“That is absolutely true. But you see you are not anybody. You are nobody. And you chose to be so of your own free will. Legally—officially—you simply don’t exist.”
BOOK 2
THE DELPHI CORACLE
SHALLOW MAN IN ALL HIS GORY WAS NOT DISMAYED BY ONE OF THESE
Take no thought for the morrow; that’s your privilege. But don’t complain if when it gets here you’re off guard.
ARARAT
With a distant … Too weak a word. With a remote part of his mind he was able to observe himself doing all the wrong things: heading in a direction he hadn’t chosen, and running when he should and could have used his company electric car, in sum making a complete fool of himself.
In principle he had made the correct decisions. He would turn up for his appointment with the interview board, he would outface the visitor from Tarnover, he would win the argument because you don’t, simply don’t, haul into custody someone who is being offered permanent employment by a corporation as powerful as G2S. Not without generating a continental stink. And if there’s one thing they’re afraid of at Tarnover, it’s having the media penetrate their guise of feigned subimportance.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. His were fine. They simply had no effect on his behavior.
“Yes, who is it?” In a curt voice from the speaker under the veephone camera. And then, almost in the same breath, “Sandy! Hey, you look sick, and I don’t mean that as a compliment! Come right on up!”
Sound of antithief locks clicking to neutral.
Sick?
He pondered the word with that strange detached portion of his awareness which was somehow isolated from his body at present, yet continued to function as though it were hung under a balloon trailed behind this fleshly carcass now ascending stairs not by legs alone but by arms clutching at the banister to stop from falling over. Legs race combines with arms race to make brain race and his brain was definitely racing. An invisible tight band had clamped on his head at the level of his temples. Pain made him giddy. He was double-focusing. When the door of Kate’s apt opened he saw two of it, two of her in a shabby red wrap-around robe and brown sandals … but that wasn’t so bad, because her face was eloquent of sympathy and worry and a double dose of that right now was to be welcomed. He was sweating rivers and imagined that he could have heard his feet squelching in his shoes but for the drumming of his heart, which also drowned out the question she shot at him.
Repeated louder, “I said, what the hell have you taken?”
He hunted down his voice, an elusive rasp in the caverns of a throat which had dried like a creek bed in a bad summer all the way to his aching lungs.
“No-uh-thing!”
“My God. In that case have you ever got it strong. Come quickly and he down.”
As swiftly and unreally as in a dream, with as much detachment as though he were viewing these events through the incurious eyes of old Bagheera, he witnessed himself being half-led, half-carried to a couch with a tan cover. In the Early Pleistocene he had sat on it to eat omelets and drink beer. It was a lovely sunny morning. He let his lids fall to exclude it, concentrated on making the best use of the air, which was tinted with a faint lemony fragrance.
She drew drapes against the sun by touching a button, then came in twilight to sit by him and hold his hand. Her fingers sought his pulse as expertly as a trained nurse.
“I knew you were straining too hard,” she said. “I still can’t figure out why—but get the worst of it over and then you can tell me about it. If you like.”
Time passed. The slam of his heart lessened. The sweat streaming from his pores turned from hot to cool, made his smart clothing clammy. He began to shiver and then, with no warning, found he was sobbing. Not weeping—his eyes were dry—but sobbing in huge gusting gasps, as though he were being cruelly and repeatedly punched in the belly by a fist that wasn’t there.
At some stage she brought a thick woolen blanket, winterweight, and laid it on him. It had been years since he felt the rough bulk of such a fabric—now, one slept on a pressure bed, insulated by a directed layer of air. It evoked thousands of inchoate childhood memories. His hands clamped like talons to draw it over his head and his knees doubled into the fetal posture and he rolled on his side and miraculously was asleep.
When he awoke he felt curiously relaxed. He felt purged. In the … How long? He checked his watch. In the at-most hour since he dozed off, something more than calm had occupied his mind.
He formed a word silently and liked its taste.
Peace.
But—!
He sat up with a jerk. There was no peace—must be none—could be none! It was the wrong world for peace. At the G2S HQ someone from Tarnover must now be adding—correction, must already have added—two plus two. This person Sandy Locke “overlooked as kind of a national resource” might have been identified as the lost Nickie Haflinger!
He threw aside the blanket and stood up, belatedly realizing that Kate was nowhere to be seen and perhaps Bagheera had been left on guard and …
But his complicated thought dissolved under a wave of dizziness. Before he had taken as much as one pace away from the couch, he’d had to lean an outstretched hand against the wall.
Upon which came Kate’s voice from the kitchen.
“Good timing, Sandy. Or whatever your real name is. I just fixed some broth for you. Here.”
It approached him in a steaming cup, which he accepted carefully by the less-hot handle. But he didn’t look at it. He looked at her. She had changed into a blue and yellow summer shirt and knee-long cultoons also of yellow with the blue repeated in big Chinese ideograms across the seat. And he heard himself say, “What was that about my name?”
Thinking at the same time: I was right. There is no room for peace in this modern world. It’s illusory. One minute passes, and it’s shattered.
“You were babbling in your sleep,” she said, sitting down on a patched old chair which he had expected her to throw out yet perversely had been retained. “Oh, please stop twitching your eyes like that! If you’re wondering what’s become of Bagheera, I took him downstairs; the girls said they’d look after him for a while. And if you’re trying to spot a way of escape, it’s too soon. Sit down and drink that broth.”
Of the alternatives open, the idea of obeying seemed the most constructive. The instant he raised the cup he realized he was ravenous. His blood-sugar level must be terribly debased. Also he was still cold. The warmth of the savory liquid was grateful to him.
At long last he was able to frame a one-word question.
“Babbling …?”
“I exaggerate. A lot of it made sense. That was why I told G2S you weren’t here.”
“What?” He almost let go of the cup.
“Don’t tell me I did the wrong thing. Because I didn’t. Ina got them to call me when you didn’t show for your interview. I said no, of course I haven’t seen him. He doesn’t even like me, I told them. Ina would believe that. She’s never realized that men can like me, because I’m all the things she didn’t want her daughter to be, such as studious and intelligent and mainly plain. She never dug deeper into any man’s personality than the level she dealt with you on: looks good, sounds good, feels good and I can use him.” She gave a harsh laugh, not quite over the brink of bitterness.
He disregarded that comment. “What did I—uh—let slip?” he demanded. And trembled a little as he awaited the answer.
She hesitated. “First off … Well, I kind of got the impression you never overloaded before. Can that be true?”