Everywhere shelves were bare, closets were ajar, boxes and cases stood with lids raised. This room had a south aspect and the sun shone through large open windows. The smell of the city blew in on a warm breeze.
Willing to play along he peeled off his shirt and hung it on the nearest chair. “I do what?” he inquired.
“As I tell you. Mostly help with the heavier junk. Oh, plus one other thing. Talk about yourself while we’re at it.”
He reached for his shirt and made to put it back on.
“Point,” she said with an exaggerated sigh, “taken. So just help.”
Two sweaty hours later the job was finished and he knew a little about her which he hadn’t previously guessed. This was the latest of perhaps five, perhaps six, annual demolitions of what was threatening to turn from a present into a past, with all that that implied: a fettering, hampering tail of concern for objects at the expense of memories. Desultorily they chatted as they worked; mostly he asked whether this was to be kept, and she answered yes or no, and from her pattern of choice he was able to paradigm her personality—and was more than a little frightened when he was through.
This girl wasn’t at Tarnover. This girl is six years younger than I am, and yet …
The thought stopped there. To continue would have been like holding his finger in a flame to discover how it felt to be burned alive.
“After which we paint walls,” she said, slapping her hands together in satisfaction. “Though maybe you’d like a beer before we shift modes. I make real beer and there are six bottles in to chill.”
“Real beer?” Maintaining Sandy Locke’s image at all costs, he made his tone ironical.
“A plastic person like you probably doesn’t believe it exists,” she said, and headed for the kitchen before he could devise a comeback.
When she returned with two foam-capped mugs, he had some sort of remark ready, anyway. Pointing at the hieroglyphs, he said, “It’s a shame to paint these over. They’re very good.”
“I’ve had them up since January,” was her curt reply. “They’ve furnished my mind, and that’s what counts. When you’ve drunk that, grab a paint-spray.”
He had arrived at around five p.m. A quarter of ten saw them in a freshly whitened framework, cleansed of what Kate no longer felt to be necessary, cleared of what the city scrap-and-garbage team would remove from the stoop come Monday morning and duly mark credit in respect of. There was a sense of space. They sat in the spacefulness eating omelets and drinking the last of the real beer, which was good. Through the archway to the kitchen they could see and hear Bagheera gnawing a beefbone with old blunt teeth, uttering an occasional rrrr of contentment.
“And now,” Kate said, laying aside her empty plate, “for the explanations.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a virtual stranger. Yet you’ve spent five hours helping me shift furniture and fill garbage cans and redecorate the walls. What do you want? To plug into me by way of payment?”
He sat unspeaking and immobilized.
“If that were it …” She was gazing at him with a thoughtful air. “I don’t think I’d say no. You’d be good at it, no doubt about that. But it isn’t why you came.”
Silence filled the brightly whitened room, dense as the feathers in a pillow.
“I think,” she said eventually, “you must have come to calibrate me. Well, did you get me all weighed and measured?”
“No,” he said gruffly, and rose and left.
INTERIM REPORT
“Bureau of Data Processing, good afternoon!”
“The Deputy Director, please. Mr. Hartz is expecting my call. … Mr. Hartz, I thought you should know that I’m approaching a crisis point, and if you care to come back and—
“Oh. I see. What a pity. Then I’d better just arrange for my tapes to be copied to your office.
“Yes, naturally. By a most-secure circuit.”
IMPERMEABLE
It was a nervous day, very nervous. Today they were boarding him: not just Rico and Dolores and Vivienne and the others he had met but also august remote personages from the intercontinental level. Perhaps he should not have shown a positive reaction when Ina mentioned the corp’s willingness to semiperm him, hinted that eventually they might give him tenure.
Stability, for a while at any rate, was tempting. He had no other plans formulated, and out of this context he intended to move when he chose, not by order of some counterpart to Shad Fluckner. Yet a sense of risk grew momently more agonizing in his mind. To be focused on by people of such power and influence—what could be more dangerous? Were there not at Tarnover people charged with tracking down and dragging back in chains Nickie Haflinger on whom the government had lavished thirty millions’ worth of special training, teaching, conditioning? (By now perhaps there were other fugitives. He dared not try to link up with them. If only …!)
Still, facing the interview was the least of countless evils. He was preening prior to departure, determined to perfect his conformist image to the last hair on his head, when the buzzer called him to the veephone.
The face showing on the screen belonged to Dolores van Bright, with whom he had got on well during his stay here.
“Hi, Sandy!” was her cordial greeting. “Just called to wish you luck when you meet the board. We prize you around here, you know. Think you deserve a long-term post.”
“Well, thanks,” he answered, hoping the camera wouldn’t catch the gleam of sweat he felt pearling on his skin.
“And I can strew your path with a rose or so.”
“Hm?” Instantly, all his reflexes triggered into fight-or-flight mode.
“I guess I shouldn’t, but … Well, for better or worse. Vivienne dropped a hint, and I checked up, and there’s to be an extra member on the selection board. You know Viv thinks you’ve been overlooked as kind of a major national resource? So some federal twitch is slated to join us. Don’t know who, but I believe he’s based at Tarnover. Feel honored?”
How he managed to conclude the conversation, he didn’t know. But he did, and the phone was dead, and he was …
On the floor?
He fought himself, and failed to win; he lay sprawled, his legs apart, his mouth dry, his skull ringing like a bell that tolls nine tailors, his guts churning, his fingers clenched and his toes attempting to imitate them. The room swam, the world floated off its mooring, everything everything dissolved into mist and he was aware of one sole fact:
Got to get up and go.
Weak-limbed, sour-bellied, half-blind with terror he could no longer resist, he stumbled out of his apartment (Mine? No! Their apartment!) and headed for his rendezvous in hell.
THE CONVICTION OF HIS COURAGE
After pressing the appropriate switches Freeman waited patiently for his subject to revert from regressed to present-time mode. Eventually he said, “It seems that experience remains peculiarly painful. We shall have to work through it again tomorrow.”
The answer came in a weak voice, but strong enough to convey venomous hatred. “You devil! Who gave you the right to torture me like this?”
“You did.”
“So I committed what you call a crime! But I was never put on trial, never convicted!”
“You’re not entitled to a trial.”
“Anybody’s entitled to a trial, damn you!”