. Who is it?"
"My name's Maurice Gordon. I'm an insurance investigator."
"I'll fetch him."
"Thanks."
That way Jarrow wouldn't be caught if Larry asked to see some ID. He was lucky that Larry wasn't at work, he reflected while he waited. That was something he should have thought of last night.
Larry appeared, rubbing his eyes and yawning, looking as if he had just gotten up, still much the same, yellow hair tumbling to his collar.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Banks?"
"Yes."
"I hope I'm not calling at an awkward time. My name's Gordon. I'm an insurance investigator. I'd like to talk to you, if I may, when you've got a few minutes."
"I don't need any insurance."
"No, you've got me wrong. I'm not selling. I said I was an investigator."
"I've heard it before."
"Believe me, Mr. Banks."
"Which company are you with?"
"No company. I'm an independent consultant."
"What's this about?"
"I believe you were a colleague of Richard Jarrow's, who died last May."
"Dick Jarrow? . . . Well, yes, that's right."
"We have reason to believe that the circumstances of his death might be part of a more widespread pattern that could affect insurance settlements. I'm helping some people who are putting some statistics together, and we'd like to know a little more about events just before he had his stroke. Somebody suggested I should talk to you."
Larry looked dubious. "I don't know much about that. I wasn't anyone particularly special, if you know what I mean. We worked in the same place, but I wouldn't say I knew any more about him than what anyone else there could tell you."
"I understand. But all the same, if you wouldn't mind, I do have some questions that I'd be interested in your answers to. Would you have a few minutes sometime -today?"
"Can't we do it right now?"
"It's not quite that simple. And I don't think the subject is really suitable to discuss over the phone. I'd rather it were face-to-face."
Larry sighed, making it obvious that in his view it was already a waste of time. "Okay. But I'm going out about lunchtime and I don't know when I'll be back. Can you get here by then?"
"Sure."
"You know where to find us?"
"I can get it off the map."
"Look out for a gate with a big sign that says Farnstead. We're along the street practically opposite that."
"Thank you very much, Mr. Banks. I'll be there before lunch."
But how? Jarrow wondered after he had cleared down. An insurance investigator would look odd showing up on a bus. He shook his head and tutted at himself. His mind seemed to be functioning more coherently at last, but too slow. He paced across the room and stared down from the window at the traffic on the street.
Then he remembered the credit cards in Gordon's wallet. The obvious thing was to rent a car. True, the cards might have been reported as lost and invalidated . . . but there was only one way he was going to find out. If they were good, however, it would be an invaluable way of stretching out the remainder of the cash.
He sat down at the table by the window, took the cards from the wallet, and stared at them. The thought of illegality made him nervous, causing a queasy feeling in his stomach. But God, how often did anyone find themself in this kind of predicament? Surely no court on Earth would convict him in circumstances like these.
He selected the MasterCard and set it before him. Then he drew across the notepad again and turned it to a fresh sheet. He poised his pen over it and looked at the signature on the card again. In the stories he'd read about crooks and forgers, you were supposed to do it in one confident movement, the same way as the original had been written, without hesitating or breaking the rhythm. So telling himself, he lowered the point of the pen and wrote smoothly and deliberately: Maurice J. Gordon. And to his amazement, the match was perfect.
He held the pad and the card side by side and examined them in the light from the window. There was no doubt about it: he himself must have signed the card. So was he really Gordon after all, and not Jarrow? Of course he was, a panicky voice told him from somewhere inside. Wasn't the picture in Gordon's passport enough? He compared the top sheets of the pad—the mysterious message and phone numbers that he'd found when he awoke in Atlanta, the page he'd written yesterday with Larry's number, and his shopping list from first thing that morning. The writing on all of them was identical.
And then all of his doubts came flooding back. Who did he think he was, trying to act like some kind of police detective or private investigator? He needed help, not trivia answers from seven months ago. He threw the pad onto the bed and emitted a strangled sound, at the same time a moan of frustration and a despairing sob. Why him? Why couldn't he just be Richard Jarrow again and pick up the threads of his own life?
Because he wasn't. He was somebody else. . . . No, even that wasn't right. He was Jarrow and somebody else, two people mixed up together. So why not simply present himself to the authorities and say so? That was what they were there for, wasn't it, to look after citizens? They had people who would know what to do.
But as he thought it through further, more doubts -assailed him. What would the likely reaction of the authorities be? As far as they were concerned, he would be Gordon—never mind how he felt about it inside. And from the little he knew of Gordon—the guns, the hotel-room woman, and the cash, the fleeting sample he'd seen last night of the kinds of things Gordon was capable of—their response might not be too friendly. They might even -receive his story as an attempt on Gordon's part to concoct an excuse, an alibi . . . for what? God alone knew what he might have been involved in.
It was no good, he concluded. Until he knew more about who this other self of his was and what kind of business he was in, he could be walking into anything.
He waited ten minutes to calm himself down. Then, putting on his scarf and coat, he went down to the desk to find out about the nearest car rental office.
* * *
Jarrow sat on the couch by the window, his notebook opened on his knee. To look the part more, he had bought himself a stiff-backed one, legal size, and a plastic cover with pockets for pens and papers. Larry was sprawled in the easy chair by the woodstove, wearing old jeans and a sweater with frayed cuffs, and looking as if he had gone down a peg since Jarrow last saw him. The place was much the same as when Jarrow was here before—roomy but cluttered, a comfortably anarchic collection of scatter rugs and wood furnishings, lots of books and gadgets, shelves littered with domestic odd-ments and offbeat souvenirs. Hilda had let Jarrow in, said hello, then gone off discreetly to busy herself elsewhere.
Jarrow began. "Just to make sure we've got it right, you are Lawrence T. Banks, of this address?"
"Right."
Jarrow glanced at his pad again. "And you teach at Linden Junior High School?"
Larry snorted. "Well, you're some investigator. No, that's way out-of-date. I haven't worked there since June." -Although Jarrow was used to Larry's cynicism, there was a bitterness in his tone that was new.
"When did you quit?"
"I didn't quit. I was asked to leave. They don't want teachers who show kids how to think anymore. They want rat trainers to condition them to run mazes. It's called eliciting desirable behavior."
"I see. . . . So what do you do now?"
"Look, are we talking about me or Dick Jarrow?"
"I'm sorry." Jarrow peered down at his pad and gave the mood a moment to lighten.
"Let's see now, Jarrow died on May fifth."
"Did he? Okay, if you say so."
"As far as you recall, was he acting normally in the time leading up to that?"
Larry frowned and stared at the floor. "It's been a while now . . . but from what I can remember there was nothing especially strange. Like I tried to tell you on the phone, I wasn't especially a close kind of friend of his, you know."
"Was it sudden—did it come as a surprise to people? Or was it on the cards? Had he been hospitalized or taken away someplace before May fifth, for example?"
"Don't your records tell you that?"
"Er, there are some conflicting accounts that I'm trying to resolve."
"Accounts?" Larry's face wrinkled. "What do you need to go by accounts for? You've only got to look at admission records to see if he was hospitalized. What is this?"
"I'm just trying to reconstruct as much as I can of what Jarrow did in the month before his death, from independent sources. I've a note here that says that on April third you drove him to a doctor's off Groveland Avenue that he'd been attending, a Dr. Valdheim?"
"I dropped him off there a number of times—we used to ride-share into work. Was one of them April third? Okay."
"It was a Thursday."
"I'll take your word for it."
"Did he show up again at the school later that day, as he was supposed to?"
Larry tossed up his hands helplessly. "Look, I can't even remember which time that was. How do I know what he did later?"
Jarrow realized that the questions were becoming implau-sible, but he had to have answers. "Was April third the last time you took him to Valdheim's?"
"I just said, I don't know!"
"When was the last time you saw Jarrow?"
"Well, that's a bit easier. It was the day he fell over. He'd driven me to the school that morning."
For a moment Jarrow just stared. Obviously that was what he should have asked in the first place. That meant, then, that he'd been around and functioning normally, as Jarrow, for something like three weeks after that visit to Valdheim's. "So where did the stroke take place?" he asked unthinkingly. "Are you saying he died at work, at the school?"
"Are you saying you don't know?" Larry ceased trying to disguise the suspicion that had been building up inside. "Look, who are you? This insurance line smelled from the minute you walked in."
Jarrow spread his hands candidly. "Okay, I'm not in insurance. I—"
Larry stood up abruptly, his face paling with anger, and strode across the room. "Your people cost me my job and a lot of friends. So what have they sent you snooping around here for? If there's such a thing as rights left in this country, what I do now is my business. Here's the door. On your way, mister. Tell 'em to waste their tax rake-offs on something else."
Jarrow stood up too, not wanting to let it go at this but flustered, and raised his arm in a way that was supposed to calm things. "Look, I didn't know how else to get to you, because this situation is crazy. This is going to be hard to accept, I know, but the fact is, I'm Dick Jarrow! Something that I don't understand has happened to me. That visit to Valdheim on April third is the last thing I -remember. . . ."
Larry was staring at him in the way he might at a bomb likely to go off any second. "What kind of shit is this?"
Jarrow was desperate. The words babbled in an uncontrollable flow. "You drove me to Valdheim's that day. We were stopped at a traffic check on ninety-four. You talked about an engineer you knew, who said the pollution thing was misrepresented. You remember? How else would I know?"
"You know too damn much about me. That's all I'm hearing."
"You wanted a book that I'd borrowed from the library. You were going to pick it up that afternoon. . . ."
Larry leaned out through the door that he had been holding open and yelled toward the kitchen. "Hilda, call the cops. This guy's a nut."
"No! Don't do that. I just need five minutes to talk. Really, Larry, I am Dick. I woke up yesterday in Atlanta and—"
"Hilda! Do it now!"
Hilda's voice came distantly through the doorway. "Okay, I've got emergency on the line now. . . . Hello, yes. Send someone quick. We've got some kind of lunatic in the house here."
Jarrow panicked. "Okay, okay. I'm not here to make any trouble. I'll leave now. Just take it easy."
And he fled.
 
nine
Driving aimlessly, Jarrow found himself at an intersection of U.S. 52 and took the entry ramp. Originally, so he'd read, the highway system had been designed for hundred-mile-per-hour traffic. No wonder the world had started running out of everything. Since most of the cars these days were low-speed electric or gasohol metropolitan-area getabouts, regular traffic was restricted to the two inside lanes. Only official vehicles or holders of specially approved five-hundred-dollar-a-year licenses used the outside. Violators would be logged by buried sensors that read registration numbers.
Farther on, heading south back toward Minneapolis, he found himself driving along the same stretch of highway where he and Larry had been stopped at the checkpoint. It brought back memories of that day clearly. On impulse, instead of exiting into the city, Jarrow continued heading southward, the way they had gone then. After Larry, the only other thread available to him to pick up from that day was the one that had ended at Valdheim's place itself. And Valdheim's was just a few more miles ahead.
He wasn't sure what he was going to do when he got to Valdheim's. After his reception at the school yesterday and at Larry's today, the prospect was unnerving. But Valdheim was a medical man. He would be used to listening to strange stories. And then, after all, Jarrow told himself for consolation, there was nothing that said he had to do anything immediately. If inspiration failed him, he could sit in the car as long as he wanted and just think about it.
But when he left I-94 at Groveland and followed the familiar route to the green house with the laurel bushes, another problem awaited him: The green house was now yellow, and the plaque announcing the practice of dr. m. r. valdheim, m.d., ph.d., m.a.p.a, m.i.p.n. consultant -neurophysiologist had gone. Instead, a sign standing on the patch of grass outside the front door proclaimed: church of the transcendental oneness.
Jarrow parked and contemplated the sign blankly for about five minutes. No obvious continuation from here suggested itself. Finally, reasoning that he might as well squeeze what he could out of the situation now he was here, he got out and walked up the path. The legend was -repeated on the door in less glaring form with the added assurance: "Everyone Welcome." Otherwise, the door leered at him in smug inscrutability. He pressed the bell push set into the wall alongside, and waited.
A wraith opened the door. She couldn't have been more than eighteen, and was dressed in a flimsy white, chiffonous garment somewhere between a dress and a robe, reaching to her ankles. Straight, fair hair fell down her back almost to her waist. All that was missing were the wings. Her face, if not quite cadaverous, could have drawn color from most turkey cuts.
"Welcome to our Earthly harbor," she intoned expressionlessly. "Have you come in search of the Oneness?"
Jarrow groped for a response. Finally he said, "No. I was expecting to find something else. . . . How long have you been here?"
"When is 'being' 'been,' and where is 'here'?" she -answered. "I am all and have always been, and everywhere that is, is here. All is one with the Cosmic Father and Void Mother. This is merely a short resting place on our -voyage."
"Er, who's in charge?" Jarrow asked.
"You don't wish to regain knowledge of the Eternal Essence?"
"I just want to ask some questions about the building."
Although the face didn't change, the light in the eyes switched to a lower wattage. "I'll fetch Sister Ophelia."
She ushered Jarrow into a darkened anteroom and disappeared through a rear archway embellished with an ornate surround and screened by hanging beads. Her delicate wraith's tread receded, then came what sounded like the thud of part of a body striking something solid, and a muted but distinct hiss of "Shit!" floated from the sanctum.
Jarrow stood and looked around while he waited. There were heavy drapes on the walls, a couple of chairs piled with cushions, and a cane divider with recesses holding carved figures. An odor of incense wafted through from beyond the arch. Strategically placed by the door was a glass display case containing assorted books, pamphlets, crystals, charms, inscribed prayers, and other material aids to attaining nirvana, all with price tags.
Sister Ophelia swept in through the hanging beads in a flurry of taffeta and tinkling jewelry, accompanied by an aura of heady perfume. She was short, endomorphic, and hugely chested. Her hair hung on either side of her head in Wagnerian braids, the effect being offset somewhat by a pair of thick glasses with butterfly frames. "Can I be of assistance?" she warbled.
"I'm not sure. I wasn't expecting this. There used to be a medical practice here, a Dr. Valdheim's. Do you know what happened to him?"
"I don't know anything about that. It must have been before we took over."
"How long ago was that?"
"Let's see, now, around the middle of summer. The first of July, I think it was, when we moved in. . . . Yes, that's right, because they had the fireworks a few days later."
"And Valdheim wasn't here when you looked at the place?"
"No. Never heard of him. It was empty when we saw it. Not even a carpet or drapes!"
Valdheim must have had a sudden change of plans, then, Jarrow reflected. He must have been gone less than two months after the last visit that Jarrow remembered—and less than a month after the date of Jarrow's death. And yet Valdheim had made no mention of such a possibility. It seemed strange.
"So you can't help me get in touch with him," Jarrow observed, as if it wasn't obvious.
"Never heard of him," Sister Ophelia said again. "You could try the real estate office that handled it: Bridger-Reece, in town."
"Yes, thanks. I'll try that."
Sister Ophelia stepped forward quickly to interpose herself as Jarrow turned toward the door. "How about some information that'll tell you more about us, before you leave? It could turn you into a different person."
Just what he needed, Jarrow thought. "No, really. I'm not into that kind of thing. Sorry."
She took one of several thick envelopes that were -lying on top of the display case. "Then take this. It's our special introductory package at no charge. And there's twenty-five percent off the novice course, if you enroll for the full twelve weeks."
"Sure. I'll think about it."
"We might see you again, then?"
"Maybe."
"Don't forget the name: Bridger-Reece."
"Right."
"Peace, Love, Joy, and may you arrive at the Oneness."
"Yes, er, thanks," Jarrow stammered, backing through the door. "You too. Good-bye now."
* * *
He called the real estate company as soon as he got back to his room in the Lennox, but they were unable to be of much help. They had not leased the property to Valdheim directly, but through an agent acting on his behalf, whom they knew only as J & F Associates, with the address of an office on Fourth Street, and a number. Jarrow tried the number, but as a rising suspicion had already forewarned him, he got nowhere. J & F Associates had packed up and gone last June, leaving no forwarding address or means of communication. From Jarrow's check with the city and state commercial directory, they had vanished without a trace.
His puzzlement growing, he tried the county and state health departments for a lead on the whereabouts of Dr. Valdheim, but nobody had a record of any such name. Finally, Jarrow was referred to the federal registry in Washington, where, after being bounced around from exten-sion to extension until he felt like a Ping-Pong ball in a typhoon, he emerged none the wiser. Nobody had any information on a national program to field-test the QUIP neuro-analyzer; in fact, nobody had heard of QUIP. So, either Valdheim had been a fake, working for God knew who, for God knew what purpose; or, though it shook Jarrow's faith in the system to have to admit it to himself, Valdheim had been a fake set up by some department of officialdom for God knew what purpose, and officialdom wasn't telling. Either way, Jarrow was thankful that he'd refrained from rushing off to one of the organs of official-dom on the first impulse, to blurt out his story.
But what was he to do now, with the last of his leads having led nowhere? He stared blankly at the picture of the buffalo. They stared blankly back. Go west with Paul, the former scientist in the bar, and work in the woods? But without bothering to examine the thought, he knew there could be no question of it. It would mean leading a semifugitive existence, without papers or any properly estab-lished status, constantly having to guard against being too visible, never sure of who might be an informer of the local registration authorities. Paul might be cut out for that kind of thing, but Jarrow wasn't.
He sat by the bed and spread out his notes and papers, and the contents of Gordon's wallet: the total of information that he had available to him so far. It didn't amount to much. His eye roamed over the items again, looking for something new, some angle that he might have missed, and came to rest on the notepad from the Hyatt in Atlanta. He drew it across and read the message on the top sheet again: Headman to ship out via J'ville, sometime Nov. 19. Check ref "Cop 3." It still meant no more to him than it had when he first saw it. He didn't know anyone called Headman, or whom he'd have described as one. J'ville could have been Jacksonville, he supposed—not all that far from Atlanta. And what did Cop 3 refer to? Something connected with the police, maybe? If so, it reinforced his conviction that he was right to lie low until he knew more about what Maurice Gordon had been mixed up in.
He turned the page to uncover the one below, with the scrawled phone numbers that he had also found yesterday morning. They were the only unknown left.
He tried calling the first. It turned out to be a pizza restaurant in Atlanta. So, not surprisingly, Maurice Gordon had to eat too. Jarrow skipped the next couple, also Atlanta numbers, and studied the last, which he recognized from its area code as a Chicago number. That made him more curious. He reached over to the keypad and entered the number. The legend call ringing appeared on the screen, and after about ten seconds was replaced by a head-and-shoulders view of a woman. Jarrow sat forward sharply in surprise as he experienced the immediate feeling of having seen her before somewhere.
Something was missing. . . . He took in her clear, finely lined features, firm but attractively feminine mouth, with a hint of a natural pout, light eyes, wavy red hair. . . . The red hair. The hair should have had a hat. No, a cap. The last time he'd seen her, she was wearing an Army general's cap. . . . And then he recognized her as the redheaded girl in the dream that he had awoken to that morning! But that was crazy. He didn't know anyone in Chicago, or a redhead that looked like that, anywhere.
And the even crazier part was that, from the way her expression changed, she evidently knew him.
"Well, hi," she said as Jarrow stared speechlessly. Her voice was dry and slightly husky. "I wondered when you'd call. I've been getting worried."
Somebody actually recognized him? After all that had been happening, it came as such a shock that for several seconds Jarrow could only gape. The woman's eyes flickered over him in a silent interrogation. Her face showed concern, but not surprise—he got the feeling that his confusion and strange behavior were not unexpected.
"You . . . you knew I'd call?" he managed finally, watching her face, searching for a hint of a memory. But apart from the fleeting parody from the dream, there was nothing.
"You just vanished into thin air," the woman said.
Jarrow swallowed and found himself shaking, hardly daring to believe it could be true. There was one other person in the world who didn't think he was going mad—either that, or the two of them alone were part of a pecu-liar reality that the rest of the world wasn't sharing.
"You recognize me?" he whispered. "You know who I am?"
Again the narrowing of the brows, signaling that she was worried, but still with the hint that she had been prepared for something like this. She nodded. "Of course I know who you are."
"So tell me." Inwardly Jarrow was on tenterhooks. Would it be the schoolteacher, Richard Jarrow, that no one else could see? Or the mysterious Maurice Gordon, who carried guns and hospitalized muggers?
"You're Tony Demiro," the woman said.
Jarrow slumped back in his chair and stared at her numbly.
"You don't remember?" she said.
He brought a hand up to massage his brow, then shook his "Who's Tony Demiro?"
"Warrant Officer Demiro? Of the Army?" She intoned the phrases like questions, as if trying to coax his memory.
Jarrow had thought that when she talked about his vanishing, she had meant last April or May. Now he wasn't so sure. "When did you last see me?" he asked.
"The night before last, in Atlanta. We were staying at the Hyatt. I went to freshen up in the pool before breakfast. When I got back to the room, you'd left. . . ." She paused, reading his expression of total bemusement. "You don't know who I am, do you?"
"I'm sorry. No, I don't."
"Rita. Rita Chilsen?"
Jarrow shook his head.
"You called me from Atlanta on Monday morning. You—"
"Wait a minute. Today's Wednesday, right?"
"Right. You said you had to see me. I managed to get a flight and joined you at the Hyatt on Monday evening."
Jarrow drew a long breath. He still had no recollection of anything that had happened before the previous day, Tuesday.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Some strange things have been happening to me."
"I know. You were pretty confused when I got there. But you knew who you were, then—and who I was. But you'd woken up that morning not knowing how you got to -Atlanta at all. And the only clothes and ID you had were somebody else's."
On Monday? Jarrow was mystified. "Did they belong to somebody called Gordon, by any chance?" he asked.
"Yes." Rita nodded. So that much was hanging together, at least.
"How about the name Richard Jarrow?" Jarrow asked.
Rita shook her head. "Never heard of him."
It still wasn't making sense. But she obviously knew him. And if, as she claimed, he had known on Monday who she was, it would explain how her phone number came to be written on the pad. "And you're certain that I"—he gestured to indicate himself—"this person you're talking to now, am an Army officer called . . . What did you say his name was?"
"Tony Demiro." Rita gave a series of short, rapid nods. "Oh, yes, no question about it." Her voice caught. She bit her lip and brushed quickly across her mouth.
"What is it?" Jarrow asked. "What's the matter?"
"You don't remember, do you?"
"What?"
"We talked about it . . . most of that evening in Atlanta."
He shook his head. "Sorry. It's like I said: I've had some pretty strange experiences lately. It's affected a lot of things. What's the problem?"
Rita swallowed audibly, and he could see her brace herself. "Tony Demiro was killed five months ago," she said.
 
ten
Colonel Rowan, commander, Third Battalion Supply & Support Depot, U.S. Army Materiel Command at Kankakee, south of Chicago, leaned back from his desk, his eyes impenetrable behind gold-tinted mirror glasses. Next to him, Major Kellend, who ran the logistics section, glanced over the file lying open in front of them. Warrant Officer -Anthony Demiro stood at ease, waiting, watching them with dark, alert eyes.
Rowan, solid and thickset, square-chinned, with iron-gray hair and nicknamed "Yukon Jack"—after the liquor and because of his gold-shielded stare—never displayed humor. Major Kellend, blond and fresh-faced, with the youthful looks that make popular actors and doctors, but intelligent, straight, and a good officer, was Demiro's immediate chief. Between the two of them they got along well enough in the informal kind of way that develops when respect for competence is mutual. But in Yukon Jack's office, everyone had to keep things a little more formal.
"As far as your duties go, you've got a clean record," Rowan said, looking up. "You've got your act together and you know your job."
"Thank you, sir," Demiro acknowledged.
Rowan drew across one of the sheets that he had taken from the file and stared at it just long enough to let the tide retreat from that high point. "But unfortunately it doesn't stop there, does it? I have reports here that some of the views and opinions that you seem to be in the habit of expressing are not what I'd expect my officers to be airing, and especially not in the company of enlisted men."
"Sir?"
Rowan sighed. "This isn't the first time we've been through this, Demiro. You know damn well what I'm talking about. You've been heard on at least two occasions in the last week referring to our President as the 'Fuehrer' and to the Pentagon as the Kremlin. And yesterday, did you not make the remark that the reason there are no Communists left in the FER is that they're all running things over here? And the day before that, that the Consolidation is a game preserve for the white man, because he's made himself an endangered species?"
"I don't remember the context, sir. We could have been joking—you know how it is when guys get together. Maybe your source isn't strong in his sense of humor." Demiro's tone made the point without his having to use the word "spy."
"I don't buy that, Demiro. The contexts that I see here make it pretty plain to me that these constitute political statements; and not only that, but statements that could, by anyone of a mind to do so, be construed as being of subversive intent. Do I make myself clear? The United States Army isn't the place to be starting your own rebellion. You could end up in a lot of trouble. This is the last time I'm prepared to let it go with a warning."
"I understand. Thank you, sir."
Rowan set the paper down, paused for a moment, then turned to Kellend. "Warrant Officer Demiro was a volunteer, not a draftee?"
"That's correct," the major replied.
Rowan leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk, and looked up again. His voice fell to a quieter note, signaling that the official business was over and he was speaking from personal curiosity. "What made you join?" he asked Demiro. "Your primary reason?"
"I didn't have a family, sir. I think, most of all it was the structure. Something to belong to."
Rowan nodded. "I appreciate your frankness. So we're not pretending that it was any motivation to dedicate yourself to the defense of the institutions and property of this country?"
"That's not quite true, sir," Demiro replied.
"Oh? How do you mean?"
"If the country was attacked or threatened, sure I'd want to help defend it."
"You don't consider that to be the case?"
The question put Demiro in an awkward position. He could agree, and in so doing deny his own last statement; or he could say, in effect, that the people were being routinely lied to. Finally, he replied, "With respect, aren't we getting into political opinions again, sir?"
"But this isn't a billet of enlisted men who might attach official authority to what you say. I'm simply curious, I'd like to hear your political view."
Demiro sensed an ulterior motive and answered guardedly. "Well . . . it just seems that we'd do better trying to get along a bit more with the Offworlders, instead of acting as if they're about to come after us all the time. I don't think they need anything we've got."
"What about this planet's material resources? Isn't it common knowledge that they'll be contested when the Off-world expansion overreaches itself, as it has to -eventually?"
"That's what they tell us," Demiro agreed.
"And you have reason to disbelieve informed sources? In other words, we're all suffering from collective paranoia down here?"
"I didn't say that, sir."
Rowan stared up at the officer in silence for a few moments, seemingly pondering whether to draw this out any further. But his instructions had been simply to sound the applicants out on their politics, not engage them in a debate. He set the papers aside and picked up a thin sheaf of forms relating to a notice that had been put out inviting volunteers for a special assignment.
"I have your VR-1 application here, countersigned and completed. Are you still interested?"
"Yes, sir, I am."
"I can't tell you anything about it, because I don't know myself. But you do understand that it would involve transfer away from this unit, and possible absence of contact with the outside world for a considerable time?"
"Yes, sir."
"Out of curiosity, why do you want to do it?" Rowan asked.
"A chance for a change. To do something different." Demiro's olive Mediterranean features, with their shaggy mat of black hair, softened into a faint grin that came easily and naturally. "I guess I get curious too, sir."
The colonel stared at him for a second or two longer, then nodded. "Very well. I'm putting it through. The appli-cation entitles you to a forty-eight-hour pass, which I'm making effective from sixteen hundred hours today since the people running this want to get started as quickly as possible. We'll see you back here on Sunday, and by that time we'll let you know their decision. If you're selected, you could be moving out Sunday night. So use the weekend to make any arrangements that you need to."
"Yes, sir."
"That's all. You're dismissed."
In a room on the floor below, the two visitors from Washington had been following the proceedings on a monitor screen hooked to the camera concealed in the Divisional crest mounted behind Colonel Rowan's desk. Colonel Wylvern, who believed with the conviction of a biblical prophet that the powers above knew what they were doing and that soldiers should preferably never have heard of politics, let alone hold political opinions, was tottering on the brink of apoplexy.
"That . . . man was as good as a goddam Communist!" he spluttered. He didn't know what this project in Georgia was all about, but he did know that it involved sensitive information and was highly classified. "A disruptive influence on everyone he comes in contact with. He ought to be discharged from the service."
The scientist who was with him keyed in a command for a replay and watched keenly through rimless bifocals as the sequence began again. Dr. Harold Nordens didn't agree at all.
"No, Colonel," he said in a voice that was only peripherally aware of the other's presence. "That's precisely what we're looking for. Warrant Officer Demiro, I suspect, would make an ideal subject."
* * *
The two girls that Rita commuted with dropped her at a convenience store off the Adlai E. Stevenson expressway at Hodgkins, twelve miles west of Chicago center. She collected some items of groceries that they were short of, a couple of magazines, a bottle of Gallo Dry Reserve, and some cigarettes—the store sold cigarettes under-the-counter to avoid hassles and picketing from neighborhood antismoking vigilantes. Then, taking her bags, she walked the two blocks to the mobile home park.
The unit that she shared with Tony was beginning to come apart at the seams; but it had meant an affordable cash outlay, instead of slow bloodletting by mortgage esca-lation clauses, or hemorrhaging to uncontrolled rents whose skyrocketing in response to vanishing supply was outdoing even the price for old-fashioned (and strictly illegal) freon-run refrigerators, whose pipes didn't rot away and release things that ate through the floor. Controlled places were fine, provided you didn't mind waiting for three years, and then the square footage was allocated through a points system and you took what was offered. Unless you got pregnant, were certified disabled, or qualified for criminal, mental stress, or drug-abuse rehabilitation, all of which came with the alternative complication of being required to let other people take charge of your life.
As she turned the last corner, she saw that the light in the house was on and there was a vehicle parked outside. Fifty yards nearer, and it revealed itself as an Army jeep. Great! Tony had fixed it for the weekend—and worked his charm with the transportation sergeant too, it seemed. She gripped the two bags more securely and quickened her pace.
"Hi!" she called to the house in general as she let herself in and closed the door with her back. "You made it, then."
Tony appeared from the living room, barefoot in his bathrobe and holding a beer. He took one of the bags and followed her through into the kitchen. "Free as a bird until Sunday night. I took a shower and called Sandy and Bruce. We're meeting them at the Admiral at eight. It seemed time we had a night out."
"Terrific." Rita put her bag down on the worktop by the refrigerator. As she turned, Tony moved close, slid an arm around her—the other was still holding the beer—and kissed her on the mouth. She responded, kissed back harder, putting her arms around his neck and drawing him close. His free hand fondled her neck, her back, her waist, then settled on her behind, squeezing the middles of their bodies -together.
"You smell nice," he murmured. "Kind of outside-and-fresh-airy."
"I don't know so much about fresh. I had a hard day at work."
"It's animal."
"Most people call it sweat."
"It's you. I like it."
They kissed and rubbed and fondled.
"You're cool and clean," she said, loosening his robe and sliding her hands around his chest inside.
He drew her away from the worktop, turning them both around, and began steering her like a waltzing partner out of the kitchen and across the living room in the direction of the door to the bedroom. "Eight's a long time away," he said, his eyes laughing. "People who've had tough days ought to be relaxed. Relaxed all over."
"There's chocolate ice cream in the bag. It should go in the freezer."
"So, we'll have chocolate milk instead."
"Can't I get to shower first?"
"Shower after. I like you better the way you are."
"Sometimes I think you're perverted, you know that?"
"You only think? Honey, if you don't know by now . . ."
* * *
They lay together contentedly, he with an arm folded underneath his head, staring at the ceiling, she propped up against the pillows, smoking a cigarette and caressing his chest with her other hand.
"How long will this assignment last? Did they say?" she asked.
"Hey, hang on. I haven't even been told I've got it yet. I don't get to find out till Sunday."
"I thought you said you could be moving out Sunday."
"If I'm selected. I just need to be ready, that's all."
Rita would be going to Boston for a month on a training seminar to do with her government job, and Demiro had decided that he might as well volunteer for the special assignment as a way of keeping himself occupied and out of trouble. There was also a lot of truth in what he had told Colonel Rowan about needing a change of scene. And on top of that, naturally, there was the extra money, which would go toward getting them a better place that much sooner.
Rita drew at her cigarette quickly. "How much do you know about it?" she asked. "Is there much chance that it could be . . . well, you know, dangerous?"
Tony laughed and turned his head to kiss her on the hip. "Not a hope. It's probably one of them dumb psychological tests they dream up—you watch colored lights or something, and then fill in questionnaires for shrinks. At the end of it they figure out that some people always get things the wrong way around, and other people get bored and start making up answers—things that everyone except shrinks knew all along, anyway."
"Then why is it secret?"
"Because it's the Army. Everything about the Army has to be secret. You don't think they want people to know how they're spending their money, do you? Don't worry about it. I'll be back home before you are."
* * *
That night they met Sandy and Bruce for drinks, ran into some more friends, and all went together to eat Chinese. Then they found another bar and drank until the early hours. They talked about the trashy music that kid groups played and why vintage stuff from the nineties and two-ohs was better, traded reviews of new movies, rated the city's eating places and dance spots, argued about what ate up the value of money and whether people in the last century had been better off—anything to forget about the week.
By the time it was drawing near to closing, Terry, one of the others who had joined them, was describing a public-information documentary about the FER states and their Offworlder connections, which had been shown the previous night. "It's practically a crime-controlled empire out there," he said. "That's where all the generals and capos went after the fighting when the Red empire broke up: the Soviet -Mafia—they run the lunar bases. If you go out there, it's a one-way trip. They run everything by what amounts to slave labor."
"And you really believe that?" Demiro asked.
Terry seemed taken aback. "Why not? I mean, look at the environment they have to deal with out there. There's nothing."
Demiro bunched his mouth and looked unconvinced. "People have always said things like that about anywhere new. Most places where people live now used to be nothing, just waste."
"They were gardens," Terry protested. "It was us who turned everywhere into wastes: people." He knew because everybody knew. They'd been told it since their school days.
"That's not what the books say," Demiro answered.
"What books?"
"Old books. Not the ones that you see these days. Ones that were written back when we're talking about. They're still around, if you know where to look. And they don't tell it the way you're saying."
Later, as they were leaving, Bruce drew Demiro and Rita to one side and asked, "Do you guys have any plans for tomorrow night?"
Demiro looked at Rita. She shrugged and shook her head. "Not really."
"Why?" Demiro asked. "What did you have in mind?"
"Oh, there's this place we go to sometimes, out near the university. There's music and you can dance, and they're not always careful about cards, so everyone can have a good time. And sometimes there's other things too—somebody talking or showing pictures maybe. It can be interesting."
"Different, anyhow," Sandy put in. "Give it a try."
"What kind of 'different'?" Demiro asked.
"Come and see," Bruce suggested. "From some of the things you say, I've got a feeling you'd like it."
"Why not?" Rita said, looking at Demiro.
He nodded. "Sure. Let's give it a try."
* * *
They stayed in bed until ten the next morning, making love and talking, got up for coffee and a breakfast of pancake, sausage, and egg, then went back to bed and started all over. The afternoon was a lazy affair of drinking the bottle of wine that Rita had bought the evening before, watching football, a movie, and other odds and ends on TV, eating chicken sandwiches with potato salad—and making love again, once on the couch in the living room and once, laughing inanely, entangled with the dishwasher and a window seat in the kitchen in a position that the compiler of the Kama Sutra had overlooked.
Evening found them at peace with the world again and in the frame of mind that international law should require all negotiators to attain before going off to discuss treaties. They showered, changed out of their house clothes, and left for the city to meet Sandy and Bruce.
 
eleven
Maisso's was located amid the jumble of aging tenements, crammed economy stores, and anything-to-go food shops squashed together along the streets of the West Side in the blocks north of the university campus. From piled windows and sagging shelves, the stores offered the city's most amazing variety of goods: clothes, shoes, electronics, knickknacks, all of it cheap—and untaxed to those who talked the right code words. More Poles once lived in the neighborhood than in any community outside Warsaw—drawn, perhaps, by nostalgia for Arctic-Siberian winters and the Windy City's fond evocations of homey breezes howling in from the steppes. As they dwindled, Puerto Ricans and Hispanics had taken over the area. Nowadays it was a general haven for refugees seeking relief from the increasing costs and restrictions of maintaining automobile lifelines to the suburbs.
The place itself was like a big, dark cavern, down creaking steps inside a dingy doorway on a side street—the kind of place that students everywhere liked to lose themselves in as a contrast to their visible aboveground existence during the day. There was a hole-in-the-wall serving as a bar on one side, a counter peddling sodas and snacks on the other, while from a raised stage at the far end a bizarrely clad rock group played to a floor crowded with shaking, gyrating bodies. The music was loud and brutal.
"See, a change," Sandy said. Demiro and Rita agreed.
"What'll it be—beer, beer, or beer?" Bruce called above the din.
"How about a beer?" Demiro answered.
"Are you staying on the soft stuff, same as last night?" Rita asked Sandy.
"I'd best," she replied, patting her tummy. She and Bruce had obtained a pregnancy approval, which meant they qualified for benefits. She was still excited about it and had talked about little else the night before.
"Sure you don't want to change your mind? You're drinking for two now, remember," Demiro quipped.
Sandy grinned. "Keep a tab. I'll make up for it after."
They quickly got into the swing of things and started dancing, changing partners for a while, then back again—Sandy taking things slow and easy, but enjoying herself. Then Bruce introduced them to Eric, who was into philosophy and classics at the university and looked the part: bespectacled, tall and gangling but with hefty shoulders, a mop of hair falling across his forehead, and wearing a baggy, roll-neck sweater, its color impossible to discern in the gloom and psychedelic lighting.
"Why classics?" Demiro asked him as they sat on a seat at the foot of a pillar, behind a bunch of people standing watching the action on the floor.
Eric swigged from a can. "Well, I'm not a tech, I don't do art, and nobody believes the history and politics they teach anymore. It's the only thing that's not doctored."
Demiro wasn't going to get into any of that tonight. He shook his head, smiling to himself, and looked away. Eric was with more of his own friends, and the two groups merged to find partners for more dancing, everyone mixing well.
The band took a break, and recorded music of a different style and tempo took over, slower, more structured, beginning quietly with a steady, driving rhythm, then rising to a pounding crescendo of brass and percussion. The kids seemed to enjoy it, responding with a lot of stamping, finger-snapping, and what looked like hands-on-hips, pseudo-Spanish dance motions. It was vaguely familiar, but Demiro couldn't place it.
"What's that?" he asked Eric, as Eric emerged from the throng, breathless and clammy, to down a mouthful from his drink.
"Ravel, Bolero."
"Is that what it's called? Not bad."
"It makes a change."
Eric seemed to change his mind about going back. Demiro shifted to make room for him to sit down. Demiro looked around and sipped his beer. "I guess they need to unwind, too, just like the rest of us, eh?"
Eric leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His manner seemed serious for this kind of occasion, but Demiro had already figured him as one of those intense kinds of younger people. "Times are getting tense," he said. "I don't just mean here, in this city. All over. There have to be changes."
"How d'you mean?"
"The system has run out of credibility. Nobody believes the garbage that gets pumped out about anything anymore. And when they just keep cracking down harder, that's when you know they're losing their grip. Repression is always the last phase before things cave in. You see it all through history."
Demiro raised his eyebrows and looked up at Rita, who had moved over with Sandy to stand by them. "Repression? Do we have repression?"
"Don't tell me you never see it," Eric said. "What do you do, anyhow?"
"Me? I'm with the Army."
Eric looked away, shaking his head bleakly. "That's all we needed."
"Don't worry about it."
"Don't worry, he says."
"Come on, do you think I'd have said so if it made any difference? Go ahead. I'm interested."
"What they're telling people is an illusion. A make--believe reality that gives them a pretext for hanging on for as long as they can get away with it. But they don't even believe it themselves anymore—not privately. The public stuff is just pretense."
"How do you mean?" Demiro asked.
Eric waved a hand toward the now-empty stage, where some people were pulling back a set of curtains at the rear to uncover a large screen. "You'll see in a minute."
"Why? What's happening?"
"We're hooking into a pirate link that some hackers somewhere are going to try and crash through one of the comsats," Eric answered. He meant an illicit communications channel. By law, all publicly operated receiving -equipment was required to embody a system of preset codes that denied access to unapproved transmissions. Conceived and ordered by bureaucrats who were not engineers, the task was an impractical one, and pirate broadcasters were always breaking in to make political statements, show foreign program material, sell hard-core porn, or just for the hell of it. "If they break in, they're going to get Daparras on the channel and spray it all over the country. That would be a real gas."
"Isn't he some kind of anarchist, terrorist, something like that?" Rita said.
"Who told you that?" Eric asked her, looking up.
"I've seen the name on subversives lists."
"Subversives lists? Where was that?" Eric's brow creased. "So what in hell do you do?"
"Work for the government. I'm a clerk with the Economic Coordination Board."
"Jesus! Who's letting these people in here?" Eric pleaded.
Bruce, who had been listening, grinned. "I brought 'em. Relax. They're okay."
"That's just what they tell people, Tony," Eric said, turning back. "It's part of the illusion. Daparras writes books on philosophy and ethics—that you can buy legally anywhere except in Consolidation countries. He talks to people. And he set up a string of homes for kids who were orphaned in the fighting when the Soviet empire broke up. What kind of terrorist is that?"
"Who are the hackers?" Demiro asked. "Are they around here somewhere?"
Eric stretched back his elbows for a moment and -returned a you-should-know-better smile. "That's something we don't get to find out. They could be anywhere from here to Texas."
Demiro turned to Bruce. "What are you getting us into now?"
"I told you it would be different," Bruce said.
"Interesting?" Sandy suggested.
And then a wave of cheering broke out all around. They looked back at the stage and saw that the screen had come to life and was showing the figure of an elderly man. He had a full head of white hair beneath a black skullcap, and a wispy beard that hung in tufts like a shortened version of a Chinese mandarin's. His face was hollowed and parchmentlike, but with eyes that gleamed brightly, and he held his frame upright, evidently with plenty of life left in it yet.
"Yeah, I've seen him before." Demiro nodded.
"Of course you have," Eric muttered. A hush fell all around. Daparras was already talking.
". . . came back to this country because I wanted the truth to be known. They called me a tool of Offworlder propaganda, as I knew they would. They said I was a threat to law and order." The old man paused and looked down at his frail form, turning up his palms bemusedly to show the absurdity of the suggestion. Delighted laughter rippled around the room. "And yes, they put me under arrest, in my own house, where I'm supposed to be right now—but as you can see, I am not. So, they have not managed to shut me up just yet." The room registered its approval by another chorus of cheering.
"Since we probably won't have much time, let me tell you what life in the Federation of Eurasian Republics was really like. As most of you know, I was there through its inception, and I lived there for over twenty years as it emerged from its troubled beginnings and evolved into the unique social and political organism that it is today."
Daparras waved a hand briefly in front of his face. "It isn't the cesspool of anarchy and violence that you are told, with people being left to fend for themselves without care or compassion while others grow fat on vast fortunes. Yes, I admit that some of the several dozen republics, national congresses, ethnic provinces, and loosely federated territories that now extend from Poland to Kamchatka might be accused of permitting rough justice to those who transgress upon the rights of others; but if so, the fault is one of the state's leaving its citizens too much freedom and independence, instead of stripping them, as is ever more the case here, of the ability and the right to defend -themselves."
"Right on!" someone shouted.
"And, yes, it is true that some individuals are rewarded more than others. But it's the freedom of all to choose that decides those rewards—not a law passed by a few, which inevitably creates privileges that the few will have the power to sell. The FER provides opportunity for everybody, growth—without the phobias about resources running out and the imminence of collapse that have been paralyzing everyone over here since the end of the last century. For the people of the FER, everything is not all over; everything is only beginning! The space industries of the Consolidation states are bankrupt and languish under a dead-weight of bureaucratic inertia. Meanwhile, the Off-worlders have come to dominate near-Earth space, and the Siberian industries that are free to trade with them prosper. A Consolidation family loses its social benefits for an unlicensed birth—surely the ultimate in obscenity. FER children are welcomed as priceless assets—and what could be more natural?"
Sandy and Bruce smiled at each other and entwined hands. But there was a wistfulness on their faces as they listened.
"See what I was talking about earlier?" Eric whispered to Demiro.
Demiro nodded. All around, others were staring intently, hanging on every word. This was the kind of message they didn't hear every day. On the screen, Daparras made a brief, appealing gesture.
"It is not difficult to understand what makes this possible. For almost a century, the peoples of the lands that today make up most of the FER lived with the consequences of allowing a tyrannical minority enough power to literally steal an entire country—all its land, all its property—and to enslave its population. They know what happens when power becomes concentrated and is unaccountable to anyone.
"There is an irony in my talking to Americans like this, for most of the younger people here have never been taught about their country's origins. It is a sad fact that Russian schoolchildren know more about Western history than the graduates of many—"
The picture vanished suddenly to leave a random wash of colors flickering across the screen, and the voice cut out.
"That's it. It's been traced back," Eric said resignedly. "The beam's been cut."
The room registered its disapproval with a chorus of shouts, hisses, boos, and whistles.
Demiro wondered how common this kind of thing was becoming. From what he knew, such a gathering would be a prime target for infiltration by security agencies. Instinctively, he cast an uneasy eye around the place, and almost at once caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure on the far side of the room briefly raising what could have been a miniature camera—there were night-vision types that could snap a face in settings as dark as this. Just what Demiro needed in his file. And especially after his interview that afternoon with Colonel Rowan.
He leaned across and murmured in Rita's ear. "Come on. It's time we were leaving."
* * *
The next day was fine and warm for the end of September. Since they had the jeep for the weekend, Demiro and Rita decided to make the best of it. They packed a picnic lunch and drove up to the wooded, hilly country bordering Wisconsin, forty miles northwest. Leaving the road, they followed a dirt trail up among trees and boulders, and came to a shaded and secluded spot in a grassy grove by a small lake. They swam naked, dried off, and made love on a blanket in the sun. As she reached for her clothes to get dressed afterward, Rita saw a stag standing motionless, which had been watching them through the trees. Its expression could only be described as nonplussed, like that of a ten-beer-a-night redneck who had stumbled upon a gourmet wine-tasting ritual.
"I guess it never knew it was possible that way," Demiro surmised. Rita laughed.
Then they heard a low droning sound somewhere to the south, which after a few seconds became discernible as getting closer. Rita sat up, wrapping a blanket around herself. Demiro stood to pull on his pants. The rhythmic thwacking of rotor blades beating air resolved itself against the background drone, and moments later a helicopter, white with state police markings, appeared over a hilltop. It came lower, circling and banking to get a good look at the jeep and the figures beside it.
"Jesus, don't they ever leave you alone?" Demiro growled, watching it. Suddenly all the fun and laughter had evaporated out of the day.
"They probably check this area for drug growers," Rita said.
"It makes you feel like you're living in some kind of zoo. They can come and check you out, anytime they want."
"Don't let it bug you, Tony. Don't let them spoil our day."
The chopper straightened up and disappeared over a ridge to the west. Demiro watched it go, then turned back and forced a grin. "You're right, why should they? So . . . what have we got?"
Rita finished putting on her shorts and top and opened the picnic box. "Well, let's see now. Chicken salad in a sandwich, and there's cheese."
"Sounds good."
"A pie that I picked up, and some thick cream to go on it. And some fruit, juice, and a flask of coffee."
Demiro sat down again and tried to make talk, but his manner was still troubled and distant. Rita assumed he was brooding because it would be their last day together for some time. After she had put away the picnic things and collected the trash into a bag, she went over and sat next to him, resting her head against his shoulder.
"Don't get too down," she told him. "It'll only be a month."
For a moment it seemed as if he hadn't heard, then he said, "Do you think all those things are true—what that guy Daparras was talking about last night?" It was an odd question, since Demiro often said similar things himself. And Bruce was aware of it to—otherwise he wouldn't have invited them along. So Demiro wasn't really asking for an answer. It was just a way of raising the subject.
"Why? What are you—" Rita started to ask, but then they heard the sound of a vehicle approaching up the trail.
"I was wondering when they'd show up," Demiro said resignedly.
A state police Range Rover came around the bend and stopped behind the jeep. Demiro and Rita stood up. Two troopers climbed out of the Range Rover and sauntered across. One was heavily built, with a paunch sagging over his belt, florid-faced and fleshy, wearing sunglasses and a dark, baseball-style cap; the other was smaller, with plain, metal-rimmed glasses and a mustache, carrying a short-barreled shotgun.
"Well, what've we got here?" the larger of the two drawled with a leer. "Mr. Lover Boy himself an' a pretty cute piece of ass. Good fuckin' today, was it, folks?"
"It's none of your business, mister," Demiro said tightly.
"Oh, touchy, touchy. I think we have a case of offended sensibilities, Hank." Hank sniggered obligingly and moved forward to poke among the picnic things with the end of the shotgun.
"If you've got some business, state it," Demiro said.
The larger of the troopers turned toward the jeep and contemplated it. "Now that would appear to me to be an item of government property. I do suppose that your -being here, in possession of it like this, is all legal and properly accountable for?"
Demiro sighed and walked over to the jeep to open the glove box. "Yes, everything's—"
"Real slow and easy," a voice warned as he reached inside. He heard the sound of a gun being cocked behind him.
Demiro turned back slowly, holding out the wallet containing his papers. "I'm with the Army at Kankakee," he said. "Warrant officer, Third Battalion Supply and Support. Everything's legit."
"Well, let's see about that, now." The trooper scanned the documents while the smaller one with the shotgun began checking the various recesses and compartments of the jeep. "Warrant Officer Anthony Demiro, huh?"
Rita clung to Demiro's arm, feeling his growing anger and frustration. "There's the requisition and approval, transport officer's clearance. It's all there," he said. "They let me use it for my two days off. Is that okay with you?"
"So why would you bring it to an area like this? You wouldn't be carrying any illegal substances, now, by any chance?"
"Look around. It's nice here. It's a change from the stinking city. Is that so strange?"
The big trooper looked across inquiringly at Hank. Hank shook his head. "It looks clean."
"Run an R7 on him and the vehicle," the larger one said, passing across the papers. Hank went back to the Range Rover, leaned inside, drew out a mike on a cord, and began talking to someone.
"What do you do?" the big trooper asked Rita.
"Bureau of Economic Coordination. In the city." The trooper's eyebrows rose a fraction. That seemed to carry some weight.
"Nothing. It's all clean," Hank called from the Range Rover. "Want them to run one on her too?"
"Nah. I guess they're okay. . . . As you were, soldier. You can get back to your basic training."
Demiro watched the trooper stride ponderously back to rejoin his companion—arrogant, unhurried, without care or apology. The Range Rover reversed onto the grass by the track and bumped away in the direction from which it had come.
Demiro sat down and unscrewed the top of the flask with a savage twist of his fingers to pour himself some coffee. "Suppose I found a way to get us into the FER. Would you go?" he asked suddenly.
It was so unexpected that for a moment Rita could only gape. "Defect to the East?" She sat down by him and raised a hand to her brow. "Tony, are you serious?"
"Why not? Maybe through Europe. Alaska's too risky. They've got it all sealed up with electronic fences."
"I don't know. I never . . ." Rita shrugged helplessly.
"How much longer could you put up with this kind of' shit? Think about how Bruce and Sandy will have their baby: with somebody's permission, have to give it a number, be ordered around, insulted, treated like kids who can't take charge of their own lives. . . . I don't want us to be like that. I want to be me. The FER's got opportunities, a chance to make something worthwhile of ourselves. Here they just keep putting the squeezes on tighter and tighter until you can't breathe, and in the end you just rot away." He took a drink from the cup and looked at her. "You heard what Daparras said about kids. You don't need any license there. They want big families—like we always talked about. You can pick what kind of school you want for them, what things they do there, what kind of health care they get. . . . It isn't all spelled out to you by somebody you never see. What kind of place is this to raise a family?"
"You are . . . you are serious?"
"Sure, I'm serious. Maybe we could even go farther, to the Offworld independencies, maybe. Maybe what he said is true, and they're not militarized slave-labor camps. . . . What do you think?"
Rita slid an arm around his neck, kissed him, and held her face close. "I'll go wherever you go. That's all that matters."
Already the day was as it had been again, as if the troopers had never existed. "God," he sighed. "Do you know how much I love you?"
"Of course I do," she whispered. "It's as much as I love you."
* * *
Demiro returned to base on time that evening and found a message waiting for him to report to Major Kellend. Kellend informed him that he had been selected for the special assignment and should see Colonel Rowan for the details. Demiro would be shipping out first thing the next morning. His orders were to fly to Atlanta, Georgia, on a priority service ticket, where transportation would be waiting to take him to a place called the Pearse Psychological -Research Laboratories, fifty-odd miles north of the city.
 
twelve
So now Jarrow was three people. Two of them were dead, and neither he nor the only person who seemed to know him had heard of the other. He was still bemused by it all when he boarded a flight for Chicago that same evening—his Maurice Gordon ID once again having proved effectual in jumping him to the head of the queue. If it wasn't for the fact that to himself he looked normal, he would have believed he was in the stock movie situation of somehow occupying another body. Whatever had happened was obviously not as simple, if that was an appropriate word. But Valdheim's abrupt disappearance removed any remaining doubt that, intentionally or otherwise, whatever had happened was a result of the process to which he had been subjecting Jarrow.
Could he, Jarrow asked himself, be the Warrant Officer Demiro that Rita had known, undergoing some kind of delusion of being Jarrow? Rita had never heard of Jarrow, but Demiro might have. The thought brought to mind accounts of hypnotic subjects who assumed personalities that they re-created in their minds from things they'd read or heard or imagined, possibly from childhood—in some cases sufficiently vivid to lead overcredulous researchers into -believing that they were witnessing reincarnations.
On the other hand, how could Demiro be aware of things that only Jarrow could have known, such as what he and Larry Banks had talked about that day in the car on the way to Valdheim's, or things he'd talked about with the staff at the school? . . . Unless those things hadn't happened at all, but were simply fabrications of his—Demiro's—mind. The only way to find out would be to check such recollections against the accounts of the people actually involved, which meant that he still needed to find some way of -approaching them without getting himself arrested or certified as insane.
Aside from all that, he was still none the wiser as to who Maurice Gordon was, whose clothes he was wearing, whose papers he was carrying, and in whose name he was obliged to travel, for it seemed that the name meant no more to Rita than it did to him. As he sat in his seat, turning over the possibilities and permutations in his mind, the disquieting realization unfolded that he really didn't know if he was Jarrow having somehow taken over Demiro, Demiro undergoing delusions that he was Jarrow, or really Maurice Gordon somehow endowed with different aspects of both of them.
Gordon with Demiro's body and Jarrow's persona? Surely that didn't make sense. If you replaced the handle of a hammer and then put on a new head, was it still the same hammer?
But who else could he be if Jarrow was dead, for Christ's sake, and now he'd just been told that Demiro was too?
Maybe Larry had been right, and Jarrow—or whoever—really was crazy. That thought didn't do much to gladden him, either.
* * *
Rita spotted him as he came off the jetway at Chicago's Midway Airport, before he recognized her. She had told him on the phone that it would be closer than O'Hare. She was wearing the same green coat that he'd seen in the room at the Atlanta Hyatt, with a white scarf wrapped around her neck and head. She moved toward him through the flurry of people, her step quickening when she saw the recognition on his face. An urge to throw out her arms to him telegraphed itself, causing Jarrow to stiffen, and she came to a confused halt, like a kitten suddenly wary of the reflection that it had been about to pounce on in a -mirror.
They stood looking at each other for several seconds. From their conversation that afternoon, Rita seemed to know more than Jarrow did, and he had unconsciously come prepared to follow her lead on what to do next. On the other hand, he'd had longer to adjust to his own bizarre circumstances, and as the first full realization sank into her that he was indeed a different person, he could see that she was at a loss.
He tried to force what he hoped would be a halfway reassuring smile, but it emerged as just a thin stretching of the month. "Er, I don't know what to say," he stammered. "It's all too insane."
Rita gave a quick nod. Her voice choked when she started to answer. She gulped and tried again. "I know. I don't meet bodies back from the dead at airports every day." Her eyes traveled down the length of him, then back up to find his again.
He said, not really thinking, "You're sure I'm this Demiro that you remember? It couldn't have been a mistake?"
She shook her head. "Oh, no. You're Tony. There's no question about it. Monday was enough to prove that—in Atlanta."
Jarrow flinched. Of course. "Oh, yes. . . . You realize that I don't remember anything about that? All I know is waking up the way I am now, on Tuesday."
"You told me that when you called. . . . What did you do to your chin?"
"Nothing. It's just a scratch."
She hesitated. "Nothing's changed?"
He shook his head. The hope that had flickered on her face for an instant vanished.
The crowd of arrivals and people who had been waiting to meet them was thinning, leaving them both feeling awkwardly unprepared and conspicuous. Jarrow looked around, searching for a way to inject some semblance of normality into this. "Have you eaten?" he asked. "I mean, would you like to get something here, before we go?"
"I'm not really hungry."
"I didn't—"
"Thanks. It's—"
"You—"
They stopped together, entangled in their own clumsiness. Then, for the first time, both managed thin smiles simultaneously at the absurdity of it. Rita recovered herself first.
"I borrowed someone's car—I haven't owned one since I moved into the city. I left it in an unloading area. It's a twenty-five-dollar hole in your budget if they tow it."
"Let's go then," Jarrow agreed. "Where to?"
Rita seemed surprised, as if it hadn't crossed her mind. It brought home to Jarrow once again that until just a few minutes ago, she really hadn't thought of him as anything else but Tony Demiro suffering from some kind of amnesia—returned unexpectedly from somewhere mysterious, to be sure, but very much alive. Indeed, from the little she had told him over the phone, three days ago he had been just that!
She shook her head and brushed a curl of red hair back under her scarf. "Back to my place, I guess," she said.
As they moved away in the direction of Baggage Claim and the exit, a mustached man in a fur-trimmed parka, who had been observing them from a position by a line of phone booths a short distance away across the concourse, spoke into a hand-held radio. "We've got him. The guy she met is Samurai, no question. They're heading for the exit."
A voice in the receiver acknowledged. "Got it. Follow them out front and wait there for Mac to pick you up. Are you reading, Jaybird Two?"
Another voice on the channel: "Two here."
"Positive identification of Samurai. They're coming out now. Stick with them when they leave."
"Gotcha."
"Jaybird Four, be standing by at the intersection with Cicero. Pick up the tail there, assuming they head back north and into the city."
"Moving out now."
The man in the fur-trimmed parka pocketed the radio and began strolling casually toward the main entrance of the terminal. So the longshot had paid off, and they'd found Samurai again: the girl had led them right back to him. Not that the party was quite over yet. They still had to bring Samurai in.
And they'd been warned by the people from Atlanta that Samurai could be dangerous.
 
thirteen
One result of travel restrictions was that the environs of airports were not as choked as they used to be in the days when anyone could go joyriding on planes whenever they wanted to. Jarrow and Rita soon cleared Midway—heading toward the city, Jarrow saw from the traffic signs—and then turned north onto an avenue posted as Cicero.
"Do you know Chicago?" Rita asked.
"Oh, I've visited from time to time. It's not that far from Minneapolis."
"Is Minneapolis where you're from originally?"
"Yes. . . . Well, close. Do you know a part called Brooklyn Center?"
"Not really."
"It's to the north, a little farther up the river."
"How about you? Is this where you're from?"
"No, from California originally."
"What do you do?"
"I'm with the state government. That's how I was able to get down to Atlanta so fast on Monday. I traded merit points with one of the other girls. You can redeem them for travel passes."
"That's handy."
A few seconds of uncomfortable silence fell. They were still evading the subject that eclipsed all else in both their minds.
Rita carried on, mainly to fill the void, "It's not right though, really. I hate the whole setup. That was why I got out of California—because of the politics. They debit your taxes straight out of your bank there. It's always too much, so you have to file for a refund. All the returns come in right on time."
Jarrow didn't see anything especially wrong with that. "Sounds efficient," he replied. "Spreads out the burden and cuts costs. The state has to have revenue. It's probably cheaper for everyone that way."
"The drug squad can come into your house on suspicion, even if you're not there," Rita countered. They were both venting their frustrated expectations on each other. He had come looking for understanding. She had been half hoping to find Demiro. "I mean, no warrant or anything—just if they feel like it."
"It's a menace that has to be fought by its own rules. Would you rather live in the FER? Private armies of thugs shooting it out on the streets."
Rita emitted an exasperated sigh. "You don't believe all that stuff, do you? Those troubles were over years ago. It's all . . ." Her voice broke off. "Tony, I don't know if I'm going to be able to get used to this. You really do sound like a total stranger."
"But I am," Jarrow replied. "That's what I was trying to tell you on the phone."
She shook her head, tight-lipped. "No. . . . Look, I -accept that it might seem that way to you, but things like that don't happen. You're Tony, with some kind of problem. You've been away, and something very strange has been going on. But you're back now, and I'm still here." She looked across the car and flashed him a look that was meant to say everything would straighten itself out now. "We can work on it together. Okay?"
Jarrow brought his hands up to his face and massaged his eyes wearily.
"Okay, Tony?"
"Please don't call me that."
Rita drew a long breath and exhaled it slowly, making it plain that it was his decision—but she'd tried to make it easy. "All right. What should I call you, then?"
"I said when we talked earlier, my name is Jarrow: Richard Jarrow." The tenseness between them crackled like the air around a power line. Jarrow didn't need a confrontation on top of everything else. He added, forcing a mellower tone into his voice, " 'Dick' would be fine."
"Dick?"
"Yes."
Rita stared ahead, digesting it slowly with a long slow nod to herself. "Okay," she pronounced finally. "Let's talk some more about him, then."
"Go ahead."
"He's this teacher who woke up in Atlanta."
"Yes."
"On Tuesday."
"Right."
Rita bit her lip, hesitating. "Now don't get mad, because I'm only trying to understand and help. But I have to ask this. Is it possible—you know, in your opinion, if you take a totally open-minded attitude toward this—that this Richard Jarrow could be somebody you invented in your head? I mean, things like that have happened before. Sometimes, when a person—"
There was no point in continuing with that line. "No, he's not a figment of my imagination," Jarrow interrupted. "I'm a real person. Go to Minneapolis and check it out if you want. There are plenty of records, people I worked with."
Rita conceded with a nod. "Okay. Sometimes people think they're somebody else who's real too."
Jarrow couldn't contain a wry smile. "You mean it makes a change from Napoleon?"
"I didn't say you were crazy."
"You couldn't have come much closer."
"I'm sorry."
Jarrow tossed out a hand dismissively. "I've got memories, complete memories of personal things, little things. . . . It's not just a case of knowing a few facts. I've lived Jarrow's life. Hiking as a kid, around the lakes in Minnesota. Birthdays, Christmases, the house I grew up in. Other people in the family. How could Tony Demiro know about things like that?"
By unconsciously inventing them to fill in the gaps, he could see her thinking to herself—but she wasn't about to press the issue right now. Approaching it, instead, from a different angle, she said, "But if Jarrow doesn't look like Tony, then where's the person that he does look like? See what I mean? If this guy Jarrow is real, then the person who all these people in Minneapolis know must still be walking around somewhere. If you're him, then who's he? Where does he fit in?"
"He's not walking around," Jarrow said. "I tried talking to those people, but all I got was a hard time." He realized then, with a sinking feeling, that he could have an even tougher problem convincing Rita. She, after all, had her own explanation worked out. And it was irrefutable.
"Why?" Rita asked, glancing across at him again. Her tone was challenging, as if he had just made her point for her. "If they know the guy, how come they couldn't buy that they were talking to him?"
Jarrow sighed hopelessly. "Richard Jarrow died of a stroke in May," he replied.
* * *
After traveling a few miles north on Cicero they exited eastward, toward the upthrust of skyline massed behind the Sears Tower and the Federal Center. Relics from an age of bygone affluence, the monuments glittered like frosty cliffs in the last light of day against the sky darkening over Lake Michigan.
They entered an older part of the city, south of center and west of the Ship Canal and south branch of the Chicago River, from what Jarrow could remember. The streets were mainly of solid, high-built, stone and timber row houses, bearing the signs of transformation over the years as successive waves of fad or commercial promise came and went. There were cinemas that had been bowling alleys, then supermarkets, and had now become miniature malls of sandwich shops and oddments stalls, or capacious used-furniture emporiums piled with Brobdignagian discards—symptomatic of a time when three-car-garage villas in Du Page and Lake counties were being traded for renovated duplexes within walking distance of the Loop. Brick-formed Carlsbads originally built as warehouses had been transformed first into light engineering factories; then later, as industry declined, into antique galleries to professional offices; and were now cellularized into studios and singles apartments. Like butchers who took pride in using everything from the ears to the hoof, it seemed that people loathed letting any part of their cities go to waste.
The street that Rita finally pulled into consisted of two rows of faded, four-floor brownstone walkups facing each other across a short length of pavement with snow heaped along the sides. A group of noisy, heavily muffled children who were playing halfway along moved aside as the car squelched past. Past them, a group of youths was standing around a fire burning in an oil drum by a wooden fence that closed off the far end of the street. Rita parked on the right almost at the end, and led Jarrow up one of the flights of wide, iron-railed steps leading to the front doors. She found her key and let them into a hallway that smelled of cats and musty carpet, from where they went up to one of what appeared to be two flats on the second floor. She shared with a girl called Margaret, she told him, more for the sake of saying something, as they went in.
Feeling more like an intruder than a guest, Jarrow followed her into the living room and looked around. The place was cramped, but cleanly kept and appealingly feminine, with fresh, warm colors, soft furnishings, and flowery decor. Before he had a chance to take off his coat, he was startled to see a picture of himself staring from a niche in the corner, in T-shirt and jeans, grinning and leaning with folded arms against a red pickup.
Then he remembered that, no, that was not him. It was Tony Demiro.
 
fourteen
Rita took off her scarf and coat and hung them behind the door, revealing a chunky beige sweater and black slacks. She shook her head, and her hair tumbled free in a bouncy red cascade, filling out the face that had seemed tight and strained outside. Her mouth still had the firmness that had struck Jarrow when he saw her on the phone that afternoon, although softened by an earthy femininity that was more pronounced at close quarters. Her eyes were a light greeny-gray, and her skin had a spattering of faint freckles that hadn't shown on the screen. Jarrow's impression was of a woman who would not be easily deflected from her opinions once she had formed them, and from their brief crossing of swords in the car it was evident that on some matters those opinions put her in a very different camp from his own.
But things like that didn't have to affect matters one way or the other. He was here for one reason only: so that Rita could tell him more about where Demiro fitted in. He had no inter-est in dragging this out any further than was necessary to learn whatever she knew. At the same time, he was under no illusions that all would be as simple as that. For it was already clear that Rita saw the situation in another light, and that she was motivated by very different hopes as to its outcome.
"I hate quiet," Rita said. "Mind if we have some noise?"
"I don't mind. It's your place."
She went over to a crystal-player—so called because the holoplate cartridges looked like postage-stamp-size tiles of glass—and touched a button to start a preset selec-tion of tunes. Then she moved to the window, which looked out over the rear of the house, and closed the drapes. "How about some coffee after that cold out there."
"Do you have coylene?" He was referring to the soy--derived substitute that people were being encouraged to switch to.
"Coylene?" Rita looked surprised. More evidence that he wasn't Tony. "No, I'm afraid we don't. How about decaf?"
"That'll be fine."
She went over to the kitchen area that formed one corner of the living room and began filling the pot. "How do you take it?"
"A splash of cream, no sugar."
"You might as well take off your coat."
Jarrow hung his coat by hers and sat down on a couch by a low table near the window. While Rita busied herself with mugs, dishes, and spoons, using movement to keep herself occupied, his eyes roamed over the flat. There were two other doors, one open, obviously the bathroom, the other probably a bedroom. More pictures of Demiro adorned the walls, some showing him and Rita together, others of another girl whom he guessed was Margaret, fair and slightly pudgy-looking; a pile of women's magazines on a shelf, the kind that featured fashion, pop psychology, and sexual titillations disguised as advice; more shelves with racks holding music crystals, along with books, mainly fiction; posters from New York and the Grand Canyon; an old computer, which from the stuff piled around and on top of it was either seldom used or not working; a framed picture of Demiro in uniform, with an Army cap-badge fixed at the top of the frame.
"I, ah, I get the feeling you and Tony were kind of close," Jarrow said, looking back at Rita.
"We were planning on getting married, if that's what you mean."
"Oh, God. I really had no idea."
"How about a cookie as well?"
"Not really."
"Cheese or something? We've got potato chips and other munchies."
"No, thank you." Jarrow stared fixedly at the table, feeling his mind gluing in its search for a line to continue, as he had known would happen. His chronic discomfort with women had long ago become sufficiently a part of his life to have this self-fulfilling quality about it. The suspicion of possibly invading her private space, intimate surroundings that she might have shared with her dead fiancé, didn't help matters. He seized upon the thought for something to say and waved a hand vaguely at the surroundings. "Did you and Tony, I mean . . . ."
"No. We had a mobile home out at Hodgkins. That's on the way to Kankakee, where he was based."
"So you've been here, how long?"
"Since August. I moved into the city after you . . ." Rita checked herself and picked up a pack of cigarettes that she had taken from her coat pocket, "after Tony was reported killed."
Jarrow stared down at his interlaced fingers, exhaled heavily, then looked up. "Listen, Rita . . . I know how you must feel. This has got to be a lot tougher for you than it is for me."
She stared at him for a moment; then her face softened, and she nodded to acknowledge that he was trying and she appreciated it. "I'm not too sure about that," she replied. "I don't wake up finding I'm someone else every morning."
They looked at each other, both feeling the first flicker of real communication. It seemed to say that in this much at least, they were on the same side. And with that, a part of the oppressiveness that had been hanging over the room since they came in lightened. Rita lit her cigarette and came over with two mugs to sit down in a cane chair facing the table. Jarrow reached out and pushed the ashtray closer to her.
"What are we going to do?" she sighed.
"All we can do: just keep sifting through what we know to see what comes out of it," he said. She nodded. Jarrow picked up his coffee and took a sip. "When was Tony supposed to have died, exactly?"
"June sixteenth. I was notified about a week later."
"By the Army?"
"Yes."
"They notified you, not his family?"
"Tony didn't have any family that he'd ever traced. He was an orphan. I was listed as his nearest relative--equivalent."
"What happened . . . as far as you were told?"
"Around a year ago—I think it was early last October—he volunteered for a special assignment. It was all secret. I didn't know what it was about, not then. But it seems it was something to do with a new technique for speeding up military training by transplanting whole patterns of things into somebody's head that other guys had already learned."
Jarrow looked up sharply. "How did you find out if it was so secret? Did he tell you?"
Rita drew quickly on her cigarette and shook her head. "Tony didn't blab about things he shouldn't, and I didn't press him to. You told me, on Monday—when we were in Atlanta."
Of course. That was when he was supposed to have been Demiro, Jarrow reminded himself. "Did you hear from him in all that time?"
"At first he used to come back on leave about once a month, but as I said he didn't talk then about what was going on. Later I got letters that had been censored." Rita sighed, shrugged, and took a drink of coffee in a way that said there really wasn't much more to tell. "Then this officer called at the place in Hodgkins one day and said Tony had been killed in a helicopter accident. Regrets and condolences and all that stuff. There was an official letter later, confirming it . . . and his things arrived in a plastic bag a couple of weeks later. That's what happens to your dreams." Rita's voice caught; her hand quivered as she set the mug down on the table. "And half a year later the phone rings, it's you . . . no, you were Tony on Monday . . . and you've just woken up in Atlanta."
At last Jarrow was getting information. He didn't want her going off into reminiscences right now. Another mystery that this might shed some light on was the change that had come over him the night before, after he left the bar in Minneapolis.
"What did Tony do in the Army?" he asked. "Was he involved in hand-to-hand combat, or with some elite fighting unit, maybe—anything like that?"
Rita looked surprised and shook her head. "Tony? Hell no. His whole idea of army life was that it would have been great if you didn't have to go and fight people sometimes."
"So what did he do?"
"He ran an office full of clerks in a transport depot."
"I see." Jarrow was perplexed. "How about hobbies and sports? Was he interested in martial arts, gymnastics . . . anything like that, athletic?"
Rita shook her head again. "He liked to enjoy life, sure, but that kind of hard work wasn't his idea of enjoyment. He partied a lot and had fun when he was in one kind of mood; then he'd maybe go off and like to be by himself and read when he was in another. He just wasn't a violent kind of person." She let her eyes flicker over Jarrow for a second, then added, "Although I have to say, you look as if you've been in training. That's a leaner, tougher body than the one I remember—and Tony wasn't exactly what you'd call flabby."
Jarrow blinked in surprise. He had never been described that way before. "What kind of things did Tony read?" he asked.
"Oh, science fiction, sports mags, westerns, sometimes. When he was in one of his serious moods, maybe history and politics. Arguing politics was the only kind of contest he got into with other guys. It got him into trouble sometimes at the base."
"What were his politics?"
Rita sighed. "I think you already have an idea. I don't think you and he would really have gotten along. I hear you as"—she made a we-are-being-frank-aren't-we rocking motion with her head—"well, kind of straight and uptight, all for the system. That's what they'd want a teacher to be like, right?"
"Maybe."
"Well, Tony wasn't that way. He thought all this environmental stuff is crap, and the things you hear all the time about we've-got-to-control-this and we-have-to-regulate-that are just pretexts for keeping one bunch of people on top and the rest of us down here. But in the long run it can't last. It's just digging itself deeper into the ground. He figured the only way left to go was out."
"Out? You mean to somewhere else?"
Rita exhaled a stream of smoke away from him and stubbed her cigarette. "Right, FER. Offworld, maybe. Well, nobody's going to change down here, are they?"
Jarrow sat back. He didn't agree, but that kind of thing could wait until another time. Demiro couldn't have picked anyone more unlike himself to have transformed into; or Jarrow couldn't, to have taken over—whatever had happened. There was an ironic side to it all, he had to admit.
"I must sound like the perfect Jekyll and Hyde," he said. "Is that what you're thinking too? I bet you've got some kind of a theory that Jarrow is an opposite personality that Tony created in his head to resolve some kind of conflict or something." He saw the resigned look starting to form around her mouth. "Yes?"
A nod, accompanied by a slightly sheepish smile. "Something like that," she agreed.
The music stopped, marking a short pause before the next number. Rita didn't notice, but just at that instant a soft creak came from the landing outside the apartment door. That in itself wouldn't have been enough to make Jarrow's head whip around like that of a pointer catching a sudden scent, but the way the sound stopped abruptly a split second after the music ceased triggered deep-seated alarm responses, tuned and sensitized to stealth; responses that weren't his.
And then came a barely audible double click that would have meant nothing to Richard Jarrow . . . but which something inside him registered instantly as the slide-action of an automatic pistol, loading a round into the chamber.
He was at the door before Rita had even reacted to the first movement of his head. While his hands slammed home the security bolt and engaged the chain, his eyes raced over the room's contents, estimating sizes and weights. The door handle turned, there was an ineffective shove, then a -series of loud raps. Jarrow heaved a bookcase over sideways to fall onto a hall table on the far side of the door, blocking it diagonally, then pushed an armchair behind it. Rita rose to her feet, knocking the table and spilling her coffee in her haste, her eyes wide.
"Tony, what the fuck do you think—"
The door rattled ineffectually, then a voice yelled from the other side. "Samurai, it's okay. It's us: Marty and Hank. It's okay, understand? We just want to talk. Open the door, willya?"
Jarrow moved the kitchen table behind the armchair, a cabinet behind that, and then turned the couch from the window around to form a chain of objects butting up against each other to the far wall. Rita watched, petrified.
The door shook under a louder thud, accompanied by a splintering noise. "Samurai, for Christ's sake, it's okay! Open the goddam door."
Jarrow snatched his coat and threw Rita's at her as he crossed to the door of the bedroom. He flung it open, and pertinent facts registered themselves like data being tagged in a computer: one window, drapes open, facing rear from same wall as in living room; dark outside; recollection of street layout: elevated row houses with rear yards back-to-back; probable mode of approach: frontally up main stairs, with backup positioned halfway along street, rear of building staked out from the neighboring yards.
He moved to the window and peered through, keeping himself in the dark to one side. The yards were separated by wooden fences, with toolsheds and garden structures in places, indistinct in the gloom. The row of houses on the far side of the intervening yards was split halfway along by a narrow alley. That was where he would have positioned the backup team at the rear, he decided: kept back to avoid setting all the dogs off. Possibly they'd have sent two men forward as stakeouts. His eyes scanned the layout like search radars, following the line that the stakeout pair would have taken from the end of the alley, picking out the patches of shadow that they would have made for. A few feet below the window was the smaller roof of an extension from the house. The crash came from the next room of the lock giving way and the door jamming into the barricade.
Rita was beside him, shaking with terror. "Who are they? What—"
He made a chopping motion with one hand: his manner, in contrast to that of the mild schoolteacher with whom she had entered, carrying such total authority that she fell silent at once. He looked up at the light: bedroom, probably low wattage. Better chances with something brighter. "Light bulbs," he snapped. "Where are they?"
"K-kitchen," she stammered.
"Fetch the biggest you've got." She nodded and disappeared back through the doorway. From beyond it, more splintering sounds came, of the front door being pried off its hinges. Jarrow took out the bulb in the room and tossed it onto one of the beds, then went to the window, released the catch, and checked that it moved freely.
Rita was back. "Hundred fifty. Biggest there is."
"Screw it in." While Rita complied, Jarrow locked the door and made another barricade from the beds and vanity, at the same time speaking rapidly. "Do exactly as I say. Turn the light on, then go to the window. Talk back into the room in a loud voice for five seconds, as if I'm behind you. Then go back to the switch and turn it off, but keep talking. Wait until I call, then get down onto that roof. If those guys get to this door, get out anyway."
She nodded tightly. Jarrow dropped to the floor and crawled to below the window. "Now," he told her.
Rita turned on the light and moved to stand silhouetted in the window frame. "What are you doing over there?" she called back. "Look, I don't know about you, but as far as I'm . . ." She went back to the door and flipped the switch.
As darkness filled the room again, Jarrow opened the window and flowed as if his body were liquid, silently over the sill and down onto the annex roof beneath, blending into its cover in the second or two that eyes watching from below would have taken to readjust from the brief glare. He wormed his way to a projecting corner cloaked in the shadows of a tree, and straightened up cautiously to -explore around with his fingers. They found a down pipe, but to get to it he would have to stand on a sliver of roof only inches wide extending beyond the corner, and then make a long step to a pipe end sticking out of the wall. He made the move deftly and effortlessly with the ease of a Yosemite climber, lowered himself by the down pipe, and dropped noiselessly behind a fence skirting the rear patio.
In a patch of darkness in the yard of the house behind, agent Barney Costello of the Federal Security Service craned his neck trying to make out what was happening. First the light had come on in the window, and the Chilsen girl appeared, shouting to somebody else who had to be Samurai. Then the light had gone off again.
"She's still yelling at the window," Costello muttered into his radio. "I can't figure what it's about."
"Keep watching," came the reply. "Two of the guys from Pearse are in the front door, but there's nobody there. Samurai and the girl must be in the back room."
They're coming out this way, Costello thought to himself. All he had nearby was Kopel, posted in the adjacent yard. Better bring some of the backup guys forward from the alley on the next street .
And that was the last thing he thought for more than the next hour. Jarrow caught the limp form as it fell, frisking it quickly and taking the gun, ammunition clip, radio, and set of car keys on a ring with a remote button.
Fifty feet away in the next yard, Kopel, crouched -behind a toolshed, heard a muffled movement. "Barney?" he hissed. "Is everything okay over there? . . . Barney?"
An arm slid around his neck from behind, tightening like a steel band to cut off the main artery to the brain and causing him to slump senseless after a few seconds.
At the back of the house, Rita clambered out onto the annex roof as banging came from inside the window -behind her. She moved warily to the edge and peered down into the darkness. "They're getting into the bedroom. Are you there?"
Jarrow materialized below her. "Turn around and let yourself drop," he hissed.
Across the way, drapes were parting in some of the windows. "What the hell's going on out there?" a voice yelled. Somebody else let out a dog, which erupted in a frenzy of barking.
Jarrow caught her as she dropped, and steered her to the fence separating the next yard. He guided her over, then vaulted after her, repeating the process a number of times to move them several houses along the row. Behind them, a figure appeared in the window of Rita's flat and leaned out, peering into the darkness. "They musta come out this way. Anybody down there?"
Jarrow and Rita were in the concrete yard of a house showing a light in the ground-floor rear window. Jarrow knocked sharply on the back door. A pause. Nothing. He knocked again. "Who is it?" a voice demanded inside. "What's going on out there?"
"Police," Jarrow snapped. "Open up. Emergency."
The door rattled and opened as far as the security chain would permit. "Got some ID?" the voice inquired.
"Right here."
A man's face appeared close to the crack. Jarrow shot one hand through, grabbing him by the shirtfront, and rammed the gun that he had taken hard up under his chin with the other. "We just need to come through, okay? Open the door and nobody gets hurt. We have to get to the street."
The door opened. Jarrow shoved the man back against the wall and sent Rita on through with a curt nod, ignoring the woman who was cowering against a countertop on the far side of a table with dishes and two half-eaten meals. "Just sit tight and enjoy the rest of your dinner," he murmured to the couple as he closed the door. Then he followed quickly through after Rita.
They emerged from a side door below the front steps of a house about halfway along the street. The car that Rita had borrowed was parked back outside the front of her place, which was where most of the backup squad would be, following the lead men inside or waiting. So they couldn't use that. The computer still working inside Jarrow's head told him that they didn't want to, anyway: her car had probably been bugged with a locator device ever since Rita left it at the airport. He looked the other way along the street and picked out the three cars that belonged to whoever was after them. Two were empty; the other had a couple of figures inside.
"Wait here," he murmured into Rita's ear. "Be ready to move fast."
He came out onto the sidewalk and walked rapidly toward the cars, at the same time taking out the keys he'd collected and pressing the remote button. The lights of one of the empty cars flashed in response, and Jarrow headed toward it. It was pointing the wrong way, toward the street's dead end, whereas the car with the two figures in was turned around. But he'd just have to take his chances.
He was inside and starting the motor before the two men in the other car realized what was happening. As Jarrow pulled away, one of them got out and called at him. "Hey! Who is that? What's going on?"
Jarrow whirled the wheel, sending the car skidding across the street into a snow mound, then back into reverse for a turn, wheels screeching.
"What the hell? Hey, stop!"
The agent just managed to leap clear as Jarrow came out of the turn. But the driver in the other car had thought quickly and was already moving. Jarrow cut in toward the sidewalk, throwing open the passenger door as Rita ran from the gate of the house they had come out of. As she tumbled in, the other car came up alongside and angled across their front to block them off, its front inside wheel plowing into the snowbank in the gutter. Front-wheel drive model, Jarrow registered. He slammed into reverse again, backed up, and changed to forward to go around the outside. As he'd figured, it took the other car a few vital seconds of wheel-spinning and lurching to unstick, which was all he needed to pull past it. But as they got to the end of the street he saw in his mirror that it was free and accelerating to follow them. Farther back behind it, figures were running out into the street from Rita's house.
"Hunch your back. Grip your neck hard with both hands," Jarrow ordered tersely.
Judging his moment, he hit the brakes and at the same time kicked into reverse again. The driver of the other car closing behind had no chance to avoid the impact. They hit with a loud rending crash that echoed along the short street. Leaving the other car immobilized with a stove in radiator, Jarrow accelerated forward once more, spinning the wheel first one way, then the other to take the corner like an unleashed rocket sleigh.
But a known car with a crumpled rear end wasn't -exactly the most likely thing to have hopes of vanishing in for very long. They ditched it a half mile west, hailed the next passing cab, and Jarrow told the driver to take them to Union Station, which was the first place to come to mind in the opposite direction, toward the city. There, they changed to another cab, the driver of which would have no reason to connect them with the area where the ditched car would be found—if it hadn't been already.
"Where to?" the cabbie asked.
"Just go south on Lake Shore," Jarrow said.
Rita sank back in the seat and exhaled a long, quavering breath. Ever since Jarrow's first sudden move back at the flat, things had been happening too fast, and her mind had been in too much of a turmoil for a shred of coherent thought to form. Beside her, he was silent.
"Okay," she said, when her shaking had abated sufficiently for her to speak. "So, what kind of a school do you teach at? Tell me again that it's junior high."
But then to her surprise she saw in the passing street-lights that Jarrow too was trembling, and his face was wet with perspiration.
"I don't understand." His icy control and commanding manner were gone, and in their place his voice was barely a croak. "Something like this happened before. . . . Look, I can't explain now. We have to find somewhere to stay out of sight. Are there any people who you can trust?"
Rita thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think I know a place. Want me to take us there?"
"Drop us somewhere close. Don't give him the location."
Rita leaned forward and opened the driver's partition. "Driver, could we make that Clybourn, please?"
"You know that's completely the other way?"
"I know. We've had a change of plan."
The cabbie shrugged. "You're paying."
They turned at a gap in the center divider of the road and began heading back, toward the north end of Chicago. Jarrow now reverted once more to his "normal" self, and the first thing he did after the cab dropped them off was lose the gun and the other items that he had taken down a storm drain on the side of the road.
 
fifteen
They walked to a corner of a street of older redbrick houses standing opposite some shops, mostly closed by this time of night, and a bar standing beside a drab restaurant It was quiet and deserted, with mist swirling in the glow of a few watery yellow streetlights.
"It's just along here, on this side," Rita said, pointing.
"Who are these people again?" Jarrow asked.
"Their names are Sandy and Bruce. They're old friends. Tony and I knew them for years."
"And you're sure they're reliable?" Jarrow was his normal hesitant self again. Just as in Minneapolis, the transformation had reversed itself as quickly as it had happened. Now, the knowledge that they were being hunted added more to his uncertainty and confusion.
"They're both okay," Rita assured him. She looked along the row of houses and thought for a moment. "Look, maybe it would be better if I go on ahead and talk to them first to give them some idea of what to expect. . . . I mean, this kind of thing doesn't happen every day. Can you wait here?"
Jarrow nodded.
"I'll be back in two minutes. Just give me a chance to explain first, okay?" She waited until he nodded again, then walked away and merged into the shadows of one of the doorways a short distance away in the gloom. Jarrow turned and moved a few paces away around the corner, exhaling white vapor into the chilly night air and stamping his feet against the cold seeping up through his shoes. That was something else he should have bought. Gordon's choice of footwear might have been fine in Georgia, but Chicago in November at this time of evening was something else.
What did it mean, this sudden change that had taken place in him twice now? It seemed to be triggered reflexively when danger threatened, as if from some depth of his being over which he had no voluntary control. And according to Rita, Demiro had been involved in a secret experimental program to transplant ready-learned behavior as an aid to military training. Furthermore, a conditioning to violence seemed to fit with the pointers that Jarrow had found in Atlanta to the kind of person Maurice Gordon was—or, more likely, he was beginning to suspect, had been a cover for. A cover for what? What had the men who had broken into Rita's called him?—"Samurai." It sounded like a code name. And they had acted as if they knew him. Jarrow pulled his coat tighter and stared at the murky outlines of the buildings across the street. As discomforting as he found the thought, there could be no denying that in a grisly but compelling kind of way that had to be faced, the pieces were starting to fit together.
Inside the house, Bruce, looking surprised but pleased, brought Rita into the kitchen, where Sandy was trying to introduce more baby cereal into their eight-month-old daughter, Alice, than was already plastered in her hair, ears, and nose and all over her hands and clothes. The piles of dishes, laundry, and food still not put away told of one of those days when entropy had won out.
"It's Rita," Bruce said unnecessarily. "Come on in. It's a hell of a cold night to take a walk. I thought it was one of those college kids from the welfare department, checking to make sure we know which end to put the diaper on."
"Hi," Sandy said. "Grab a chair if you can find one. Alice is having one of her frisky days. Isn't that right, Alice? . . . There, tastes good, huh? It might work better if I made this into pies and threw 'em at her. Bruce, put on some coffee for us, would you, hon?"
"Thanks," Rita said. "You'd better make it four."
At the clipped note in her voice, Bruce turned his head, then saw her face properly for the first time. "Hey, what's up?"
Sandy straightened up, forgetting her encrusted daughter for the moment. "Rita, what is it? What's happened?"
"Anybody got a cigarette?" Rita hadn't had one since she was at the flat, having left hers behind in the rush to get out. Bruce produced a pack from a drawer after some searching. He used them occasionally, and there were only a few left. Rita took one and held it steady with some effort while he lit it. "Thanks." She looked up at him, across at Sandy, and exhaled. "Tony isn't dead. He's come back." They stared incredulously. Bruce started to say something, but Rita stopped him with a quick motion of her hand. "I don't know where he's been or what's been going on. He arrived in town today from Minneapolis."
"Tony? Alive? But, but . . ." Sandy shook her head. "Is he okay?"
"Where is he?" Bruce asked, similarly astounded.
"That's the whole point. He's got some kind of amnesia . . . but not only that. It's not just that he doesn't know who he is. He thinks he's someone else completely. I mean it's total, a completely different personality. But apart from that he seems quite rational." Rita looked at Bruce. "He's outside, just along the street. . . . Look, we had some trouble back at the flat. There are some guys after him. I mean heavy stuff, with guns. I don't know who they are. They came busting into the place."
"Jesus Christ!" Bruce exclaimed.
"What happened to them?" Sandy asked, horrified.
"We got out and managed to lose them. That's another story. But we need to get inside off the streets, and we can't go back there tonight." Rita looked around at the room and gestured imploringly. "So what I'm saying is, is there any way we could . . ."
"Well, sure." Bruce's tone conveyed that she should have known better than to ask.
"It's so weird that I thought I ought to come in first and let you know how he is. And he agreed—I mean, he's not acting crazy or anything. But he's convinced he's somebody called Jarrow, Dick Jarrow. That's what I've been calling him. So just try and, kind of, go along with it for now, okay? Tomorrow will be a better time to figure out what to do."
"Get him inside," Sandy said. "He'll freeze out there."
Rita brought Jarrow in a few minutes later. There were some awkward preliminaries. Hard as they tried, Sandy and Bruce found it impossible to disguise the strangeness of being introduced to somebody they had known closely for years. "Don't feel too bad about it," Jarrow told them. "I know how this must feel. I've had a couple of days to get used to this, and I'm still having a problem."
They talked for a while over coffee, self-consciously at first, more or less repeating what Rita had already said in brief, but it gave Sandy and Bruce a chance to adapt. Then Sandy excused herself and went to get Alice washed and put to bed. Bruce began a brave attack upon the havoc of the kitchen and Rita rose to help, while Jarrow remained at the table, hands clasped around his mug.
"What were you doing in Minneapolis?" Bruce asked him as he moved to clear the table.
"It's where I live. I went back to where I'm from," Jarrow told him.
"Yeah. . . . Right," Bruce agreed, but still with detectable absence of conviction. "And you've no idea who these guys were who broke into Rita and Margaret's place?"
"No. They must have been watching either Rita or the place. The only thing I can think of is that they followed her from Atlanta."
"He called me from Atlanta on Monday," Rita explained. "But there was no mention of any Dick Jarrow then. He was Tony, his old self. He'd woken up in a hotel there, and that was all he knew."
"But Georgia was where he transferred to last year, when he went on that special assignment," Bruce observed. "Where was it?"
"A place called Pearse," Rita said.
"Right. So there has to be some connection."
Rita went on, "The last thing he remembered was -being at Pearse sometime last May. There was nothing then about anything that had to do with flying in helicopters."
Bruce turned toward Jarrow from the sink, where he had been stacking dishes. "Any idea what you were doing in Atlanta on Monday?"
Jarrow shook his head. "No."
The door opened and Sandy came back in. "Well, there's some justice in life after all. She went out like a light. Little snot—must run on some infinite energy source that science hasn't discovered yet. . . . Oh, thanks, Bruce."
"Needs a man's touch," Bruce grunted.
"How are we doing?" Sandy inquired, looking around.
"It's the strangest story I've heard for a long time," Bruce said. "No, wrong. It's the strangest story I've heard anytime. I don't know what to make of it. But I'm just an out-of-work machine operator. What do I know about any of it?"
"What happened to Margaret in all this?" Sandy asked.
Rita put a hand to her mouth. "Oh, Christ, I forgot about Margaret. She was out. What's she going to come back to? The place looked like it had been bombed."
"Will those guys still be around?" Bruce asked.
"How would I know?"
"Try giving her a call," Sandy suggested, indicating a traditional audio-only phone hanging over the half-height refrigerator.
Bruce lifted it off the hook and was about to tap in the number, then hesitated. "We don't know who they were," he said, looking at the others. "Do you think it might be tapped? Could they trace a calling number back to here?"
Rita glanced at Sandy. They both shrugged.
"I wouldn't risk it," Jarrow said from the table. "With computers they can do anything."
A few seconds of baffled silence ensued. Then Sandy said, "I guess we could always call from someplace else. Does that sound overdramatic, you know, too much like the movies?"
"Not to me it doesn't," Rita answered.
"I'll get Eric to call her," Bruce said. "He's on the other side of town."
"Who's Eric?" Jarrow asked.
"Another friend, student at University of Chicago," Bruce replied. "He's okay."
"Don't you call him, Bruce," Rita said. "Let me do it. If he hears from you, it'll be obvious where I've gone. If I call him, it could be from anywhere. People can't give away what they don't know."
Bruce nodded, picked up the phone again, and handed it to her.
"I just want him to let Margaret know that I'm okay, I know about the mess there, and I'll explain later," she said, taking it.
The others waited, keeping silent while Rita made the call. She kept it brief, told Eric that she'd call again in the morning, and hung up. The four of them exchanged looks that agreed there was nothing more that they could do now.
Sandy sighed and stretched out her arms to relieve aching muscles. "Whew, what a day. Well, now that the demolition machine's asleep, maybe we can get to eat too. Can I get you guys a sandwich or something? When did you last have a bite?"
"I don't know. It feels like sometime last week," Rita said. Now that her nerves were recovering, she was beginning to realize how much all the tension had taken out of her.
Jarrow had glimpsed how bare the refrigerator was while Bruce was putting the things away. "Is there a pizza place or anything like that near here?" he asked.
"A block and a half away," Sandy answered.
Jarrow felt inside his jacket for Gordon's wallet. "Then order a couple of big ones," he said. "And a six-pack or two to go with them. It's on me."
 
sixteen
Pearse Psychological Research Laboratories lay a little under fifty miles northwest of Atlanta, hidden among the wooded valleys forming the edge of the Dahlonega Plateau, the southern end of the Appalachians. What was now the Main Complex, containing the major laboratory and administration blocks, had been built originally as the research facility of private genetic engineering interests, closed down by animal-rights lobbying. Since its takeover as a military facility, a patchwork of more sprawling extensions had -attached themselves in a succession of uncoordinated addi-tions. The establishment oversaw and instituted programs connected with various aspects of military psychology and psychological warfare, stresses of combat environments, maintenance of morale, optimization of training methods, and a few other things that weren't publicly talked about.
Names only would be used for the volunteers, Demiro had been told; ranks would not be disclosed. He arrived with another soldier who gave his name as Schott, and a black called Lowe, who had been collected at the airport by the same shuttle bus. They had exchanged the usual basic data on the ride back to Pearse. Lowe was from Mississippi, had had postings in Venezuela and Alaska, had been a bugler, still played jazz trumpet, would lay odds on any sport, and thought that being in bed with a woman was the most natural thing in the world because he'd been born that way. Schott was more taciturn, but from the few things he said he came from New York State and thought that one thing to be said for army life as opposed to civilian was that at least you didn't have to choose who got to push you around. Neither of them had any more idea than Demiro did of what the assignment at Pearse was about. Lowe had volunteered to escape an amorous entanglement involving a sergeant's wife; Schott said he was just curious to find out what kinds of things happened on programs that volunteers were invited for.
They checked in at a guardhouse by the main gate, where IDs and security clearances were verified, and were escorted to one of several regular army-style billet huts in a compound on one side of the main complex, which they were told would be their assigned quarters. A number of other volunteers for the same program were already unpack-ing kits into lockers and settling in, having picked the best bunk spaces. A Sergeant Eades, from Pearse itself, was in charge, standard Army product, stiff-backed, pressed and creased, and would evidently be handling routine administrative and day-to-day matters.
They had lunch, eleven of them, plus the sergeant and a couple of other NCOs that they'd be working with, in a canteen located outside an internal security perimeter that was designated the Restricted Zone and included most of the Main Complex. That was where the classified work went on, and anyone without high-level clearance required -escort at all times. This was when people competed in the heats for first impressions, and the initial forays were made to rough out whatever pecking order would finally assert -itself. Demiro tended to a lower-profile role, keeping eyes and ears open. As an old cowhand turned bar owner had told him once when he was a kid growing up in Denver, "Y' don't learn nuthin' while yer talkin'."
After lunch the shuttle bus returned from another pickup at the airport, bringing the total number of recruits up to twenty. When the newcomers had been installed and given a chance to clean up, they were all taken to a room in the Facilities Block, again still outside the Restricted Zone, for a preliminary briefing.
* * *
The warm-up man was a Major Gleavey: a smiling Mr. Personality, everybody's friend—perhaps a frustrated talk-show host or prime-time variety MC. He welcomed the company to the establishment, enthusing about it as if it were a Boy Scout camp, stressed the importance of team spirit and making the effort to fit in, and promised them some "truly fascinating and exciting things" if they stayed with it. He wanted this to be a happy place. The secret of success in anything was to learn to work together. And of course, ". . . if you've got any problems, come to me, okay?"
He then introduced Colonel Wylvern, who, as most of the men present had already discerned for themselves, would be in ultimate charge of things while Gleavey did the legwork and fronting. He didn't make any especially spectacular impact: the kind of CO whom they'd all seen a dozen times before, square-set and solid, with wavy hair, a touch of floridness about the features, sufficiently aloof and remote to maintain a distance of militarily proper impar-tiality. He delivered a set-piece recitation on the importance of security, a warning that infractions of discipline would not be tolerated, and some words about the privilege of having an opportunity to serve the nation in this way. Nothing new or interesting there. Wylvern ended, "This may look like a small-time, backwater project from the scale of it and the number of you here, but I can assure you that it has national importance. In fact, it's under the personal direction of a general, who'll be making himself known in due course, after we've made some initial progress."
Then it was the turn of the civilian in a dark gray suit who had been sitting listening without change of expression through all this, and drawing curious looks from the troops. He was tight about the face and lean-jawed, which drew his mouth into a thin-lipped line that hinted of humor-lessness, determination, or both, an impression strengthened by the narrow, thinly knotted necktie—constraining his person, as he perhaps did his emotions—and the cold eyes staring out through rimless bifocal spectacles. "Economy" was the word to summarize what everything about him seemed to project. He expended no unnecessary effort in his movements; there was no pointless expressiveness in his manner, nor sartorial elegances in his dress. Gleavey, who Demiro had already dubbed inwardly as "Glee-show," intro-duced him as Dr. Nordens. And it quickly turned out that Nordens didn't waste anything in words, either.
"We'll be exploring a new territory of science, concerning the mind and how it functions. We are looking for a particular type of subject to help in these researches, and the first part of the program will consist of further testing and selection before we move on to the program itself. For obvious reasons I can't go into details at this stage. But I can say that those of you who remain can expect to acquire skills and abilities that you never thought possible. The rest of today is available for you to relax and settle in. We begin work tomorrow morning, at eight-thirty sharp. The schedule will be posted. Thank you." He sat down.
The official designation of the project they were now part of, the men learned, would be "Southside."
 
seventeen
The house had been subdivided into several family units, so space was limited. Bruce cleared away some junk and boxes in a small room that would eventually be Alice's and set up a folding bed there for Rita, while Jarrow made do with a couple of blankets on the living-room couch. It was comfortable enough, but he slept fitfully, unable to disengage his mind from continual replays of the things that had happened since his awakening in Atlanta. It didn't seem possible for it to have been only two days. What amazed him most was the uncanny way in which he knew just where the men who had come for him at Rita's would be and how they would react. It was almost as if he himself were one of them, and had known how people who did that kind of work would think. But he was unable to summon up any glimpse of a wider framework of associations, of which such knowledge would surely be a part.
The next morning Rita called Eric again while Sandy was scrambling eggs for breakfast. He had talked to Margaret the night before, who had sounded shaken but was otherwise all right. She had arrived home to find the street full of police, who had been called by the neighbors, taking statements everywhere. There was no sign by then of the men who had caused the disturbance. Whether that meant that they hadn't been from one of the law-enforcement agencies, or had, and were simply covering their tracks after a botched job, there was no way of telling. Eric had just called Margaret again that morning. The police had been keeping an eye on the street and there had been no further incidents. Apart from having the clearing up to do and some repairs to arrange with the landlord, Margaret was okay. Rita said she appreciated his help, promised to -explain it all one day, and hung up before he could start pressing her with questions.
There was really nothing new to be said over breakfast. Rita and Jarrow must have been followed from the airport; it was obviously Jarrow that these people were interested in, since he was the one that all the strange things had been happening to; neither he nor Rita had any better notion than they'd had last night of what to do now. They couldn't go back to the apartment now, Rita said. It would be -exactly what the police would be waiting for, and once they got involved with them there'd be no end to it.
Sandy wanted to know why the police wouldn't be the best people to get involved with. If guys were breaking down doors and coming after her, that would be the first place she'd go. That was what police were for. Rita -explained about the Maurice Gordon mystery, and the guns and other questionable items that Jarrow had been carrying in -Atlanta—which she knew all about, since they'd been there when Jarrow was Tony and she was with him, the night before he woke up as Jarrow. Who knew what Gordon had been mixed up in?
"True," Sandy agreed.
And even more to the point, Jarrow reminded them, as far as the rest of the world seemed to be concerned, he was Tony Demiro. But Demiro was supposed to be dead. The official Army records said so. So something very strange and distinctly malodorous had been going on involving official departments.
"Do the police talk to the Army?" Sandy asked.
"They all talk to everybody," Rita said. "They've all got lines into each other's computers. Anything that carries what's called a general public service code can be fished out anywhere. That includes a summary listing of most routine police reports."
Bruce glanced at the clock. "Well," he announced, "it doesn't seem as if we're any nearer to settling anything. I have to go and see a guy in fifteen minutes about some part-time help that might bring in a few bucks."
"Oh, right. I'd forgotten about that," Sandy said. "We could sure use it."
"I should be back in under an hour."
"You go ahead," Jarrow told him. "Don't let us keep you. As you say, we aren't really any closer to settling anything."
Bruce got up and went to put on his coat. Just then the phone rang. "Ten to one it's Eric," he muttered. It was what they expected. Naturally, after Eric got the story from Margaret, he would be calling around, trying to find out where Rita had contacted him from.
"I'll get it," Sandy said, crossing the room. She picked up the receiver. "Hello? . . . Oh, Eric, hi. What's up? . . . No, why? . . . she did? . . . You're kidding! . . . Oh, my God, is she all right? . . ." The gist of the conversation was clear from Sandy's responses. Had she seen or heard anything of Rita? Rita had called Eric last night and again just now, but wouldn't say from where. Eric then went on to relate the story, which Sandy of course had to listen through to be credible. She ended by assuring Eric that she'd let him know if they heard anything.
"The things I do for friends," Sandy sighed after she'd hung up.
"I won't forget it," Rita promised.
Bruce finished putting on his coat. "Anything you two need while I'm out?" he asked Rita and Jarrow. "I guess it would probably be better if you stayed inside."
"I could use some cigarettes," Rita replied. The few that Bruce had found hadn't lasted the previous evening.
"How about a paper?" Jarrow said. "There might be something about last night."
"I'll see to it," Sandy told them. "I've got to go out myself in a few minutes anyhow—do a few things and take the Wretch out for some air."
"Okay, take care." Bruce kissed her lightly and turned to the door. "See you later." He left, and they heard the front door close o