The Eleventh Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by F. L. Wallace

  He skirted the area. He’d been found in one of the Shelters—which one he didn’t know. Perhaps he should have checked the record before he came here.

  No, this was better. Clues, he was convinced, were almost non-existent. He had to rely on his body and mind; but not in the ordinary way. He was particularly sensitive to impressions he had received before; the way he had learned things in therapy proved that; but if he tried to force them, he could be led astray. The wisest thing was to react naturally, almost without volition. He should be able to recognize the Shelter he’d been found in without trouble. From that, he could work back.

  That was the theory—but it wasn’t happening. He circled the area, and there was nothing to which he responded more than vaguely.

  He would have to go closer.

  He crossed the street. The plan of the Shelters was simple; an area two blocks long and one block wide, heavily planted with shrubs and small trees. In the center was an S-shaped continuous structure divided into a number of small dwelling units.

  Luis walked along one wing of the building, turned at the corner and turned again. It was quite dark. He supposed that was why he wasn’t reacting to anything. But his senses were sharper than he realized. There was a rustle behind him, and instinctively he flung himself forward, flat on the ground.

  A pink spot appeared, low on the wall next to him. It had been aimed at his legs. The paint crackled faintly and the pink spot faded. He rolled away fast.

  A dark body loomed past him and dropped where he’d been. There was an exclamation of surprise when the unknown found there was no one there. Luis grunted with satisfaction—this might be only a stickup, but he was getting action faster than he’d expected. He reached out and took hold of a leg and drew the assailant to him. A hard object clipped the side of his head, and he grasped that too.

  The shape of the gun was familiar. He tore it loose. This wasn’t any stickup! Once was enough to be retrogressed, and he’d had his share. Next time it was going to be the other guy. Physically, he was more than a match for his attacker. He twisted his body and pinned the struggling form to the ground.

  That was what it was—a form. A woman, very much so; even in the darkness he was conscious of her body.

  Now she was trying to get loose, and he leaned his weight more heavily on her. Her clothing was torn—he could feel her flesh against his face. He raised the gun butt, and then changed his mind and instead fumbled for a light. It wasn’t easy to find it and still keep her pinned.

  “Be quiet or I’ll clip you,” he growled.

  * * * *

  She lay still.

  He found the light and shone it on her face. It was good to look at, that face, but it wasn’t at all familiar. He had trouble keeping his eyes from straying. Her dress was torn, and what she wore underneath was torn too.

  “Seen enough?” she asked coldly.

  “Put that way, I haven’t.” He couldn’t force his voice to be matter-of-fact—it wouldn’t behave.

  She stared angrily at the light in her eyes. “I knew you’d be back,” she said. “I thought I could get you before you got me, but you’re too fast.” Her mouth trembled. “This time make it permanent. I don’t want to be tormented again like this.”

  He let her go and sat up. He was trembling, too, but not for the same reason. He turned the light away from her eyes.

  “Ever consider that you could be mistaken?” he asked. “You’re not the only one it happens to.”

  She lay there blinking at him, eyes adjusting to the changed light. She fumbled at the torn dress, which wouldn’t stay where she put it. “You too?” she said with a vast lack of surprise. “When?”

  “They found me here two weeks ago. This is the first time I’ve come back.”

  “Patterns,” she said. “There are always patterns in what we do.” Her attitude toward him had changed drastically, he could see it in her face. “I’ve been out three weeks longer.” She sat up and leaned closer. She didn’t seem to be thinking about the same things that had been on her mind only seconds before.

  He stood up and helped her to her feet. She was near and showed no inclination to move away. This was something Borgenese hadn’t mentioned, and there was nothing in his re-education to prepare him for this sensation, but he liked it. He couldn’t see her very well, now that the light was turned off, but she was almost touching him.

  “We’re in the same situation, I guess.” She sighed. “I’m lonely and a little afraid. Come into my place and we’ll talk.”

  He followed her. She turned into a dwelling that from the outside seemed identical to the others. Inside, it wasn’t quite the same. He couldn’t say in what way it was different, but he didn’t think it was the one he’d been found in.

  That torn dress bothered him—not that he wanted her to pin it up. The tapes hadn’t been very explicit about the beauties of the female body, but he thought he knew what they’d left out.

  She was conscious of his gaze and smiled. It was not an invitation, it was a request, and he didn’t mind obeying. She slid into his arms and kissed him. He was glad about the limitations of re-education. There were some things a man ought to learn for himself.

  She looked up at him. “Maybe you should tell me your name,” she said. “Not that it means much in our case.”

  “Luis Obispo,” he said, holding her.

  “I had more trouble, I couldn’t choose until two days ago.” She kissed him again, hard and deliberately. It gave her enough time to jerk the gun out of his pocket.

  She slammed it against his ribs. “Stand back,” she said, and meant it.

  * * * *

  Luis stared bewilderedly at her. She was desirable, more than he had imagined and for a variety of reasons. Her emotions had been real, he was sure of that, not feigned for the purpose of taking the gun away. But she had changed again in a fraction of a second. Her face was twisted with an effort at self-control.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. He tried to make his voice gentle, but it wouldn’t come out that way. The retrogression process had sharpened all his reactions—this one too.

  “The name I finally arrived at was—Luise Obispo,” she said.

  He started. The same as his, except feminine! This was more than he’d dared hope for. A clue—and this girl, who he suddenly realized, without any cynicism about “love at first sight,” because the tapes hadn’t included it, meant something to him.

  “Maybe you’re my wife,” he said tentatively.

  “Don’t count on it,” she said wearily. “It would have been better if we were strangers—then it wouldn’t matter what we did. Now there are too many factors, and I can’t choose.”

  “It has to be,” he argued. “Look—the same name, and so close together in time and place, and we were attracted instantly—”

  “Go away,” she said, and the gun didn’t waver. It was not a threat that he could ignore. He left.

  She was wrong in making him leave, completely wrong. He couldn’t say how he knew, but he was certain. But he couldn’t prove it, and she wasn’t likely to accept his unsubstantiated word.

  He leaned weakly against the door. It was like that. Retrogression had left him with an adult body and sharper receptiveness. And after that followed an urge to live fully. He had a lot of knowledge, but it didn’t extend to this sphere of human behavior.

  Inside he could hear her moving around faintly, an emotional anticlimax. It wasn’t just frustrated sex desire, though that played a part. They had known each other previously—the instant attraction they’d had for each other was proof, leaving aside the names. Lord, he’d trade his unknown identity to have her. He should have taken another name—any other name would have been all right.

  It wasn’t because she was the first woman he’d seen, or the woman he had first re-seen. There had been nurses, some of them beautiful, and he’d paid no attention to them. But Luise Obispo was part of his former life—and he didn’t know what part. The reactions were
there, but until he could find out why, he was denied access to the satisfactions.

  From a very narrow angle, and only from that angle, he could see that there was still a light inside. It was dim, and if a person didn’t know, he might pass by and not notice it.

  His former observation about the Shelters was incorrect. Every dwelling might be occupied and he couldn’t tell unless he examined them individually.

  He stirred. The woman was a clue to his problem, but the clue itself was a far more urgent problem. Though his identity was important, he could build another life without it and the new life might not be worse than the one from which he had been forcibly removed.

  Perhaps he was over-reacting, but he didn’t think so: his new life had to include this woman.

  He wasn’t equipped to handle the emotion. He stumbled away from the door and found an unoccupied dwelling and went in without turning on the lights and lay down on the bed.

  In the morning, he knew he had been here before. In the darkness he had chosen unknowingly but also unerringly. This was the place in which he had been retrogressed.

  It was here that the police had picked him up.

  * * * *

  The counselor looked sleepily out of the screen. “I wish you people didn’t have so much energy,” he complained. Then he looked again and the sleepiness vanished. “I see you found it the first time.”

  Luis knew it himself, because there was a difference from the dwelling Luise lived in—not much, but perceptible to him. The counselor, however, must have a phenomenal memory to distinguish it from hundreds of others almost like it.

  Borgenese noticed the expression and smiled. “I’m not an eidetic, if that’s what you think. There’s a number on the set you’re calling from and it shows on my screen. You can’t see it.”

  They would have something like that, Luis thought. “Why didn’t you tell me this was it before I came?”

  “We were pretty sure you’d find it by yourself. People who’ve just been retroed usually do. It’s better to do it on your own. Our object is to have you recover your personality. If we knew who you were, we could set up a program to guide you to it faster. As it is, if we help you too much, you turn into a carbon copy of the man who’s advising you.”

  Luis nodded. Give a man his adult body and mind and turn him loose on the problems which confronted him, and he would come up with adult solutions. It was better that way.

  But he hadn’t called to discuss that. “There’s another person living in the Shelters,” he said. “You found her three weeks before you found me.”

  “So you’ve met her already? Fine. We were hoping you would.” Borgenese chuckled. “Let’s see if I can describe her. Apparent age, about twenty-three; that means that she was originally between twenty-six or thirty-eight, with the probability at the lower figure. A good body, as you are probably well aware, and a striking face. Somewhat oversexed at the moment, but that’s all right—so are you.”

  He saw the expression on Luis’s face and added quickly: “You needn’t worry. Draw a parallel with your own experience. There were pretty nurses all around you in retro-therapy, and I doubt that you noticed that they were female. That’s normal for a person in your position, and it’s the same with her.

  “It works this way: you’re both unsure of yourselves and can’t react to those who have some control over their emotions. When you meet each other, you can sense that neither has made the necessary adjustments, and so you are free to release your true feelings.”

  He smiled broadly. “At the moment, you two are the only ones who have been retroed recently. You won’t have any competition for six months or so, until you begin to feel comfortable in your new life. By then, you should know how well you really like each other.

  “Of course tomorrow, or even today, we might find another person in the Shelter. If it’s a man, you’ll have to watch out; if a woman, you’ll have too much companionship. As it is, I think you’re very lucky.”

  Yeah, he was lucky—or would be if things were actually like that. Yesterday he would have denied it; but today, he’d be willing to settle for it, if he could get it.

  “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “She took the same name that I did.”

  Borgenese’s smile flipped over fast, and the other side was a frown. For a long time he sat there scowling out of the screen. “That’s a hell of a thing to tell me before breakfast,” he said. “Are you sure? She couldn’t decide on a name before she left.”

  “I’m sure,” said Luis, and related all the details of last night.

  The counselor sat there and didn’t say anything.

  * * * *

  Luis waited as long as he could. “You can trace us now,” he said. “One person might be difficult. But two of us with nearly the same name, that should stick out big, even in a population of sixteen billion. Two people are missing from somewhere. You can find that.”

  The counselor’s face didn’t change. “You understand that if you were killed, we’d find the man who did it. I can’t tell you how, but you can be sure he wouldn’t escape. In the last hundred years there’s been no unsolved murder.”

  He coughed and turned away from the screen. When he turned back, his face was calm. “I’m not supposed to tell you this much. I’m breaking the rule because your case and that of the girl is different from any I’ve ever handled.” He was speaking carefully. “Listen. I’ll tell you once and won’t repeat it. If you ever accuse me, I’ll deny I said it, and I have the entire police organization behind me to make it stick.”

  The counselor closed his eyes as if to see in his mind the principle he was formulating. “If we can catch a murderer, no matter how clever he may be, it ought to be easier to trace the identity of a person who is still alive. It is. But we never try. Though it’s all right if the victim does.

  “If I should ask the cooperation of other police departments, they wouldn’t help. If the solution lies within an area over which I have jurisdiction and I find out who is responsible, I will be dismissed before I can prosecute the man.”

  Luis stared at the counselor in helpless amazement. “Then you’re not doing anything,” he said shakily. “You lied to me. You don’t intend to do anything.”

  “You’re overwrought,” said Borgenese politely. “If you could see how busy we are in your behalf—” He sighed. “My advice is that if you can’t convince the girl, forget her. If the situation gets emotionally unbearable, let me know and I can arrange transportation to another city where there may be others who are—uh—more compatible.”

  “But she’s my wife,” he said stubbornly.

  “Are you sure?”

  Actually Luis wasn’t—but he wanted her to be, or any variation thereof she would consent to. He explained.

  “As she says, there are a lot of factors,” commented the counselor. “I’d suggest an examination. It may remove some of her objections.”

  He hadn’t thought of it, but he accepted it eagerly. “What will that do?”

  “Not much, unfortunately. It will prove that you two can have healthy normal children, but it won’t indicate that you’re not a member of her genetic family. And, of course, it won’t touch on the question of legal family, brother-in-law and the like. I don’t suppose she’d accept that.”

  She wouldn’t. He’d seen her for only a brief time and yet he knew that much. He was in an ambiguous position; he could make snap decisions he was certain were right, but he had to guess at facts. He and the girl were victims, and the police refused to help them in the only way that would do much good. And the police had, or thought they had, official reasons for their stand.

  Luis told the counselor just exactly what he thought of that.

  “It’s too bad,” agreed the counselor. “These things often have an extraordinary degree of permanency if they ever get started.”

  If they ever got started! Luis reached out and turned off the screen. It flickered unsteadily—the counselor was trying to ca
ll him back. He didn’t want to talk to the man; it was painful, and Borgenese had nothing to add but platitudes, and fuel to his anger. He swung open the panel and jerked the wiring loose and the screen went blank.

  There was an object concealed in the mechanism he had exposed. It was a neat, vicious, little retrogression gun.

  * * * *

  He got it out and balanced it gingerly in his hand. Now he had something else to work on! It was the weapon, of course. It had been used on him and then hidden behind the screen.

  It was a good place to hide it. The screens never wore out or needed adjustment, and the cleaning robots that came out of the wall never cleaned there. The police should have found it, but they hadn’t looked. He smiled bitterly. They weren’t interested in solving crimes—merely in ameliorating the consequences.

  Though the police had failed, he hadn’t. It could be traced back to the man who owned it, and that person would have information. He turned the retro gun over slowly; it was just a gun; there were countless others like it.

  He finished dressing and dropped the gun in his pocket. He went outside and looked across the court. He hesitated and then walked over and knocked.

  “Occupied,” said the door. “But the occupant is out. No definite time of return stated, but she will be back this evening. Is there any message?”

  “No message,” he said. “I’ll call back when she’s home.”

  He hoped she wouldn’t refuse to speak to him. She’d been away from retro-therapy longer than he and possibly had developed her own leads—very likely she was investigating some of them now. Whatever she found would help him, and vice versa. The man who’d retroed her had done the same to him. They were approaching the problem from different angles. Between the two of them, they should come up with the correct solution.

  He walked away from the Shelters and caught the belt to the center of town; the journey didn’t take long. He stepped off, and wandered in the bright sunshine, not quite aimlessly. At length he found an Electronic Arms store, and went inside.