But it was too late.
It burst through the fog, a serpent's head on a long, sinuous neck. A dinosaur? No, more like a dragon. The head was stylized, ornamented, inanimate—it was the prow of a ship.
A Viking ship!
Johnsmith swallowed a mouthful of water as the graceful long ship glided by. He could clearly see the men in the bow, their long hair and beards matted from the salt air, their tarnished helmets dented, their round shields strapped to the hull as they pulled at the oars. Their king, a huge man standing on the deck, peered over the side, hearing Johnsmith cough.
The king shouted something incomprehensible at his men, and the oars on the starboard side were shipped en masse. The long ship swung back toward Johnsmith, who screamed, taking more salt water into his lungs and coughing. He flailed wildly, trying to swim away from the long ship. An oar was extended toward him by one of the Vikings.
It was at that moment that Johnsmith dropped the onees.
Light blossomed out of the foggy night. He was still sitting in his living room, his breath ragged, his heart pounding.
"Jesus," he breathed. For several minutes, he couldn't quite believe that he was back in his apartment, dry and alone. He'd read enough about the Vikings to know what would have happened if they had gotten their hands on him . . . .
But how
could
they get their hands on him? They were nothing more than neural impulses, figures in a synthetic dream. They couldn't really hurt him.
It was then that he smelled his own shit. That part of the dream had been real enough, it seemed. Shame-faced, Johnsmith carefully got to his feet with the intention of changing his clothes.
After using a full day's allotment of water in the shower, he put on his green kimono and returned to the living room, grateful to be clean once again. He was certain that there was plenty of life left in the onees, if he could find them among the debris. He hadn't cleaned this effapt since he'd moved in six weeks ago.
One of the onees lay gleaming on the rug. Using a matchbook cover, Johnsmith knelt and guided the tiny sphere into the film canister. Next time, he would use only one, at least at the beginning. The intensity of the oneiric images had made him forget where he really was.
Still, he thought as he crawled on his hands and knees, he had enjoyed the onees until he got scared. If he only took one at a time, there would still be some anchor in reality, most likely. A more gradual descent into the subconscious would be wise. But what the hell, he'd rarely acted so spontaneously. He was proud of himself, in a perverse way. He was okay now; quite relaxed, in fact. The experience had done him good, shocked him out of his depressed state.
He spied another onee, under his chair. On hands and knees, he used the matchbook again, scooping it up. His heart was beating at a normal rate now, and he felt pretty good. It had been exciting, meeting up with a shipful of Vikings.
They probably hadn't been Vikings at all. With his
Beowulf
fixation, he must have imagined Geats. That could have been King Hygelac's long ship. Indeed, the height of the man on the deck suggested a giant, which, by all accounts, Hygelac had been. Or maybe it was Hygelac's nephew, Beowulf himself. Johnsmith figured that all that stuff was rattling around inside his brain, so it was probably what the onees had brought out and made real to him.
He finally gave up without finding the third onee. Maybe it had fallen between the louvers of the floor vent. If so, it would go to one of the trash bins downstairs, and would be as hard to find as the proverbial needle in the haystack. It would be compacted and added to one of the trash islands in the harbor, where some derelict might stumble on it and have an experience that wine could never provide. At least, he hoped so. It was more likely, of course, that the onee would be buried so deeply that it would lie dormant until its potential was gone.
Well, at least he had two of them left. Now that he knew first hand what they were like, he was actually considering taking them tomorrow when he appeared before the Triple-S inquisitors. Maybe he really could get out of going to the moon.
Or maybe they'd put him in cold storage for a while. After all, he'd be breaking the law, wouldn't he? Come to think of it, even though it was against the law to buy or sell onees, was it illegal to have them in your possession? It didn't seem possible that you could have them if you hadn't bought them . . .unless, of course, somebody had given them to you. And that was exactly what had happened, wasn't it? Ryan Effner had given them to him, without solicitation of any kind.
So maybe he could get away with it. And even if he didn't, wasn't a few years in stasis better than spending the rest of his life completely off the planet?
It was something to think about. And since he had to be at Triple-S at nine in the morning, the
time
to think about it was now. But he didn't want to just hang around here brooding. Without even putting on his jacket, he went impulsively to the door.
As he threw it open, he saw a fat, black man standing in the hall, holding something that looked like a fountain pen.
"Can I help you?" Johnsmith asked.
"I'm looking for someone . . . ."
"What's the name?"
"Uh, Judy . . .Judy Takahashi."
"Well, I don't know anybody by that name," Johnsmith said, staring at the thing in the guy's hand. "But there are a lot of people moving in and out of these apts all the time."
"Well, she just moved in, and I'm not too sure of the apt number."
"I see." At that moment, Johnsmith recognized the gleaming, black object as the guy shoved it into his pocket. It was a sound scoop; he'd seen a dimensional picture of one in
Pixine
a few weeks ago.
"If I meet Judy Takahashi, I'll tell her you're looking for her," Johnsmith said. "Of course, it isn't likely I'll meet her, since there are over a hundred and fifty apartments on this floor, but who knows?"
"Yeah, right. Who knows?"
"What's your name?" Johnsmith asked.
"Uh, Sonny. My name's Sonny."
Johnsmith waited for the expected follow-up question, but it didn't come. He offered the usual information anyway. "My name is Johnsmith Biberkopf."
"Glad to meet you, sir." Sonny stuck out his hand.
As Johnsmith shook it, he noticed that it was slippery with sweat. It made sense that Sonny would be perspiring heavily after walking up fourteen flights. And yet, the guy didn't seem winded, overweight as he was. Johnsmith began to suspect that Sonny had been listening at his door for quite a while. Maybe he was a P.A. Of course, the official government line was that there was no such thing as a P.A. P.A.s were unconstitutional, but since when did the administration give a shit about that? Everybody knew that they existed, both to provide full employment and to make sure people didn't get out of space service.
"Would you like to come inside?" Johnsmith said, figuring what the hell? If they wanted to keep an eye on him, why not? He wasn't going anywhere. Except to the moon. "We can call the directory and find out which effapt is your friend's."
The P.A.—if that's what he really was—looked around uncertainly, and then said, "Thanks. I think I will."
"Cup of coffee?" Johnsmith asked as he shut the door behind Sonny. "I was just about to make some."
"Sounds good," Sonny replied, looking around at the tiny, sparsely furnished cubicle.
"Have a seat," Johnsmith said, gesturing at the meter-wide, plastic table where he ate his meals.
"Coffee's one of my few luxuries nowadays," Johnsmith said, measuring out spoonfuls into the coffee maker. "This is a real antique. My grandmother owned it. It's all I kept after the divorce."
Sonny didn't say anything.
"I moved here after my wife and I split up," Johnsmith said, and then, thinking what the hell, said: "To tell you the truth, my wife threw me out."
"Oh," said Johnsmith's guest, "I'm sorry."
Sonny didn't seem very surprised, though, which made Johnsmith's suspicion deepen. A P.A. would surely already know that he was divorced, would know all about him, in fact, and would doubtless perceive his newfound bachelorhood symptomatic of the nonproductivity that had led to his present dilemma. A Pre-Emptive Agent would also be certain that somebody like Johnsmith deserved to be drafted.
"I'm going to appear before the Triple-S tomorrow," Johnsmith said.
"Really?" Sonny did seem surprised by that, but perhaps only at the manner in which Johnsmith had blurted it out. Most people didn't talk about their bad luck that much. Now that Johnsmith had the P.A. off balance, though, he might as well keep at it. "A few minutes ago, I used onees for the first time in my life," he said.
Sonny didn't say anything at all. Johnsmith supposed that his own candor wouldn't inspire his unexpected guest to tell him the truth, but maybe it would make the bastard think twice about what he was doing here, if he was in fact a P.A. Johnsmith wondered how somebody who did what Sonny did for a living could sleep at night.
"A friend gave them to me, thinking that if I held them in my hand at the Triple-S hearing, I might be judged unfit for service. I doubt that it would work, and I don't think I'd have the nerve to do that, anyway, so I took them as a sort of farewell to civilian life. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Well . . ."
"It makes sense to me, even if it's nonsense to anybody else. I ended up suffering an illusion of almost drowning, and then being found by a boatload of Vikings."
"
Vikings?
" Alderdice immediately regretted his ejaculation. He composed himself, noting that Biberkopf kept right on babbling, though the suspect's eyebrows did arch a bit. There had been a report circulating through the Agency for the past few months, about onees that imprinted some kind of specific hallucinations on the user's memory. The hallucinations always had Vikings in them. The term the report had used was "archecoding." Just why this was significant enough to rate such a report had remained unexplained, but it was obviously important enough to the Agency to make them want to track down any and all such onees. Alderdice just might have lucked out and found a way to improve his standing in the Agency. "What were you saying about Vikings?" he asked, trying to sound only politely interested.
"Geats, really," said Biberkopf. "At least, that's what I think they were. Seventh century Danes, a group who seemed to disappear from the face of the earth sometime during the Dark Ages."
"Fascinating," Alderdice said, fearing that the point would be obscured by Biberkopf's rambling. "But what did the Vikings do?"
"Not much. I forgot that it was only an illusion and panicked. I dropped the onees."
"But you're
sure
you saw Vikings—I mean Geats?" Alderdice knew that he shouldn't have asked that question. Biberkopf's brow furrowed; the guy had been going on about the onees with abandon, and now he might suspect that something was wrong because of Alderdice's excitability.
"Well, I thought I saw Geats. See, I used to teach a class about
Beowulf
at the University, and . . ."
"Bay of Wolf? Is that in Canada?"
"Uh, no. It's the name of a Geat, a kind of Viking, as I said before. That's probably why I hallucinated a Geatish ship."
"Ah." Alderdice was relieved to see that Biberkopf had a rationale for why he'd seen the archecoded images.
"It was kind of scary, but I enjoyed it in a way. Now I'm not so upset about going to the moon. Even if I have to slave away in a mine for the rest of my miserable life, at least I can take onees on my off hours—and I hear they've got a decent library you can jack into up there."
"Yeah, I've heard that, too."
"Coffee's ready," Biberkopf said, grabbing two cups that rested on a soggy paper towel. "Take anything in yours?"
"Sweetener, please."
"I can whiten it for you, too." Biberkopf lifted up packets that had obviously been stolen from a Kwikkee-Kwizeen.
"That's okay," Alderdice said. "Just the sweetener."
As he stirred the coffee, Biberkopf said, "I never thought Ronnie would toss me out. No matter what happened, I thought she'd always be my girl. Know what I mean?"
"Yes, I do." Alderdice remembered all too clearly how Lon had dumped him a year ago. He thoughtfully took a steaming cup from Biberkopf.
"I guess it's just part of growing up, finding out about these things, huh?"
"I guess so." Alderdice's first sip of coffee scalded the roof of his mouth. He grimaced and set the cup on the table.
"It's kind of like when somebody close to you dies. You don't really understand that it's possible until it actually happens. There's a terrific sense of isolation that follows. It's as if you're the only one in the universe who this has ever happened to. But after a while you become less solipsistic, and you find out that other people are dying, people who aren't loved ones. They're somebody else's loved ones, though, and these other people maybe feel the same way you did when it happened to you. So you try to break through their isolation, and then you might find out that they don't want you to. That they'd rather be alone."
Alderdice took another sip of coffee. Biberkopf was really babbling now. But at least he wasn't going anyplace. Not physically, anyway.
"It's all a great mystery. Love, death, all of it," Biberkopf said. "No matter how many times somebody says that, it doesn't make it any less true, does it?"
"I guess not. So what did you do with the onees, Mr. Biberkopf?"
"Call me Smitty. Everybody does. We even named my son Smitty II."
"That's nice—what about the onees, though?"
"I've got them right here." Biberkopf picked up a canister and smiled. "Would you like to try one?"
ALDERDICE WAS TEMPTED to do it. In some crazy, self-destructive way, he wanted to touch an onee and act peculiar for once in his life. But he couldn't override the programming that made him always do what he was supposed to.
"Do you . . ." It sounded preposterous, but he said it anyway. " . . .realize that what you've just said is a Conglom offense?"