Derek felt trapped. He had been accessing increasingly recent memories, more and more painful to face. He wasn’t sure he could go through the final two years’ worth of total recall.
He would be gambling the pain of recent memories against Dr. Bettide’s hypothetical “breakthrough”… when all the storage in his mind would supposedly be his again, reachable at will.
Reliving that episode with the kids at the improv—and then his first purchase of Time-Jizz from dealer Barney—had driven him away from the drug for a few days. He had walked around in a depressed haze, getting stoned on older, less terrifying highs.
He hung around a few theaters, milking a few tourists who recognized him. He ignored their whispers to each other after he finished signing autographs.
Finally, he found himself at the office of Frank Furtess, his old agent. Old Frankfurter had looked genuinely surprised to see him. Then Derek remembered. He had fired Furtess more than a year ago, using nearly every piece of invective in the book.
Derek realized that he had adopted a frame of reference twenty months old, and momentarily forgotten the incident! By then he had already shaken the agent’s hand; he had to play the scene to its end.
The meeting was chilly. Furtess promised to look into a few possibilities. Derek left his landlady’s phone number, but he figured the man would throw it away the moment he left.
Now, to come home and find all these bills, and royalties so scant these days…
It was late afternoon, and once again the ripped windowshade cast the legs of a runner on the wall. The jogger’s slow, mute progress was a tale of perseverance.
Derek plucked up the ampule and moved over to the mattress on the dusty floor. He broke the seal and held the needle to his arm… He…
…mixed the powder carefully in his Fifth Avenue apartment. In the light from the lavalamp he poured the mixture into a glass and drank it, as Barney had told him to do.
He sat back in the relaxing hum of his vibrochair and avoided dunking about how he was going to keep up the rent on this expensive flat. Instead, he tried to focus on some event in his childhood. Almost anything would do for a test of the new drug.
Ah, he thought. Model-making with Douglas Kee, the gardener’s boy! We did have fun, didn’t we? We were pals. What age was I then, ten years old?
He closed his eyes as a pleasant numbness washed over him. He thought about glue, and plastic, and little sticky decals…
…and found himself laughing!
The laughter was high and clear. It startled him, but he couldn’t stop! He was no longer in control of his body. Someone else was in command.
In a sudden flow of visual images, he saw that he was no longer in his apartment. Sunlight streamed in to fall on a cracked linoleum floor. Dust gathered in clumps under worn furniture and stacks of old newspapers. In one corner of the room a calico kitten played with a ball of string. Through a half-opened door came a steady breeze of sunwarmed fresh air.
But he caught all of this out of a corner of his field of vision. At the moment he could not make his eyes shift from a pile of plastic odds and ends on the floor in front of him. He caught a glimpse of his own hands and was momentarily shaken by how small they were. They moved nimbly among the plastic bits, fitting them together experimentally.
“Maybe we could glue that extra piece of the ol’ Cutty Sark onto here and make a radar antenna out of it!”
Derek’s gaze shifted to his left. Next to him was a small boy with Oriental features.
And yet he didn’t look so very small right now. In fact the boy was larger than himself!
Once again Derek found himself laughing, high and uninhibited. “Sure, stick a mast of a sailing ship on an intergalactic warp vessel. Why not?”
The voice was unmistakably his own. He felt his own mouth and larynx form the words. But it was a smaller voice, and a younger, more intense volition that shaped it. The adult part of himself began to understand.
I’m back to when I was ten. It worked. The drug worked!
Now he was getting more than physical sensations. The thoughts of that happy ten-year-old come rushing in, threatening to wash all sense of adulthood aside.
He tried to make the flow two-way… to communicate with the boy. But it was hopeless. The child was only a memory, playing back now in vivid detail. It could not be changed.
Gradually, all awareness of being anything but the boy fell away, as he learned to let go and just observe.
“Hey! Hey! I got it!” Derek-the-child shouted. “Let’s put a glob of glue over this guy’s head and call it a space helmet!”
“Naw. That’s a Civil War Union guy. What’d he be doing with a space helmet?”
“Well, with the glue on his head who could tell?” Derek giggled. “And he wouldn’t care. Not with a ton of glue to sniff!”
The boys laughed together. Derek laughed along.
“I want to go back to the old drug, now. I want to slow down again.”
Dr. Bettide jotted a comment in his little black notebook.
“Have you finished reviewing your memories up to the present?”
“No. I don’t want to do that now.”
“Why? I thought your objective was to make available, once more, the memories of childhood.”
Derek grinned. “I’ve done that!”
Bettide frowned. “I’m not certain I understand.”
“It’s simple, really. I’ve finally started reliving the point, eighteen months ago, when I first started taking the drug.”
“Yes? And?”
“And now I’m recalling perfect memories of recalling perfect memories of childhood!”
Bettide stared at him, blinking first in confusion, then in growing amazement. Derek relished it.
I must be the first, he realized. The first ever to have done this. Why, that makes me some kind of explorer, doesn’t it? An explorer of inner space?
“But Derek, you’ll also be reliving some of the worst times of your life—the eviction, for instance, and the lawsuits.”
Derek shrugged. “Most of that time I was in a Time-Jizz stupor. And it felt like I was in the past six to ten hours for every hour in the present. It was worth it then, it’ll be worth it again.”
Bettide frowned. “I must think on this, Derek. There may be unforeseen consequences. I’d like to have you come out to the institute for some tests…”
Derek shook his head. “Uh-uh. You can’t force me. I’m grateful, Doctor. Accidentally you’ve given me the key. But if you stop helping me, I’ll go to the Black Chemists.”
“Derek…”
“You think about it, Doc.” Derek got up, knowing he had the advantage. Obviously, the physician wanted to keep him in sight, to observe this new twist.
“I’ll come back in a week, Doctor Bettide. If you have refills ready for me, I’ll tell you all about it.” He couldn’t help letting a little Vincent Price slip into his voice. “Otherwise…”
Involuntarily Bettide shivered. Derek laughed and swept out of the office.
“Darling, don’t go in the water! You’ll get your cast wet!”
“Aw, Mom!”
“I mean it!”
Derek shrugged and kicked a stone along the sandy lake shore. He savored the feeling of being unjustly persecuted, though at the root of it he knew his mother was right. This way, though, he could nurse just a little more mileage out of his broken arm.
Actually, it had been frightening when it happened. He had fractured it waterskiing early in the summer. But now it seemed like the best thing that ever happened to him. All the girls whose families were summering by the lake competed to fuss over him.