WAIT

Willy K ceased, rotated his supporting mechanism inquiringly.

THE DOCTOR HAS LEARNED SOMETHING MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY CHEMICAL FORMULA

‘What is it?’ Eric asked her.’

IN YOUR UNIVERSE WE ARE YOUR ENEMY BUT HERE YOU HAVE SEEN TERRANS AND OURSELVES LIVE TOGETHER. YOU KNOW THAT WAR AGAINST US IS UNNECESSARY. AND WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT, SO DOES YOUR LEADER.

That was so. No wonder Molinari had no heart for the war; it was not merely a suspicion on his part that this was the wrong war with the wrong enemy and the wrong ally; it was a fact which he had experienced for himself, perhaps many times. And all due to JJ-180.

But not only that. There was something more, something so ominous that he wondered why the inhibition barriers of his mind had permitted the thought to rise from his unconscious. JJ-180 had reached Lilistar – and in quantity. ‘Starmen had certainly been experimenting with it. So they, too, knew the alternate possibility, knew that Terra’s better hope lay in cooperation with the reegs. Had witnessed it for themselves.

In both branches of possibility Lilistar had lost the war. With or without Terra on her side. Or—

Was there a third alternative, one in which Lilistar and the reegs joined against Terra?

‘A pact between Lilistar and the reegs is unlikely,’ Willy K said. They have been antagonists for too many years. I feel that it is only your planet, on which we now stand, that hangs in the balance; Lilistar will be defeated by the reeg power in any eventuality.’

‘But that means,’ Eric said, ‘that the ‘Starmen have nothing to lose; if they know they can’t win—’ He could imagine Freneksy’s reaction to this information. The nihilism, the destructive violence of the ‘Starmen, would be inconceivable.

‘True,’ Willy K agreed. ‘So your Secretary is wise to walk softly. Now perhaps you can comprehend why his illness pattern must be so vast, why he must push himself actually over the brink, into repeated death, to serve his people. And why he would hesitate to provide you with the antidote to JJ-180; if ‘Star intelligence agents – and your wife may be one – learned that he possessed it, they might—’ Willy K was silent. ‘It is hard, as you yourself might observe, to predict the behavior of psychotics. But this much is clear: they would not ignore the situation.’

‘They’d find a way to get it away from him,’ Eric said.

‘You’ve missed the point. Their attitude would be punitive; they would know that Molinari possesses too much power, that by having unhindered use of JJ-180, without the possibility of addiction, of neural deterioration, he can’t be controlled by them. This is why, on a deep, psychosomatic basis, Molinari can defy Minister Freneksy. He is not entirely helpless.’

‘This is all over my head,’ Taubman said. ‘Excuse me.’ He walked off.

The reeg receptionist remained.

URGE YOUR SECRETARY TO CONTACT THE REEG AUTHORITY. WE WOULD ASSIST IN PROTECTING TERRA FROM STAR VENGEANCE, I AM SURE.

It was, Eric thought, a rather wistful message which the multi-armed creature had flashed at him with her translation box. The reegs might want to assist, but ‘Starmen were already on Terra, holding key positions. At the first hint that Terra was negotiating with the reegs the ‘Starmen would move in prearranged order; they would seize the planet overnight.

A tiny Terran-controlled state might function for a limited time in the Cheyenne vicinity, shelled and bombed day and night by the ‘Starmen. But then it, too, would capitulate. Its shield of Jupiter-obtained rexeroid compounds would not protect it forever – and Molinari knew that. Terra would become a conquered state, supplying war materiel and slave labor to Lilistar. And the war would go on.

And the irony was this: as a slave planet Terra would be able to contribute more to the war effort than she did now as a quasi-independent entity. And no one recognized this more than did the Mole. Hence his entire foreign policy; this explained everything that he did.

‘By the way,’ Willy K said, and there was a trace of amusement in his voice. ‘Your former employer, Virgil Ackerman, is still alive; he still governs Tijuana Fur & Dye. He is two hundred and thirty years old and retains twenty org-trans surgeons within call. I believe I have read that he has gone through four matched sets of kidneys, five livers, spleens, and undetermined numbers of hearts—’

‘I feel sick,’ Eric said, and rocked back and forth.

The drug is wearing off.’ Willy K floated toward a chair. ‘Miss Ceeg, assist him, please!’

‘I’m okay,’ Eric said thickly. His head ached and nausea staggered him. All the lines, the surfaces around him, had become astigmatic; under him the chair felt unreal and then, abruptly, he fell, lay on his side.

‘The transition is difficult,’ Willy K said. ‘Apparently we can’t help him, Miss Ceeg. Good luck to your Secretary, doctor. I can appreciate what a great service he performed for your people. Perhaps I will write a letter to the New York Times, conveying this knowledge.’

A prism of primal colors tapped at Eric like an illuminated wind; it was, he thought, the wind of life blowing over him, sweeping him where it desired without regard for his small wishes. And then the winds became black; they were no longer the winds of life but the opaque smoke of death.

He saw, projected as a pseudo environment around him, a travesty of his injured nervous system; the multitudes of conduits were visibly corrupted, had turned inky as the drug’s damage spread throughout him and established its grim self. A voiceless bird, some carrion eater of the storm, sat on his chest, croaking in the silence left behind as the winds receded from him. The bird remained and he felt its dunglike claws penetrate his lungs, his chest cavity, and then his abdominal cavity. Nothing within him remained untouched; it had all been disfigured and even the antidote had not stopped this. As long as he lived he would never regain the purity of the original organism.

This was the price exacted from him by the deciding forces.

Dragging himself to a crouched position, he saw that he inhabited an empty waiting room. No one had seen him and he was free to get up and go. He rose to his feet, steadied himself by means of a chrome and leather chair.

The magazines, in the nearby rack, were in English. And on their covers, laughing Terrans. Not reegs.

‘Did you want something?’ A male voice, lisping slightly. A Hazeltine employee wearing florid, fashionable robes.

‘No,’ Eric said. This was his own time; he recognized the trappings of 2055. Thanks just the same.’

A moment later he had made his way painfully outdoors in the direction of the sidewalk, down the path of redwood-rounds.

What he wanted was a cab, a place to sit down and rest. As he made his trip back to Cheyenne. He had gotten what he wanted; presumably he was no longer an addict and if he cared to he could also free his wife. And in addition he had viewed a world over which the shadow of Lilistar did not obtain.

‘Ferry you somewhere, sir?’ An autonomic cab drifted toward him.

‘Yes,’ he said, and walked toward it.

Suppose an entire planet took the drug, he thought as he boarded. A mass fugue away from our dismal, ever narrowing world of reality. Suppose Tijuana Fur & Dye gave the order to produce it in enormous quantity, distributed it, through the government’s help, to everyone. Would that be a moral solution? Are we entitled to that?

Anyhow it couldn’t be done. The ‘Starmen would move in first.

‘Where to sir?’ the cab’s circuit inquired.

He decided to use it for the entire trip; it would take only a few minutes longer. To Cheyenne.’

‘I can’t, sir. Not there.’ It sounded nervous. ‘Request another—’

‘Why not?’ He came awake instantly.

‘Because as is well known all Cheyenne belongs to them. To the enemy.’ It added, ‘And traffic into enemy areas is illegal, as you know.’

‘What enemy?’

‘The traitor Gino Molinari,’ the cab answered. ‘Who sought to betray the war effort; you know, sir. The former UN Secretary who conspired with reeg agents to—’

‘What is the date?’ Eric demanded.

‘June 15, 2056.’

He had – possibly through the action of the antidote – failed to make it to his own time; it was one year later and there was nothing he could do about it. And he had saved no more of the drug; the rest had been given to Kathy at the Airfield, and so he was stuck here in what obviously was ‘Star-dominated territory. Like most of Terra.

And yet Gino Molinari was alive! He still hung on; Cheyenne had not fallen in a day or a week – perhaps the reegs had been able to bring in reinforcements to assist the Secret Service.

He could find out from the cab. As they flew along.

And Don Festenburg could have told me this, he realized, because this is precisely the time period at which I encountered him there in his office with the phony homeopape and mock-up UN Secretary uniform.

‘Just head west,’ he told the cab. I’ve got to get back to Cheyenne, he realized. Somehow, by some route.

‘Yes sir,’ the cab said. ‘And by the way, sir, you failed to show me your travel permit. May I see it now? Just a formality, of course.’

‘What travel permit?’ But he knew; it would be an issue of the governing ‘Star occupation agency, and without their permission Terrans could not come and go. This was a conquered planet and very much still at war.

‘Please, sir,’ the cab said. It had begun to descend once more. ‘Otherwise I am required to carry you to the nearest ‘Star military police barracks; that is one mile east. A short trip from here.’

‘I’ll bet it is,’ Eric agreed. ‘From any point, not just from here. I’ll bet they’re all over.’

The cab dropped lower and lower. ‘Right you are, sir. They’re very convenient.’ It clicked off its engine and coasted.

TWELVE ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Eric said as the cab’s wheels touched the ground; it slid to a gradual halt at the curb and he saw, just ahead, an ominous structure with armed guards at the entrance. The guards wore the gray of Lilistar. ‘I’ll make a deal with you.’

‘What deal?’ the cab said, with suspicion.

‘My travel permit is back at Hazeltine Corporation – remember, where you picked me up? Along with my wallet. All my money’s there, too. If you turn me over to the ‘Star military police my money won’t be worth anything to me; you know what they’ll do.’

‘Yes sir,’ the cab agreed. ‘You’ll be put to death. It’s the new law, passed by decree on the tenth of May. Unauthorized travel by—’

‘So why not give my money to you? As a tip. You take me back to Hazeltine Corporation, I’ll pick up my wallet, I’ll show you my travel permit so you won’t have to bring me here again. And you can have the money. You can see how I’d benefit by the deal and how you would too.’

‘We’d both gain,’ the cab agreed. Its autonomic circuit clicked .rapidly as it calculated. ‘How much money do you have, sir?’

‘I’m a courier for Hazeltine. In my wallet there’s about twenty-five thousand dollars.’

‘I see! In occupation scrip or in pre-ocupation UN banknotes?’

‘The latter of course.’

‘I’ll comply!’ the cab decided eagerly. And took off once more. ‘In strict sense you can’t be said to have traveled, inasmuch as the destination you gave me is enemy territory and hence I did not turn even for a moment in that direction. No law has been broken.’ It turned in the direction of Detroit, greedy for its loot.

When it set down at the parking lot of Hazeltine Corporation Eric got out hurriedly. ‘I’ll be right back.’ He loped across the pavement toward a doorway of the building; a moment later he was inside. An immense testing lab lay extended before him.

When he found a Hazeltine employee he said, ‘My name is Eric Sweetscent; I’m on the personal staff of Virgil Ackerman and there’s been an accident. Will you get in touch with Mr Ackerman at TF&D for me, please?’

The employee, a male clerk, hesitated. ‘I understood—’ He lowered his voice fearfully. ‘Isn’t Mr Virgil Ackerman at Wash-35 on Mars? Mr Jonas Ackerman is in charge at Tijuana Fur & Dye now and I know Mr Virgil Ackerman is listed in the Weekly Security Bulletin as a war criminal because he fled when the occupation began.’

‘Can you contact Wash-35 for me?’

‘Enemy territory?’

‘Get me Jonas on the vidphone, then.’ There was not much else he could do. He followed the clerk into the business office, feeling futile.

Presently the call had been put through, Jonas’ features formed on the screen; when he saw Eric he blinked and stammered, ‘But – they got you, too?’ He blurted, ‘Why’d you leave Wash-35? My God, you were safe there with Virgil. I’m ringing off; this is some kind of a trap – the MPs will—’ The screen died. Jonas had hurriedly cut the circuit.

So his other self, his normally phased, one-year-later self, had made it to Wash-35 with Virgil; that was terribly reassuring – almost unthinkably so. No doubt the reegs had managed to—

His one-year-later self.

That meant that somehow he had gotten back to 2055. Otherwise there couldn’t be a self of 2056 to have fled with Virgil. And the only way he could reach 2055 would be by means of JJ-180.

And the only source of the drug was here. He was standing in the one right spot on the entire planet, by accident, due to the trick he had managed to pull off at the expense of the idiotic autonomic cab.

Relocating the clerk, Eric said, ‘I’m supposed to requisition a supply of the drug Frohedadrine. One hundred milligrams. And I’m in a hurry. You want to see my identification? I can prove I work for TF&D.’ And then it came to him. ‘Call Bert Hazeltine; he’ll identify me.’ Undoubtedly Hazeltine would remember him from the encounter at Cheyenne.

The clerk muttered, ‘But they shot Mr Hazeltine. You must remember that; how come you don’t? When they took over this place in January.’

The expression on Eric’s face must have conveyed his shock. Because all at once the clerk’s manner changed.

‘You were a friend of his, I guess,’ the clerk said.

‘Yes.’ Eric nodded; that could be said.

‘Bert was a good man to work for. Nothing like these ‘Star bastards.’ The clerk made up his mind. ‘I don’t know why you’re here or what’s wrong with you but I’ll get the hundred milligrams of JJ-180: I know where it’s kept.’

‘Thanks.’

The clerk hurried off. Time passed. Eric wondered about the cab; was it still waiting outside on the lot? Would it, if pressed too hard, attempt to come into the building after him? An absurd and yet nerve-wracking thought, the autonomic cab forcing its way into Hazeltine, bursting – or trying to burst – through the cement wall.

The clerk returned and held out a handful of capsules to Eric.

From a nearby water cooler Eric got a cup, filled it, mouthed a capsule, and raised the Dixie cup.

‘That’s the recently altered JJ-180 formula,’ the clerk said, watching him keenly. ‘I better tell you, now that I see it’s for yourself.’ He was all at once pale.

Lowering the cup of water, Eric said, ‘Altered how?’

‘Retains the addictive and liver-toxic properties but the time-freeing hallucinations are gone.’ The clerk explained, ‘When the ‘Starmen came in here they ordered our chemists to reconstruct the drug; it was their idea, not ours.’

‘Why?’ In the name of God, what good was a drug consisting of nothing but addictive and toxic properties?

‘For a weapon of war against the reegs. And—’ The clerk hesitated. ‘Also it’s used to addict rebel Terrans who’ve gone over to the enemy.’ He did not look very happy about that part of it.

Tossing the capsules of JJ-180 onto a nearby lab bench, Eric said, ‘I give up.’ And then he had one more – meagre – idea. ‘If I can get approval from Jonas will you supply me a company ship? I’ll call him again; Jonas is an old friend of mine.’ He walked toward the vidphone, the clerk trailing after him. If he could get Jonas to listen—

Two Lilistar MPs entered the lab; behind them, in the parking lot, Eric saw a ‘Star patrol ship parked beside his autonomic cab.

‘You are under arrest,’ one of the MPs said to him, pointing an oddly shaped stick in Eric’s direction. ‘For travel without authorization and felony fraud. Your cab got tired of waiting and called in a complaint.’

‘What fraud?’ Eric said. The clerk now had wisely vanished. ‘I’m a staff member of Tijuana Fur & Dye; I’m here on business.’

The oddly shaped stick glowed and Eric felt as if his brain had been touched; without hesitation he moved toward the lab door, his right hand pawing in a ticlike, useless gesture at his forehead. Okay, he thought. I’m coming. He had lost any idea of resisting the Lilistar MPs now, or even of arguing with them; he was glad to get into their patrol ship.

A moment later they had taken off; the ship glided above the rooftops of Detroit, heading toward the barracks two miles away.

‘Kill him now,’ one of the MPs said to his companion. ‘And drop his body out; why take him to the barracks?’

‘Hell, we can just push him out,’ the other MP said. ‘The fall will kill him.’ He touched a button at the control panel of the ship and a vertical hatch slipped open; Eric saw the buildings below, the streets and conapts of the city. Think happy thoughts,’ the MP said to Eric, ‘on the way down.’ Grabbing Eric by the arm, he slung him into a helpless, crippled posture and shoved him toward the hatch. It was all expert and entirely professional; he found himself teetering at the hatch and then the MP released him in order to escape falling himself.

From beneath the patrol ship a second ship, larger, pitted and scarred, an interplan military vessel with cannon bristling as spines, floated on its back as it ascended like some raptorial water creature. With care it fired a microbolt into the open hatch, picking off the MP who stood by Eric and then one of its larger cannon opened up and the front portion of the MP patrol ship burst and flew outward, spattering Eric and the remaining MP with molten debris.

The MP patrol ship dropped like a stone toward the city below.

Awakening from his stricken trance, the remaining MP ran to the wall of the ship and threw on the emergency manually-operated guidance system. The ship ceased to fall; it glided, wind-swept, in a spiral pattern until at last it crashed and bumped and skidded along a street, missing wheels and cabs, nosed into the curb, lifted its tail into the air and came to rest.

The remaining MP staggered up, grabbed his pistol, and somehow got to the hatch: he crouched sideways and began firing. After the third shot he snapped backward; his pistol dropped from his hand and skidded against the hull of the ship and he tumbled into a ball that rolled helplessly like an animal that had been run over until at last it collided with a portion of the hull. There it stopped, gradually unwinding into man shape once more.

The pitted, grimy military ship had parked on the street close by and now its forward side-hatch opened and a man hopped out. As Eric stepped from the MP patrol ship the man sprinted up to him.

‘Hey,’ the man panted. ‘It’s me.’

‘Who are you?’ Eric said; the man who had tackled the MP ship with his own was certainly familiar – Eric confronted a face which he had seen many times and yet it was distorted now, witnessed from a weird angle, as if inside out, pulled through infinity. The man’s hair was parted on the wrong side so that his head seemed lopsided, wrong in all its lines. What amazed him was the physical unattractiveness of the man. He was too fat and a little too old. Unpleasantly gray. It was a shock to see himself like this, without preparation; do I really look like that? he asked himself morosely. What had become of the clean-cut youth whose image he still, evidently, superimposed onto his shaving mirror each morning … who had substituted this man bordering on middle age?

‘So I’ve gotten fat; so what?’ his self of 2056 said. ‘Christ, I saved your life; they were going to pitch you out.’

‘I know that,’ Eric said irritably. He hurried along beside the man who was himself; they entered the interplan ship and his 2056 self at once slammed the hatch shut and sent the ship hurtling into the sky, out of reach of any possibility of containment by the Lilistar military police. This was obviously an advanced ship of the line; this was no barge.

‘Without intending to insult your intelligence,’ his 2056 self said, ‘which I personally consider very high, I’d like to review for your benefit a few of the moronic aspects of what you had in mind. First, if you had been able to obtain the original type of JJ-180 it would have carried you to the future, not back to 2055, and you would have been readdicted. What you need – and you seemed for a time to have worked this out – is not more JJ-180 but something to balance the effects of the antidote.’ His 2056 self nodded his head. ‘Over there in my coat.’ His coat hung by a magnetic spot on the wall of the ship. ‘Hazeltine has had a year to develop it. In exchange for your bringing them the formula for the antidote – you couldn’t get back to 2055. And you know you do. Or will, rather.’

‘Whose ship is this?’ It impressed him. It could pass freely through Lilistar lines, penetrate Terra’s defenses with ease.

‘It’s reeg. Made available to Virgil at Wash-35. In case something goes wrong. We’re going to bring Molinari to Wash-35 when Cheyenne falls, which it eventually will, probably in another month.’

‘How’s his health?’

‘Much better. He’s doing what he wants now, what he knows he should be doing. And there’s more… but you’ll find out. Go get the antidote to Lilistar’s antidote.’

Eric fumbled in the pockets of the coat, found the tablets, took them without benefit of water. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘what’s the story on Kathy? We ought to confer.’ It was good having someone he could talk to about his most wasting, obsessive problem, even if it was only himself; at least the illusion of collaboration was achieved.

‘Well, you got – will get – her off JJ-180. But not before she’s suffered major physical damage. She’ll never be pretty again, even with reconstructive surgery, which she’ll try several times before she gives up. There’s more but I’d rather not tell you; it’ll just make your difficulties worse. I’ll say only this. Have you ever heard of Korsakow’s syndrome?’

‘No,’ Eric said. But of course he had. It was his job.

‘Traditionally it’s a psychosis occurring in alcoholics; it consists of actual pathological destruction of cortical brain tissue due to long periods of intoxication. But it also can occur from the steady use of narcotic drugs.’

‘Are you saying that Kathy has it?’

‘Remember those periods when she wouldn’t eat for three days at a time? And her violent, destructive rages – and ideas of reference, that everyone was being mean to her. Korsakow’s syndrome, and not from JJ-180, but from all the drugs she took prior to that. The doctors at Cheyenne, while getting her ready to be returned to San Diego, ran an E E G on her and picked it up. They’ll tell you very soon after your return to 2055. So prepare yourself.’ He added, ‘It’s irreversible. Needless to say. Removal of the toxic agents is not enough.’

Both of them were silent then.

‘It’s rough,’ his 2056 self said finally, ‘to be married to a woman with psychotic traits. As well as showing her physical deterioration. She’s still my wife. Our wife. Under phenothiazine sedation she’s quiet, anyhow. You know, it’s interesting that I – we – didn’t pick it up, weren’t able to diagnose a case we’re living with day in, day out. A commentary on the blinding aspects of subjectivity and over-familiarity. It unfolded slowly, of course; that tended to conceal its identity. I think eventually she’ll have to be institutionalized, but I’m putting that off. Possibly until after the war’s won. Which it will be.’

‘You have proof? Through JJ-180?’

‘Nobody’s using JJ-180 any more except for Lilistar, and that as you know is only for the toxic and addictive properties. So many alternate futures have been disclosed that the task of relating them to our world had to be put aside for after the war. It takes literally years to test out a new drug thoroughly; we both know that. But of course we’ll win the war; the reegs have invested half of Lilistar’s Empire. Now listen to me. I have instructions for you and you must fulfill them; otherwise another alternate future will split off and it may cancel my stand with you against the ‘Star MPs.’

‘I understand,’ Eric said.

‘In Arizona, at POW Camp 29, there’s a reeg major from the reegian intelligence service. Del Dal Il is his code name; you can contact him through that, since it’s Terra’s code not theirs. The camp authorities have got him studying insurance claims filed against the government in order to detect frauds, if you can believe that. So he’s still busy at work piping data back to his superiors, even through our POW. It’s he who’ll be the link between Molinari and the reegs.’

‘What do I do with him? Take him to Cheyenne?’

‘To Tijuana. To TF&D’s central offices. You buy him from the camp authorities; it’s slave labor. You didn’t know that, did you, that large Terran industrial constellations could acquire free labor from the POW camps. Well, when you show up at Camp 29 and tell them you’re from TF&D and you want a clever reeg, they’ll understand.’

‘You learn something new every day of the week,’ Eric said.

‘But your main problem lies with Molinari. It’s up to you to persuade him to visit Tijuana to confer with Deg Dal Il and hence establish the first link in the chain of circumstances that’s going to get Terra pried loose from Lilistar and over to the reegs without everyone being killed in the process. I’ll tell you why it’ll be difficult. Molinari has a scheme. He’s been involved in a personal struggle, man to man, against Freneksy; it’s his masculinity that he feels is at stake. For him it’s not abstract, it’s immediate and physical. And you saw the virile Molinari strutting on the video tape. That’s his secret weapon, his V-2. He’s starting to throw in the healthy duplicates of himself from the rank of parallel worlds, and as he knows he’s got quite a supply of them to draw on. His whole psychology, his point of orientation, is to dabble with death and yet somehow surmount it. Now’s the time for him to demonstrate his way. In confrontation with Minister Freneksy – whom he fears – he can die a thousand times and still spring back. The deteriorating process, the encroachment of his psychosomatic illness process, will cease as soon as he throws the first healthy Molinari in. And when you get back to Cheyenne you’ll just be in time to witness it; the video tapes go on all the TV networks that night. At prime viewing time.’

Eric said musingly, ‘So he’s as sick right now as it will be necessary for him ever to be.’

‘And that’s exceedingly sick, doctor.’

‘Yes, doctor.’ Eric eyed his 2056 self. ‘We agree in our diagnoses.’

‘Late tonight, by your time, not mine, Minister Freneksy will demand – and get – another face-to-face conference with Molinari. And the healthy, virile substitute will be the one there in that room … while the sick one, our one, recovers in his upstairs private quarters, guarded by his Secret Service, watching the video tapes on TV and thinking grand thoughts to himself as to how easily he has found a way of evading Minister Freneksy and his burgeoning, excessive demands.’

‘I assume the virile Molinari from the other Terra has involved himself willingly.’

‘Delighted to. All of them are. All of them see the penultimate in life as a successful grudge-battle waged above and below the belt against Freneksy. Molinari is a politician and he lives for this – lives for it while at the same time it kills him. The healthy one, after his conference with Freneksy, will suffer his first attack of pyloric spasms; the attrition will start to eat away at him, too. And so on down the rank, until at last Freneksy is dead, as someday he has to be, and hopefully before Molinari.’

‘Beating Molinari to it will take some doing,’ Eric said.

‘But this isn’t morbid; this is straight out of the Middle Ages, the clash of armed knights. Molinari is Arthur with the spear wound in his side; guess who Freneksy is. And the interesting thing, to me, is that since Lilistar has no period of chivalry, Freneksy has no comprehension of this. He simply sees it in terms of a struggle for economic domination; who runs whose factories and can sequester whose labor force.’

‘No romance,’ Eric said. ‘How. about the reegs? Will they understand the Mole? Have they a period of knighthood in their past?’

‘With four arms and a chitinous shell,’ his 2056 counterpart said, ‘it would have been something to see one of them in action. I don’t know, because neither you nor I nor any other Terran that I ever met bothered to learn as much about reeg civilization as we should have. You have the name of the reeg intelligence major?’

‘Deg something.’

‘Deg. Dal. Il. Think to yourself: the dog dallied and it made him ill.’ ‘Mary Reineke.’

‘Christ,’ Eric said.

‘I nauseate you, don’t I? Well, you nauseate me, too; you strike me as flabby and blubbery and your posture is terrible. No wonder you’re stuck with a wife like Kathy; you got what you deserved. During the next year why don’t you show some guts? Why don’t you pull yourself together and go find another woman so by the time it gets to me, in 2056, things aren’t quite so goddam fouled up? You owe it to me; I saved your life, got you away from Lilistar’s police.’ His 2056 self glowered at him.

‘What woman do you suggest?’ Eric said guardedly.

‘You’re out of your mind.’

‘Listen; Mary and Molinari have a quarrel about a month from now, your time. You could exploit it. I didn’t but that can be changed; you can set up a slightly different future, everything the same except for the marital situation. Divorce Kathy and marry Mary Reineke or someone – anyone.’ There was desperation, all at once, in his counterpart’s voice. ‘My God, I see this ahead, this having to institutionalize her, and for the rest of her life – I don’t want to do that; I want out.’

‘With or without us—’

‘I know. She’ll wind up there anyhow. But do I have to be the one? Together you and I ought to be able to reinforce ourselves. It’ll be hard; Kathy’ll fight a divorce action like a crazed thing. But bring the action in Tijuana; Mexican divorce law is looser than in the States. Get a good lawyer. I’ve picked one; he’s in Ensenada. Jesus Guadarala. Can you remember that? I couldn’t quite make it there to start litigation through him, but dammit, you can.’ He eyed Eric hopefully.

‘I’ll try,’ Eric said presently.

‘Now I have to let you out. The medication you took will start to work on you in a few minutes and I don’t care to have you drop five miles to the surface of the planet.’ The ship began to descend. ‘I’ll let you off in Salt Lake City; it’s a big place, you won’t be noticed. And when you’re back in 2055 you can catch a cab to Arizona.’

‘I don’t have any 2055 money,’ Eric remembered. ‘Or do I?’ He was confused; too much had happened. He groped for his wallet. ‘I got into a panic after that attempt on my part to buy the antidote from Hazeltine with wartime—’

‘Don’t ruminate over the details. I know them already.’

They completed the flight to Earth’s surface in silence, each inhibited by his gloomy contempt for the other. It was, Eric decided, a graphic demonstration of the necessity for having respect for one’s own self. And this gave him for the first time an insight into his fatalistic quasi-suicidal inclinations … they were undoubtedly based on this same flaw. To survive he would have to learn to view himself and his accomplishments differently.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ his counterpart said after the ship had landed in an irrigated pasture outside Salt Lake City. ‘You’re not going to change.’

As he stepped from the ship onto the spongy, moist alfalfa Eric said, ‘According to you, anyhow. But we’ll see.’

Without a further word his 2056 self slammed the hatch and took off; the ship shot up into the sky and disappeared.

Eric trudged toward the nearby paved road.

In Salt Lake City proper he snared a cab. It did not ask for his travel permit and he realized that imperceptibly, probably as he was walking toward town along the road, he had slipped a year back and was now in his own time. Nevertheless he decided to make sure.

‘Give me the date,’ he instructed the cab.

‘June 15, sir,’ the cab said as it buzzed south over green mountains and valleys.

‘What year?’

The cab said, ‘Are you Mr Rip Van Winkle or something, sir? It’s 2055. And I hope it satisfies you.’ The cab was old and somewhat seedy, needing repairs; its irritability showed in the activity of its autonomic circuitry.

‘It does,’ Eric said.

By use of the cab’s vidphone he learned from the information center at Phoenix the location of the prisoner of war camp; this was not classified information. Presently the cab flew above flat desert lands and monotonous hills of rock and empty basins which in former times had been lakes. And then, in the midst of this barren, unexploited wilderness, the cab set him down; he had arrived at POW Camp 29, and it was just where he had expected it to be: in the most uninhabitable spot conceivable. To him the great desert lands of Nevada and Arizona were like a dismal alien planet, not Earth at all; frankly he preferred the parts of Mars which he had seen near Wash-35.

‘Lots of luck, sir,’ the cab said. He paid it and it zoomed noisily off, its plate shuddering.

‘Thanks,’ Eric said. He walked to the guardhouse at the entrance of the camp; to the soldier within he explained that he had been sent by Tijuana Fur & Dye to buy a POW for clerical work that had to be processed with absolute accuracy.

‘Just one?’ the soldier asked him as he led the way to his superior’s office. ‘We can give you fifty reegs. Two hundred. We’re overrun with them right now. From that last battle we nailed six of their transports.’

In the colonel’s office he filled out forms, signed for TF&D. Payment, he explained, would be forwarded through normal channels at the end of the month in response to presentation of a formal statement.

‘Take your pick,’ the colonel, bored to death, told him. ‘Look around; you can have any one of them – they’re all alike, though.’

Eric said, ‘I see a reeg filing forms there in the next room. He – or it – looks efficient.’

‘That’s old Deg,’ the colonel said. ‘Deg’s a fixture around here; captured in the first week of the war. Even built himself one of those translating boxes so he could be of more use to us. I wish all of them were as cooperative as Deg.’

‘I’ll take him,’ Eric said.

‘We’ll have to affix a considerable additional fee,’ the colonel said slyly. ‘Because of the amount of training he’s received here from us.’ He made a note of that. ‘And a service charge for the translating box.’

‘You said he built it.’

‘We supplied the materials.’

At last they agreed on a price and then Eric walked into the next room and up to the reeg, busy with his four multi-jointed arms at the insurance claim files. ‘You belong to TF&D now,’ Eric informed him. ‘So come along.’ To the colonel he said, ‘Will he try to escape or fight me?’

‘They never do,’ the colonel said, lighting a cigar and leaning against the wall of his office with dreary ennui. They don’t have the mentality for it; they’re just bugs. Huge, shiny bugs.’

Presently he was back outside in the hot sun, waiting for a cab from nearby Phoenix. If I had known it would take such a short time, he said to himself, I would have held onto the cranky, elderly cab. He felt uncomfortable, standing with the silent reeg; this was, after all, their formal enemy. Reegs battled with and killed Terrans, and this one had been and still was a commissioned officer.

Like a fly the reeg cleaned himself, combing his wings, his sensory antennae, then his lower set of extremities. He carried his translating box under one brittle arm, never letting go of it.

‘Are you glad to get out of that PO W camp?’ Eric asked.

Words, pale in the strong desert sun, appeared on the box.