“Got it,” I acknowledged. “Thanks for the polite qualification.”
“Now, Sammy—”
“She’s my favorite sister; I protect her from dogs and strange men. I don’t have to be slapped with an ax. Okay, when do we start?”
“Better stop over in Cosmetics; I think they have a new face for you.”
“Make it a whole new head. See you. ‘By, Sis.”
They did not quite do that, but they did fit my personal phone under the overhang of my skull in back and then cemented hair over it. They dyed my hair to the same shade as that of my newly acquired sister, bleached my skin, and did things to my cheekbones and chin. The mirror showed me to be as good an authentic redhead as Sis. I looked at my hair and tried to recall what its natural shade had been, way back when. Then I wondered if Sis were what she seemed to be along those lines. I rather hoped so. Those teeth, now—Stow it, Sammy! She’s your sister.
I put on the kit they gave me and somebody handed me a jump bag, already packed. The Old Man had evidently been in Cosmetics, too; his skull was now covered by crisp curls of a shade just between pink and white. They had done something to his face, for the life of me I could not tell just what—but we were all three clearly related by blood and were all of that curious sub-race, the redheads.
“Come, Sammy,” he said. “Time is short. I’ll brief you in the car.” We went up by a route I had not known about and ended up on the Northside launching platform, high above New Brooklyn and overlooking Manhattan Crater.
I drove while the Old Man talked. Once we were out of local control he told me to set it automatic on Des Moines, Iowa. I then joined Mary and “Uncle Charlie” in the lounge. He gave us our personal histories briefly and filled in details to bring us up to date. “So here we are,” he concluded, “a merry little family party—tourists. And if we should happen to run into unusual events, that is how we will behave, as nosy and irresponsible tourists might.”
“But what is the problem?” I asked. “Or do we play this one entirely by ear?”
“Mmmm . . . possibly.”
“Okay. But when you’re dead, it’s nice to know why you’re dead, I always say. Eh, Mary?”
“Mary” did not answer. She had that quality, rare in babes and commendable, of not talking when she had nothing to say. The Old Man looked me over, his manner not that of a man who can’t make up his mind, but rather as if he were judging me as I was at that moment and feeding the newly acquired data into the machine between his ears.
Presently he said, “Sam, you’ve heard of ‘flying saucers’.”
“Huh? Can’t say that I have.”
“You’ve studied history. Come, now!”
“You mean those? The flying-saucer craze, ‘way back before the Disorders? I thought you meant something recent and real; those were mass hallucinations.”
“Were they?”
“Well, weren’t they? I haven’t studied much statistical abnormal psychology, but I seem to remember an equation. That whole period was psychopathic; a man with all his gaskets tight would have been locked up.”
“But this present day is sane, eh?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.” I pawed back through the unused drawers of my mind and found the answer I wanted. “I remember that equation now—Digby’s evaluating integral for second and higher order data. It gave a 93.7 percent certainty that the flying-saucer myth, after elimination of explained cases, was hallucination. I remember it because it was the first case of its type in the history of science in which the instances had been systematically collected and evaluated. Some sort of a government project, God knows why.”
The Old Man looked benignly avuncular. “Brace yourself, Sammy. We are going to inspect a flying saucer today. Maybe we’ll even saw off a piece for a souvenir, like true tourists.”
II
“Seen a newscast lately?” the Old Man went on.
I shook my head. Silly question—I’d been on leave.