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 assume 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 circumstances, 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 nobody. 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 passed by Congress back in the terrible days of the Insurrection. The clerk carefully slowed his rattly quibble to a stop so as not to harass 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 damn 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 bumped 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.”