—T.S. Eliot
The city moved past him in a slow, descending spiral. Sam Harker looked at it blankly, taking in nothing. His brain was too filled already to be anything just now but empty. There was too much to cope with. He could not yet think at all. He had no recollection to span the time between the moment when he looked into his impossibly young face in the glass, and this current moment. Under his broken soles he felt the faint vibration of the Way, and the city was familiar that moved downward beneath him in its slow sweep, street after street swinging into view as the spiral Way glided on. There was nothing to catch hold of and focus, no way to anchor his spinning brain.
“I need a shot,” he told himself, and even the thought came clumsily, as if along rusty channels where no thought had moved before in forty drugged years. But when he tried his ragged pockets, he found them empty. He had nothing. No credits, no memory, not even a past.
“Nothing?” he thought foggily. “Nothing?” And then for the first time the impact of what he had seen in the mirror struck him hard. “Nothing? I’m immortal!”
It could not be true. It was part of the dream-dust fantasy. But the feel of his own firm cheek and hard, smooth neck muscles beneath his shaking fingers—that was no fantasy. That was real. Then the idea of forty years gone by must be the unreality. And that man at the alley-mouth had lied. Looking back now, it seemed to Sam that the man had looked at him oddly, with a more than passing interest. He had assumed the man was a passer-by, but when he forced his rusty brain to remember, it seemed to him that the man had been standing there watching him, ready to go or to stay according to. the cue Sam’s conduct gave him.
He groped for the memory of the man’s face, and found nothing. A blur that looked at him and spoke. But looked with clinical interest, and spoke with purpose and intent beyond the casual. This was the first coherent thought that took shape in the dimness of Sam’s brain, so the stimulus must have been strong. The man must have been there for a reason. For a reason concerned with Sam.
“Forty years,” Sam murmured. “I can check that, anyhow.”
The city had not changed at all. But that was no criterion. The Keeps never changed. Far ahead, towering above the buildings, he saw the great globe of dead Earth in its black plastic pall. He could orient himself by that, and the shapes of the streets and buildings fell into familiar place around him. He knew the city. He knew where he was, where his old haunts had been, where that lavish apartment had looked down over these glittering ways, and a girl with blue eye had blown dust in his face.
Kedre’s face swam before hint in the remembered screen, tears in the eves, command in the gesture that brought about his downfall. Kedre and Rosathe. He had a job to do, then. He knew Kedre? had not really been the hand behind that poison dust, any more than Rosathe’s had been. Zachariah Harker was the man who gave the orders here. And Zachariah would suffer for it. But Kedre must suffer too, and as for Rosathe—Sam’s fingers curved. Rosathe he had trusted. Her crime was the worst—betrayal. Rosathe had better die, he thought.
But wait. Forty years? Had time done that job for him already: The first thing he must learn was the date of this day on which he had awakened. The moving street glided toward one of the big public newscast screens, and he knew he could check the date on that when it came into view. But he thought he did not really need to. He could feel time’s passage. And though the city had. not changed, the people had, a little. Some of the men near him were bearded, so that much was new. Clothes had a more extreme cut than he remembered. Fashions change in rhythm with changing social orders, not meaninglessly but in response to known patterns. He could work it out from that alone, he thought, if his mind were clearer and there was no other way to learn.
The Way swung round slowly so that a corner of the newscast screen loomed into view, and Sam noticed how few faces around him turned toward it. He could remember a time when every neck craned and people jostled one another in their hurry to read the news a little faster than the moving Way would let them. All that was over now. Apathy in direct and easily understood contrast to the extreme new styles showed upon every face. Sam was the only one here who craned to see the big screen.
Yes, it had been forty years.
There was something like a bright explosion in the center of his brain. Immortality! Immortality! All the possibilities, all the dangers, all the glories lying before him burst outward in one blinding glow. And then the glow faded and he was afraid for a moment of maturity’s responsibilities—this new, incredible maturity so far beyond anything that he had ever dreamed of before. And then the last doubts he would feel about this wonderful gift assailed him, and he searched his memory frantically for knowledge of some drug, some treatment that could produce a catalepsy like this, ageless over a span of forty years. He knew of none. No, it must be real. It could not be, but it was true.
It would wait. Sam laughed dryly to himself. This of all things would most certainly wait. There were more urgent things to think of. Something magical had happened to him, and the result was forty years of sleep and then immortality. But what had that something been?
Dream-dust. The remembered fragrance of it was still in his nostrils, and there was an ominous dry thirst beginning to assert itself beneath his tongue, a thirst no liquid would assuage.
I’ve got to get cured. First of all, I’ve got to get cured.
He knew dream-dust. It wasn’t incurable, but it was habit-forming. Worse than that, really, because once you went under the deadly stuff you didn’t come out again. There were no rational periods during which you could commit yourself for cure. Not until the organism built up antibodies, and that took almost a lifetime. Even then the dream-dust virus could mutate so rapidly that the rational term didn’t last. You dropped back into dreams, and eventually, you died.
Panic struck Sam for a moment. How long would this rationality last? How long had it lasted already? At any time now would the dusty dreams strike again and his newly emerged identity go under? Immortality was useless if he must sleep it all away.
He had to get cured. The thirst mounted now as he recognized it for what it was, a darker thirst than the average man ever knows. The cure took money. Several thousand korium-credits, at least. And he had nothing. He was rich beyond dreams of avarice if this immortality meant what he believed it meant, but the wealth of his endless years might vanish in any instant now because he had no material wealth at all. Paradox. He owned centuries of the future, but for lack of a few current hours he might be robbed of his treasure laid up in time.
Panic was no good. He knew that. He forced it down again and considered very quietly what he had to do. What he had to learn. How to go about it. Two things were paramount—his immortality and his dream-dust addiction.
Money.
He hadn’t any.
Immortality.
That was an asset quite apart from the future it promised, but he didn’t yet know how to spend it most wisely. So—keep it a secret.
How?
Disguise.
As whom?
As himself, of course. As Sam Reed, but not Sam Reed Immortal. Sam as he should have looked at the age of eighty. This tied in with the money angle. For the only way to get money was to return to his old haunts, his oldest practices.
And he must not throw away his most precious secret there. Already a dim stirring in his brain hinted at the wonderful use he might make of this secret. Time enough for that later. Time in spilling-over plenty, if he could salvage it soon .enough.
But first, a little money, a little knowledge.
Knowledge was easier and safer to acquire. It came first. He must learn immediately what had been happening in the past four decades, what had happened to himself, whether he had dropped out of the public attention, when and how. Clearly he was no longer a public figure, but where he had been the past forty years was still a question.
He stepped off onto a crossway and let it carry him toward the nearest library. On the way he c
onsidered the problem of money. He had been a very rich man when Rosathe blew the dream-dust in his face. Some of the credits were in his own name, but four caches privately hidden held most of the fortune. It seemed likely that at least one still remained secret, but whether he could collect the money in any identity but his own remained to be seen. That had waited forty years—it would wait a few hours longer.
He had not even the few cents required to buy the privacy of a room or a booth at the library, but he seated himself at one of the long tables and bent forward, hiding his face between the sound-absorbent wings that jutted out from the middle-partition. He lowered his eyes to the viewpiece of the visor. He touched control buttons and waited.
A general newscast forty years old unrolled itself on the magnified screen below him. It was a weekly summary that covered the last seven days he could remember.
Rip van Winkle could have helped his own disorientation by reading a twenty-year-old newspaper. It wouldn’t have told him what had happened since he slept, but it would have restored the firmness of the world he woke in. In all the Keep, in all the planet, this odd newscast was the only thing that could have put solidity under Sam Reed’s feet. Outside the library danger and unfamiliarity waited everywhere, because the frames of reference had changed so much.
The little things change most—fads, fashions, slang—and lapses from that superficial norm are instantly noticed. But a lapse from a basic can often remain undetected.
Sam watched the past unroll which seemed so vividly the present that he could almost smell dream-dust puffed freshly in his face from Rosathe’s hand. When he thought of that the dryness of his thirst suddenly choked him, and he remembered anew how urgent his need for haste was. He pressed his forehead to the viewpiece and sped the roll faster.
SAM REED DREAM-DUSTS! The thin voice from the past shrilled ghostlike in his ears while the tri-di pictures moved swiftly by. Sam Reed, promoter behind the Land Colony, today gave up his career and dream-dusted, amazing everyone who knew him . . . found wandering through the city . . .
It was all there. The investigation that followed his apparent suicide, the scandal as his swindle began to emerge. Four days after Sam Reed disappeared, after a dozen reputable witnesses saw him under the influence of dream-dust, the Colony bubble burst.
Robin Hale, the Free Companion, had no answer to make. What could he say? Three hundred per cent of the stock had been sold, speaking louder than any words of the fact that the Colony’s promoters had known it could not succeed. Hale did the only thing he could do—tried to weather the storm as he had weathered so many in his long lifetime, man-made storms and the violent tornadoes of landside. It was impossible, of course. Emotions had been strung too high. Too many men had believed in the Colony.
When the bubble burst, little remained.
Sam Reed’s name bore the brunt of the opprobrium. Not only was he a swindler, but he had run out—given up completely and lost himself in the suicidal escape of dream-dust. No one seemed to wonder why. There was no logic behind such a step. But publicity-wise minds behind the telling of the story wasted no time that might give people a chance to think the thing out. If the Colony was foredoomed to failure, Sam had only to wait to collect his illicit three hundred per cent in safe secrecy. His suicide might have argued that he feared the Colony would succeed—but no one thought of that. It seemed only that, fearing exposure, he took the quickest way out.
Investigation followed him, backtracked and discovered the caches of swindled money that he hadn’t concealed quite cleverly enough. Not against the deductive technology of the Keeps and the Immortals. They found the caches and emptied them—all of them. There had been four. The old newscasts gave details.
Sam leaned back and blinked in the dim air of the library. Well, he was broke, then.
He could see the hands of the Harker Family moving behind this four-decade-old game. Zachariah’s face came back to him like something seen an hour ago, smooth and smiling in the visor screen, remote as a god’s face .watching ephemeral mortals. Zachariah had known exactly what he was doing, of course. But that was only the start of the game. Sam was a pawn to be used and discarded in the opening move. He turned back to the newscast to learn how the rest of the moves had been carried out.
And he was surprised to find that Robin Hale went ahead and started the Land Colony, in the face of the lack of all popular support—in the face of actual enmity. He had only one weapon. He still had the granted charter, and they couldn’t take that away from him, especially since the money Sam stole had been recovered. Doggedly Hale must have forged ahead, laying his long-term plans as the Families laid theirs, looking forward to the time when these petty scandals would have blown past and he could start anew with a fresh generation and fight the Families to win this generation over as he had won the last—for a while.
Yes, the Colony was started. But remarkably little news had been recorded about it. There was a spectacular murder in Delaware Keep and then a new play was produced that had all undersea Venus scrambling for tickets, and presently Sara found week after week of newscast spinning by with only the briefest references to the fact that a Colony had been started at all.
That was deliberate, of course. The Harkers knew what they were doing.
Sam stopped the newscast and thought. He would have to rearrange his tentative plans, but not much. He still needed money—fast. He swallowed dryly against the drug-thirst. The cached money was gone. What remained? Only himself, his experience, his priceless secret that must not yet be squandered—and what else? The old land charter issued in his name forty years ago was still on file, he assumed, since the charters were irrevocable. He couldn’t claim it in his own name, and in any other name it would be invalid Well, deal with that later.
Right now—money. Sam’s lips tightened. He got up and left the library, walking lightly, seeking a weapon and a victim. He couldn’t get two or three thousand credits by robbery without taking long risks, but he could manage a simple blackjacking up an alley for twenty or thirty credits—if he was lucky.
He was lucky. So was the man he stunned, whose skull didn’t crack under the impact of a sock filled with pebbles. Sam had taken careful stock of himself, and was surprised to find that physically he seemed to be in better shape than he had any right to expect. Most dream-dust victims are skin-and-bone mummies by the time they die. It raised another mystery—what sort of life had he been leading during these forty dreaming years?
Memory of the men in the alley where Sam woke returned bafflingly. If he had only been clear-headed enough to keep his grip on that collar until he could shake the information he needed out of the watcher who had stood waiting above him. Well, that would come, too, in its time.
With forty-three credits in his pocket, he headed for a certain establishment he had known forty years ago. The attendants there kept their mouths shut and worked efficiently, in the old days, and things did not change fast in the Keeps. He thought they would still be there.
On the way he passed a number of big new salons where men and women were visible being embellished to a high point of perfection. Apparently the demand had increased. Certainly more foppery was evident in the Keep now. Men with exquisitely curled beards and ringlets were everywhere. But privacy and discretion were necessary to Sam’s purpose. He went on to his semi-illegal establishment, and was not surprised to find it still in business.
His nerve shook a little as he paused before the entrance. But no one had recognized him on the Ways, apparently. Forty years ago his televised face had been thoroughly familiar in the Keeps, but now—
Rationalization is a set pattern in men’s minds. If they looked at him and saw familiarity, they decided automatically that it was a remarkable likeness, no more. The unconscious always steers the conscious toward the most logical conclusion—the one grooved by channels of parallel experience. Sometimes striking resemblances do occur; that is natural. It was not natural to see Sam Reed as he had looked forty years
before, moving along a Way. And many of those he passed had been unborn at the time of the Colony fiasco, or had seen Sam Reed with the indifferent eyes of childhood. Those who might remember were old now, dim-sighted, and many faces in public life had superimposed themselves on these failing memories since then.
No, he was safe except for random chance. He went confidently through the glass door and gave his orders to the man assigned to him. It was routine enough.
“Permanent or temporary?”
“Temporary,” Sam said, after a brief pause.
“Quick-change?” There was a call for emergency quick-changes of disguise among the establishment’s clientèle.
“That’s right.”
The artist went to work. He was an anatomist and something of a psychologist as well as a disguise expert. He left Sam’s pate bald, as directed; he dyed and. bleached the red brows and lashes to pepper-and-salt that could pass for either dark or light, depending on the rest of the ensemble. With the beard, they passed for grimy white. The beard was a dirty, faded mixture.
He built up Sam’s nose and ears as time would have built them had it touched Sam. He put a few wrinkles in the right places with surrogate tissues. The beard hid most of Sam’s face, but when the artist had finished eighty years of hard living looked out above its grayish mask.
“For a quick change,” he said, “take off the beard and change your expression. You can’t remove the surrogate quickly, but you can iron out those wrinkles by the right expression. Try it, please.” He wheeled Sam’s chair around to the mirror and made him practice until both men were satisfied.
“All right,” Sam said finally. “I’ll need a costume.”
They settled on three things only—hat, cloak, shoes. Simplicity and speed were the factors behind the choice. Each item was a special article. The hat could be completely altered in shape by a pull and a twist. The cloak was opaque, but of a texture so thin it could be crumpled and stuffed into a pocket. It was weighted to hang straight when worn, to hide the fact that the body beneath was not an old man’s body. Sam had to practice the proper gait. And the shoes were nondescsipt in color, like the hat, but their large, dull buckles could be opened to release puffy blue bows.
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