“It really wasn’t any good?” Kathy asked trustingly.
“Jeff Pomeroy,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, is the itchy asshole of the world. He and those like him. His imitators.”
Kathy said, “He was at Morningside for a while. I didn’t get to know him, but he was there.”
“I can believe it,” he said, half believing it.
“Do you know what he said to me once?”
“Knowing him,” Jason began, “I’d say–”
“He said I was the tamest person he ever knew. Isn’t that interesting? And he saw me go into one of my mystic states–you know; when I lie down and scream–and still he said that. I think he’s a very perceptive person; I really do. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Shall we go back to my room, then?” Kathy asked. “And screw like minks?”
He grunted in disbelief. Had she really said that? Turning, he tried to make out her face, but they had come to a patch between signs; all was dark for the moment. Jesus, he said to himself. _I’ve got to get myself out of this_. I’ve got to find my way back to my own world!
“Does my honesty bother you?” she asked.
“No,” he said grimly. “Honesty never bothers me. To be a celebrity you have to be able to take it.” Even that, he thought. “All kinds of honesty,” he said. “Your kind most of all.”
“What kind is mine?” Kathy asked.
“Honest honesty,” he said.
“Then you do understand me,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I really do.”
“And you don’t look down on me? As a little worthless person who ought to be dead?”
“No,” he said, “you’re a very important person. And very honest, too. One of the most honest and straightforward individuals I’ve ever met. I mean that; I swear to God I do.”
She patted him friendlily on the arm. “Don’t get all worked up over it. Let it come naturally.”
“It comes naturally,” he assured her. “It really does.”
“Good,” Kathy said. Happily. He had, evidently, eased her worries; she felt sure of him. And on that his life depended . . . or did it really? Wasn’t he capitulating to her pathological reasoning? At the moment he did not really know.
“Listen,” he said haltingly. “I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen carefully. You belong in a prison for the criminally insane.”
Eerily, frighteningly, she did not react; she said nothing.
“And,” he said, “I’m getting as far away from you as I can.” He yanked his hand loose from hers, turned, made his way off in the opposite direction. Ignoring her. Losing himself among the ordinaries who milled in both directions along the cheap, neon-lit sidewalks of this unpleasant part of town.
I’ve lost her, he thought, and in doing so I have probably lost my goddamn life.
Now what? He halted, looked around him. Am I carrying a microtransmitter, as she says? he asked himself. Am I giving myself away with every step I take?
Cheerful Charley, he thought, told me to look up Heather Hart. And as everybody in TV-land knows, Cheerful Charley is never wrong.
But will I live long enough, he asked himself, to reach Heather Hart? And if I do reach her and I’m bugged, won’t I simply be carrying my death onto her? Like a mindless plague? And, he thought, if Al Bliss didn’t know me and Bill Wolfer didn’t know me, why should Heather know me? But Heather, he thought, is a six, like myself. The only other six I know. Maybe that will be the difference. If there is any difference.
He found a public phone booth, entered, shut the door against the noise of traffic, and dropped a gold quinque into the slot.
Heather Hart had several unlisted numbers. Some for business, some for personal friends, one for–to put it bluntly– lovers. He, of course, knew that number, having been to Heather what he had, and still was, he hoped.
The viewscreen lit up. He made out the changing shapes as indicating that she was taking the call on her carphone.
“Hi,” Jason said.
Shading her eyes to make him out, Heather said, “Who the hell are you?” Her green eyes flashed. Her red hair dazzled.
“Jason.”
“I don’t know anybody named Jason. How’d you get this number?” Her tone was troubled but also harsh. “Get the hell off my goddamn phone!” she scowled at him from the viewscreen and said, “Who gave you this number? I want his name.”
Jason said, “You told me the number six months ago. When you first had it installed. Your private of the private lines; right? Isn’t that what you called it?”
“Who told you that?”
“You did. We were in Madrid. You were on location and I had me a six-day vacation half a mile from your hotel. You used to drive over in your Rolls quibble about three each afternoon. Right?”
Heather said in a chattering, staccato tone, “Are you from a magazine?”
“No,” Jason said. “I’m your number one paramour.”
“My _what?_”
“Lover.”
“Are you a fan? You’re a fan, a goddamn twerp fan. I’ll kill you if you don’t get off my phone.” The sound and image died; Heather had hung up.
He inserted another quinque into the slot, redialed.
“The twerp fan again,” Heather said, answering. She seemed more poised, now. Or was it resigned?
“You have one imitation tooth,” Jason said. “When you’re with one of your lovers you glue it into place in your mouth with a special epoxy cement that you buy at Harney’s. But with me you sometimes take it out, put it in a glass with Dr. Sloom’s denture foam. That’s the denture cleanser you prefer. Because, you always say, it reminds you of the days when Bromo Seltzer was legal and not just black market made in somebody’s basement lab, using all three bromides that Bromo Seltzer discontinued years ago when–”
“How,” Heather interrupted, “did you get hold of this information?” Her face was stiff–her words brisk and direct. Her tone . . . he had heard it before. Heather used it with people she detested.
“Don’t use that ‘I don’t give a fuck’ tone with me,” he said angrily. “Your false tooth is a molar. You call it Andy. Right?”
“A twerp fan knows all this about me. God. My worst nightmare confirmed. What’s the name of your club and how many fans are there in it and where are you from and how, God damn it, did you get hold of personal details from my private life that you have no right to know in the first place? I mean, what you’re doing is illegal; it’s an invasion of privacy. I’ll have the pols after you if you call me once more.” She reached to hang up the receiver.
“I’m a six,” Jason said.
“A what? A six what? You have six legs; is that it? Or more likely six heads.”
Jason said, “You’re a six, too. That’s what’s kept us together all this time.”
“I’m going to die,” Heather said, ashen, now; even in the dim light of her quibble he could make out the change of color in her features. “What’ll it cost me to have you leave me alone? I always knew that some twerp fan would eventually–”
“Stop calling me a twerp fan,” Jason said bitingly; it infuriated him absolutely. It struck him as the ultimate in something or other; maybe a bird down, as the expression went now.
Heather said, “What do you want?”
“To meet you at Altrocci’s.”
“Yes, you’d know about that, too. The one place I can go without being ejaculated on by nerds who want me to sign menus that don’t even belong to them.” She sighed wretchedly. “Well, now that’s over. I won’t meet you at Altrocci’s or anywhere. Keep out of my life or I’ll have my prive-pols deball you and–”
“You have _one_ private pol,” Jason interrupted. “He’s sixtytwo years old and his name is Fred. Originally he was a sharpshooter with the Orange County Minutemen; used to pick off student jeters at Cal State Fullerton. He was good then, but he’s nothing to worry about now.”
“Is that so,” Heather said.
“Okay, let me tell you something else that how do you think I would know. Remember Constance Ellar?”
“Yes,” Heather said. “That nonentity starlet that looked like a Barbie Doll except that her head was too small and her body looked as if someone had inflated her with a CO2 cartridge, overinflated her.” Her lip curled. “She was utterly damn dumb.”
“Right,” he agreed. “Utterly damn dumb. That’s the exact ward. Remember what we did to her on my show? Her first planetwide exposure, because I had to take her in a tie-in deal. Do you remember that, what we did, you and I?”
Silence.
Jason said, “As a sop to us for having her on the show, her agent agreed to let her do a commercial for one of our quarter-time sponsors. We got curious as to what the product was, so before Miss Ellar showed up we opened the paper bag and discovered it was a cream for removing leg hair. God, Heather, you must–“