“What are you looking at?” the girl asked, her head on her folded arms, face-up in the deep green lawn.
“I’m lost.” It was the first thing that entered his mind.
“This is Holly Street and the cross street is Glen. Where do you want to be?”
“I want to be home,” he said.
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look at your ident card. In your wallet.”
He reached into his coat and brought out his wallet. The card was there, a strip of plastic with words and numbers punched into it.
2319 Pepper Lane
That was his address, and above it was his name. He read that, too.
Coates, John B.
“I slipped over,” he said.
“Over what?” She raised her head.
Bending down he showed her the ident card. “Look, it says John Coates. But my name’s Allen Purcell; I picked the name Coates at random.” He ran his thumb across the raised plastic, feeling it.
The girl sat up and tucked her bare, deeply-tanned legs under her. Her breasts, even as she sat, remained up-tilted. Her nipples projected prettily. “Very interesting,” she said.
“Now I’m Mr. Coates.”
“Then what happened to Allen Purcell?” She smoothed her hair back and smiled up.
“He must be back there,” Mr. Coates said. “But I’m Allen Purcell,” Allen said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Sliding to her feet the girl put a hand on his shoulder and guided him to the sidewalk. “On the corner is a cab-box. Ask the cab to take you home. Pepper Lane is about two miles from here. Do you want me to call it for you?”
“No,” he said. “I can do it.”
He set off along the pavement, looking for the cab-box. Never having seen one, he walked past it.
“There,” the girl called, hands cupped to her mouth.
Nodding, he pulled the switch. A moment later the cab dropped to the pavement beside him and said: “Where to, sir?”
The trip took only a minute. The cab landed; he pushed coins into its slot; and then he was standing before a house.
His house.
The house was big, imposing, dominating a ridge of cedars and peppers. Sprinklers hurled water across the sloping lawns on both sides of the brick path. In the rear was a garden of dahlias and wisteria, a tumbling patch of deep red and purple.
On the front porch was a baby. An agile sitter perched on the railing nearby, its lens monitoring. The baby noticed Mr. Coates; smiling, it reached up its arm and burbled.
The front door—solid hard wood, with brass inlay—was wide open. From within the house drifted the sounds of music: a jazzy dance band.
He entered.
The living room was deserted. He examined the rug, the fireplace, the piano, and he recognized it from his research. Reaching, he plinked a few notes. Then he wandered into the dining room. A large mahogany table filled the center. On the table was a vase of iris. Along two walls were a line of mounted plates, glazed and ornate; he inspected them and then passed on, into a hall. Broad stairs led up: he gazed up, saw a landing and open doors, then turned toward the kitchen.
The kitchen overwhelmed him. It was long, gleaming-white, and it contained every kind of appliance he had heard of and some he had not. On the immense stove a meal was cooking, and he peered into a pot, sniffing. Lamb, he decided.
While he was sniffing there was a noise behind him. The back door opened and a woman entered, breathless and flushed.
“Darling!” she exclaimed, hurrying to him. “When did you get home?”
She was dark, with tumbles of hair bouncing against her shoulders. Her eyes were huge and intense. She wore shorts and a halter and sandals.
She was Gretchen Malparto.
The clock on the mantel read four-thirty. Gretchen had drawn the drapes, and the living room was in shadow. Now she paced about, smoking, gesturing jerkily. She had changed to a print skirt and peasant blouse. The baby, whom Gretchen called “Donna,” was upstairs in her crib, asleep.
“Something’s wrong,” Gretchen repeated. “I wish you’d tell me what it is. Damn it, do I have to beg?” Turning, she faced him defiantly. “Johnny, this isn’t like you.”
He lay on the couch, stretched out, a gin sling in one hand. Above him the ceiling was a mild green, and he contemplated it until Gretchen’s voice shattered at him.
“Johnny, for Christ’s sake!”
He roused himself. “I’m right here. I’m not standing outdoors.”
“Tell me what happened.” She came over and settled on the arm of the couch. “Is it because of what happened Wednesday?”
“What happened Wednesday?” He was, in a detached way, interested.
“At Frank’s party. When you found me upstairs with—” She looked away. “I forget his name. The tall, blond-haired one. You seemed mad; you were a little this way. Is that it? I thought we agreed not to interfere with each other. Or do you want it to work just one way?”
He asked: “How long have we been married?”
“This is a lecture, I suppose.” She sighed. “Go ahead. Then it’s my turn.”
“Just answer my question.”
“I forget.”
Meditating, he said: “I thought wives always knew.”
“Oh, come off it.” She pulled away and stalked over to the phonograph. “Let’s eat. I’ll have it serve us. Or do you want to go out for dinner? Maybe you’ll feel better where there’s people—instead of cooped up here.”
He didn’t feel cooped up. From where he lay he could see most of the downstairs of the house. Room after room . . . like living in an office building. Renting a whole floor; two floors. And in the back of the house, in the garden, was a three-room guest cottage.
In fact, he felt nothing at all. The gin sling had anesthetized him.
“Care to buy a head?” he asked her.
“I don’t understand.”
“A stone head. Bronzed thermoplastic, to be absolutely accurate. Responds to cutting tools. Doesn’t that ring a bell? You thought the job was quite original.”
“Rave away.”
He said: “A year? Two years? Approximately.”
“We were married in April 2110. So it must be four years.”
“That’s a good long time,” he said. “Mrs. Coates.”
“Yes, Mr. Coates.”
“And this house?” He liked the house.
“This house,” Gretchen said fiercely, “belonged to your mother. And I’m sick of hearing about it. I wish we had never moved here; I wish we had sold the goddamn thing. We could have got a good price two years ago; now real estate’s down.”
“It’ll go up. It always does.”
Glaring at him, Gretchen strode across the living room to the hall. “I’ll be upstairs, changing for dinner. Tell it to serve.”
“Serve,” he said.
With a snort of exasperation, Gretchen left. He heard the click of her heels on the stairs and then that, too, faded.
The house was lovely: it was spacious, luxuriously furnished, solidly built, and modern. It would last a century. The garden was full of flowers and the freezer was full of food. Like heaven, he thought. Like a vision of the after-reward, for all the years of public service. For all the sacrifice and struggle, bickerings and Mrs. Birmingham. The ordeal of the block meetings. The tension and sternness of the Morec society.
A part of him reached out to this, and he knew what that part was named. John Coates was now in his own world, and it was the antithesis of Morec.
Close to his ear, a voice said: “There remains some island of ego.”
A second voice, a woman’s, said: “But submerged.”
“Totally withdrawn,” the man said. “The shock of failure. When the Psi-testing collapsed. He was at the edge of the Resort, starting back out. And he couldn’t.”
The woman asked: “Isn’t there a better solution?”
“He needed one at that instant. He couldn’t return to Morec, and he had found no help at the Resort. For that I’m partly to blame; I wasted time on the testing.”
“You thought it would help.” The woman seemed to be moving nearer. “Can he hear us?”
“I doubt it. There’s no way to tell. The catalepsy is complete, so he can’t signal.”
“How long will it last?”
“Hard to say. Days, weeks, maybe the balance of his life.” Malparto’s voice seemed to recede, and he strained to catch it. “Maybe we should inform his wife.”
“Can you tell anything about his inner world?” Gretchen, too, was dimming. “What kind of fantasy is he lost in?”
“An escape.” The voice vanished, then momentarily returned. “Time will tell.” It was gone.
Struggling from the couch, Mr. John Coates shouted: “Did you hear them? Did you?”
At the top of the stairs Gretchen appeared, hairbrush in one hand, stockings over her arm. “What’s the matter?”
He appealed in despair. “It was you and your brother. Couldn’t you hear them? This is a—” He broke off.