"Yes," Jason said.
"We have no birth registration form for such a person at that time and place. Are you absolutely sure of the facts, sir?"
"You mean do I know my name and when and where I was born?" His voice again managed to escape his control, but this time he let it; panic flooded him. "Thanks," he said and hung up, shaking violently, now. Shaking in his body and in his mind.
_I don"t exist_, he said to himself. There is no Jason Taverner. There never was and there never will be. The h.e.l.l with my career; I just want to live. If someone or something wants to eradicate my career, okay; do it. But aren"t I going to be allowed to exist at all? Wasn"t I even born?
Something stirred in his chest. With terror he thought, They didn"t get the feed tubes out entirely; some of them are still growing and feeding inside of me. That G.o.dd.a.m.n tramp of a no-talent girl. I hope she winds up walking the streets for two bits a try.
After what I did for her: getting her those two auditions for A and R people. But h.e.l.l--I did get to lay her a lot. I suppose it comes out even.
Returning to his hotel room, he took a good long look at himself in the flyspecked vanity mirror. His appearance hadn"t changed, except that he needed a shave. No older. No more lines, no gray hair visible. The good shoulders and biceps. The fat-free waist that let him wear the current formfitting men"s clothing.
And that"s important to your image, he said to himself. What kind of suits you can wear, especially those tucked-inwaist numbers. I must have fifty of them, he thought. Or did have. Where are they now? he asked himself. The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing? Or however that goes. Something from the past, out of his days at school. Forgotten until this moment. Strange, he thought, what drifts up into your mind when you"re in an unfamiliar and ominous situation. Sometimes the most trivial stuff imaginable.
If wishes were horses then beggars might fly. Stuff like that. It"s enough to drive you crazy.
He wondered how many pol and nat check stations there were between this miserable hotel and the closest ID forger in Watts? Ten? Thirteen? Two? For me, he thought, all it takes is one. One random check by a mobile vehicle and crew of three. With their d.a.m.n radio gear connecting them to pol-nat data central in Kansas City. Where they keep the dossiers.
He rolled back his sleeve and examined his forearm. Yes, there it was: his tattooed ident number. His somatic license plate, to be carried by him throughout his life, buried at last with him in his longed-for grave.
Well, the pols and nats at the mobile check station would read off the ident number to Kansas City and then--what then? Was his dossier still there or was it gone, too, like his birth certificate? And if it wasn"t there, what would the polnat bureaucrats think it meant?
A clerical error. Somebody misfiled the microfilm packet that made up the dossier. It"ll turn up. Someday, when it doesn"t matter, when I"ve spent ten years of my life in a quarry on Luna using a manual pickax. If the dossier isn"t there, he mused, they"ll a.s.sume I"m an escaped student, because it"s only students who don"t have pol-nat dossiers, and even some of them, the important ones, the leaders--they"re in there, too.
I am at the bottom of life, he realized. And I can"t even climb my way up to mere physical existence. Me, a man who yesterday had an audience of thirty million. Someday, somehow, I will grope my way back to them. But not now. There are other things that come first. The bare bones of existence that every man is born with: I don"t even have that. But I will get it; a six is not an ordinary. No ordinary could have physically or psychologically survived what"s happened to me--especially the uncertainty--as I have.
A six, no matter what the external circ.u.mstances, will always prevail. Because that"s the way they genetically defined us.
He left his hotel room once more, walked downstairs and up to the desk. A middle-aged man with a thin mustache was reading a copy of _Box_ magazine; he did not look up but said, "Yes, sir."
Jason brought out his packet of government bills, laid a five-hundred-dollar note on the counter before the clerk. The clerk glanced at it, glanced again, this time with wide-opened eyes. Then he cautiously looked up into Jason"s face, questioningly.
"My ident cards were stolen," Jason said. "That fivehundred-dollar bill is yours if you can get me to someone who can replace them. If you"re going to do it, do it right now; I"m not going to wait." Wait to be picked up by a pol or a nat, he thought. Caught here in this rundown dingy hotel.
"Or caught on the sidewalk in front of the entrance," the clerk said. "I"m a telepath of sorts. I know this hotel isn"t much, but we have no bugs. Once we had Martian sand fleas, but no more." He picked up the five-hundred-dollar bill. "I"ll get you to someone who can help you," he said. Studying Jason"s face intently, he paused, then said, "You think you"re world-famous. Well, we get all kinds."
"Let"s go," Jason said harshly. "Now."
"Right now," the clerk said, and reached for his shiny plastic coat.
3
As the clerk drove his old-time quibble slowly and noisily down the street he said casually to Jason, seated beside him, "I"m picking up a lot of odd material in your mind."
"Get out of my mind," Jason said brusquely, with aversion. He had always disliked the prying, curiosity-driven telepaths, and this time was no exception. "Get out of my mind," he said, "and get me to the person who"s going to help me. And don"t run into any pol-nat barricades. If you expect to live through this."
The clerk said mildly, "You don"t have to tell me that; I know what would happen to you if we got stopped. I"ve done this before, many times. For students. But you"re not a student. You"re a famous man and you"re rich. But at the same time you aren"t. At the same time you"re a n.o.body. You don"t even exist, legally speaking." He laughed a thin, effete laugh, his eyes fixed on the traffic ahead of him. He drove like an old woman, Jason noted. Both hands fixedly hanging on to the steering wheel.
Now they had entered the slums of Watts proper. Tiny dark stores on each side of the cluttered streets, overflowing ashcans, the pavement littered with pieces of broken bottles, drab painted signs that advertised Coca-Cola in big letters and the name of the store in small. At an intersection an elderly black man haltingly crossed, feeling his way along as if blind with age. Seeing him, Jason felt an odd emotion. There were so few blacks alive, now, because of Tidman"s notorious sterilization bill pa.s.sed by Congress back in the terrible days of the Insurrection. The clerk carefully slowed his rattly quibble to a stop so as not to hara.s.s the elderly black man in his rumpled, seam-torn brown suit. Obviously he felt it, too.
"Do you realize," the clerk said to Jason, "that if I hit him with my car it would mean the death penalty for me?"
"It should," Jason said.
"They"re like the last flock of whooping cranes," the clerk said, starting forward now that the old black had reached the far side. "Protected by a thousand laws. You can"t jeer at them; you can"t get into a fistfight with one without risking a felony rap--ten years in prison. Yet we"re making them die out--that"s what Tidman wanted and I guess what the majority of Silencers wanted, but"--he gestured, for the first time taking a hand off the wheel--"I miss the kids. I remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with . . . not far from here as a matter of fact. He"s undoubtedly sterilized by now."
"But then he"s had one child," Jason pointed out. "His wife had to surrender their birth coupon when their first and only child came . . . but they"ve got that child. The law lets them have it. And there"re a million statutes protecting their safety."
"Two adults, one child," the clerk said. "So the black population is halved every generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right."
"Something had to be done," Jason said; he sat rigidly in his seat, studying the street ahead, searching for a sign of a pol-nat checkpoint or barricade. He saw neither, but how long were they going to have to continue driving?
"We"re almost there," the clerk said calmly. He turned his head momentarily to face Jason. "I don"t like your racist views," he said. "Even if you are paying me five hundred dollars."
"There"re enough blacks alive to suit me," Jason said.
"And when the last one dies?"
Jason said, "You can read my mind; I don"t have to tell you."
"Christ," the clerk said, and returned his attention to the street traffic ahead.
They made a sharp right turn, down a narrow alley, at both sides of which closed, locked wooden doors could be seen. No signs here. Just shut-up silence: And piles of ancient debris.
"What"s behind the doors?" Jason asked.
"People like you. People who can"t come out into the open. But they"re different from you in one way: they don"t have five hundred dollars . . . and a lot more besides, if I read you correctly."
"It"s going to cost me plenty," Jason said acidly, "to get my ID cards. Probably all I"ve got."
"She won"t overcharge you," the clerk said as he brought his quibble to a halt half on the sidewalk of the alley. Jason peered out, saw an abandoned restaurant, boarded up, with broken windows. Entirely dark inside. It repelled him, but apparently this was the place. He"d have to go along with it, his need being what it was: he could not be choosy.
And--they had avoided every checkpoint and barricade along the way; the clerk had picked a good route. So he had d.a.m.n little to complain about, all things considered.
Together, he and the clerk approached the open-hanging broken front door of the restaurant. Neither spoke; they concentrated on avoiding the rusted nails protruding from the sheets of plywood hammered into place, presumably to protect the windows.
"Hang on to my hand," the clerk said, extending it in the shadowy dimness that surrounded them. "I know the way and it"s dark. The electricity was turned off on this block three years ago. To try to get the people to vacate the buildings here so that they could be burned down." He added, "But most of them stayed on."
The moist, cold hand of the hotel clerk led him past what appeared to be chairs and tables, heaped up into irregular tumbles of legs and surfaces, interwoven with cobwebs and grainy patterns of dirt. They b.u.mped at last against a black, unmoving wall; there the clerk stopped, retrieved his hand, fiddled with something in the gloom.
"I can"t open it," he said as he fiddled. "It can only be opened from the other side, _her_ side. What I"m doing is signaling that we"re here."
A section of the wall groaningly slid aside. Jason, peering, saw into nothing more than additional darkness. And abandonment.
"Step on through," the clerk said, and maneuvered him forward. The wall, after a pause, slid shut again behind them.
Lights winked on. Momentarily blinded, Jason shielded his eyes and then took a good look at her workshop.
It was small. But he saw a number of what appeared to be complex and highly specialized machines. On the far side a workbench. Tools by the hundreds, all neatly mounted in place on the walls of the room. Below the workbench large cartons, probably containing a variety of papers. And a small generator-driven printing press.
And the girl. She sat on a high stool, hand-arranging a line of type. He made out pale hair, very long but thin, dribbling down the back of her neck onto her cotton work shirt. She wore jeans, and her feet, quite small, were bare. She appeared to him to be, at a guess, fifteen or sixteen. No b.r.e.a.s.t.s to speak of, but good long legs; he liked that. She wore no makeup whatsoever, giving her features a white, slightly pastel tint.
"Hi," she said.
The clerk said, "I"m going. I"ll try not to spend the five hundred dollars in one place." Touching a b.u.t.ton, he caused the section of wall to slide aside; as it did so the lights in the workroom clicked out, leaving them once again in absolute darkness.
From her stool the girl said, "I"m Kathy."
"I"m Jason," he said. The wall had slid shut, now, and the lights had come on again. She"s really very pretty, he thought. Except that she had a pa.s.sive, almost listless quality about her. As if nothing to her, he thought, is worth a d.a.m.n. Apathy? No, he decided. She was shy; that was the explanation.
"You gave him five hundred dollars to bring you here?" Kathy said wonderingly; she surveyed him critically, as if seeking to make some kind of value judgment about him, based on his appearance.
"My suit isn"t usually this rumpled," Jason said.
"It"s a nice suit. Silk?"
"Yes." He nodded.
"Are you a student?" Kathy asked, still scrutinizing him. "No, you"re not; you don"t have that pulpy pasty color they have, from living subsurface. Well, that leaves only one other possibility."
"That I"m a criminal," Jason said. "Trying to change my ident.i.ty before pols and nats get me."
"Are you?" she said, with no sign of uneasiness. It was a simple, flat question.
"No." He did not amplify, not at that moment. Perhaps later.
Kathy said, "Do you think a lot of those nats are robots and not real people? They always have those gas masks on so you can"t really tell."
"I"m content just to dislike them," Jason said. "Without looking into it any further."
"What ID do you need? Driver"s license? Police-file ident card? Proof of employment at a legal job?"
He said, "Everything. Including membership tab in the Musicians Union Local Twelve."
"Oh, you"re a musician." She regarded him with more interest, now.
"I"m a vocalist," he said. "I host an hour-long TV variety show Tuesday night at nine. Maybe you"ve seen it. The Jason Taverner Show."
"I don"t own a TV set any more," the girl said. "So I guess I wouldn"t recognize you. Is it fun to do?"
"Sometimes. You meet a lot of show-biz people and that"s fine if that"s what you like. I"ve found them mostly to be people like anybody else. They have their fears. They"re not perfect. Some of them are very funny, both on and off camera."
"My husband always used to tell me I have no sense of humor," the girl said. "He thought everything was funny. He even thought it was funny when he was drafted into the flats."
"Did he still laugh by the time he got out?" Jason asked. "He never did. He was killed in a surprise attack by students. But it wasn"t their fault; he was shot by a fellow nat."
Jason said, "How much is it going to cost me to get my full set of ID? You better tell me now before you start on them."
"I charge people what they can afford," Kathy said, once more setting up her line of type. "I"m going to charge you a lot because I can tell you"re rich, by the way you gave Eddy five hundred dollars to get you here, and by your suit. Okay?" Briefly she glanced in his direction. "Or am I wrong? Tell me."
"I have five thousand dollars on me," Jason said. "Or, rather, less five hundred. I"m a world-famous entertainer; I work a month every year at the Sands in addition to my show. In fact, I appear at a number of first-cla.s.s clubs, when I can squeeze them into my tight schedule."
"Gee," Kathy said. "I wish I had heard of you; then I could be impressed."
He laughed.
"Did I say something stupid?" Kathy asked timidly.
"No," Jason said. "Kathy, how old are you?"
"I"m nineteen. My birthday is in December, so I"m almost twenty. How old did you think I am by looking at me?"
"About sixteen," he said.
Her mouth turned down in a childlike pout. "That"s what everybody says," she said in a low voice. "It"s because I don"t have any bosom. If I had a bosom I"d look twenty-one. How old are you?" She stopped fiddling with her type and eyed him intently. "I"d guess about fifty."
Fury flowed through him. And misery.
"You look like your feelings are hurt," Kathy said.
"I"m forty-two," Jason said tightly.
"Well, what"s the difference? I mean, they"re both--"
"Let"s get down to business," Jason broke in. "Give me a pen and paper and I"ll write down what I want and what I want each card to say about me. I want this done exactly right. You better be good."
"I made you mad," Kathy said. "By saying you look fifty. I guess on closer examination you really don"t. You look about thirty." She handed him pen and paper, smiling shyly. And apologetically.
Jason said, "Forget it." He patted her on the back.
"I"d rather people didn"t touch me," Kathy said; she slid away.
Like a fawn in the woods, he thought. Strange; she"s afraid to be touched even a little and yet she"s not afraid to forge doc.u.ments, a felony that could get her twenty years in prison. Maybe n.o.body bothered to tell her it"s against the law. Maybe she doesn"t know.