I TRACK DOWN FREAKS

A Religious Vision, Disguised as a Sci-Fi/Horror Novel. Chapter 1. One of the mutant children was spared by its childï·“mother, who was at the time of its birth living in Venice, California, in the region known as "the canals." She knew she was supposed to bring it to the hospital, where it would be painlessly killed, but she did not obey the law. She was thirteen years old when her child was born. She was named Katherine Casey. She had run away from her home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a boy who had been in a small band whose origin was in that city and whose dispersal was in Los Angeles. The boy walked out barefoot over the stone bridges of the Venice canals every morning, looking for a job in the body of Los Angeles, shuffling slowly away and home, his yellow hair nodding back and forth around his face. Then he was beaten by three drunken thieves in Santa Monica in the beach parking lot when he came out of the bus where a friend of his was living, who turned on the headlights, which even then did not encompass the place where they were beating him. He died several days later, weakly smiling, making no effort to speak. His parents came to take his body. Katherine did not inform them of the coming birth. She spent two weeks alone in her room. The room was an attic. She looked out the window over a peaceful canal, where ducks were sitting on the water and chickens walked in the yards of her neighbors. She had always been a good reader, and she read piles of used books and magazines that were given to her by the boy and girl who lived on the lower floor of her house. The walls of the room were painted a restful color, and she had the knack of making her surroundings comfortable, although she had no money. This restfulness, reading and solitude, and the effect of the community where she lived, where musical instruments could be heard day and night, all made it possible for her to develop from the tragic, unlucky elements of her life, a sense of herself that was independent and strong. She brought herself to a state of moral scrupulousness without any conceivable use to her at the time, but which was soon to come into play, as she was faced with a situation requiring a difficult choice. The boy and girl from below began to dote on her, took pride in the thing that the world had left over, began to brag about the white flower, and although they were older than she, came upstairs nightly to hear her examine the questions that occurred to her, which seemed somehow to illuminate their lives for them. As the birth of the child approached, Katherine obtained medical books and pamphlets of advice wherever she could, and studied them. She then sought to examine herself internally, closing her eyes and calling forth images from her body, especially her womb, and willing them to fulfill the ideal of the medical drawings upon which she meditated. The child was born as she knew it would be ï·“ a male cylopean. The girl from downstairs, dressed in a white waitress' dress, with a paper cap pinned in her hair, pulled him from Katherine and gave out a short scream. Katherine's eyes were comfortable on the face of the infant and she loved him instantly. His face was in other respects similar to others of the human race, except for the ears, which were lower and longer than the ears of other infants. She poured her attention into the eye, which was like a long blue fish above the center of the nose. The pupil was actually the result of the overlaying of the pupils of two eyes not completely separated from one another, the hemispheres of the brain to which each was attached not having sufficiently distinguished themselves from one another. Katherine was amazed to see the piercing quality of the eye, shining up and searching the area. The people of the neighborhood soon knew of the child. Dustï·“covered trucks gathered in the yellow dirt before the house. Men, women and children stood in the low haze like a field of wheat around the house, as the ashes and pollen of the sky settled upon their hair and skins. Finally, the boy from the lower floor came to the front steps and without looking at the crowd, but only staring at the sheet of white paper he held in his hands, he read, "On this day our own Katherine Casey, of this place, has given birth to a prodigious child, whose name shall be Raphael. It is the mother's wish that no one give news of Raphael's birth, or of the form of Raphael, because she is afraid of the state authorities." He turned the stooping shoulders and bloated belly of his malnourishment up the stairs. Some people followed him to the papered attic room, and were momentarily blinded by one or another of the strokes of sunlight originating in the wood's knots and broken corners of the room. The mother and child were in a corner, below a blanketed window. Beside the bed was a wooden crate covered with a piece of white lace. Although they had expected their eyes would immediately seek out the infant, they could not remove their gazes from the mother, who was so thin and pale she was almost transparent. Everyone who passed during the first day and night did claim to admire Raphael, but they were not telling the truth. Some had nightmares that would not leave them for the rest of their lives. Even after Raphael was older, and could be seen playing in the area with the other children, with his melancholic mouth and the searchlight beam of his eye, and they knew and did like him, still the memory of the first seeing was terrible... In Katherine's time, as in our time, it is near to starvation that stands anyone who is forced to depend on the State for his food. Unlucky is the unlucky one, because the State, through all its programs, funds and loans, will not sustain him and will tend to reinforce his fate rather than to help him forestall it. A few bills and coins were shoved across the counter every month for those such as Katherine and her neighbors. Such a few that the old woman who stood on the Government's side of the counter, a short woman, who stood on a platform of wood in order to see the line, when she saw the face of Katherine, so lethargic and complete suddenly materalized before the counter, reached into her own pocketbook, that she kept on a lower shelf, took out five dollars and pushed it with the rest to the young girl. Now, in order to continue to receive even her small monthly amount, and to have added to it the sum required to feed and clothe her new son, it was necessary for Katherine to inform the State of Raphael's birth. But she could not let the State know he was a mutant. She wanted Raphael to live as long as possible. She knew she was wrong. The law was clear concerning the mutant births. They must be handed over to qualified members of the medical profession, who would see to it that they were disposed of in a safe, humane manner. She would not be blamed for the birth, if she simply obeyed the law. At first, when the monstrous births had begun, a few years ago, the mothers and fathers were thought to be the parties at fault. Articles were written suggesting that the drug-taking, unmarried sex, and slothful lives of the poor were the causes of the mutations. Of course, the parents of such children became afraid to bring them to the hospitals, fearing the shame of association. Therefore, new causes were suggested, one after the other, each cooked up in the public relations departments of the National Institutes of Health. Terrorists were blamed for poisoning the already undrinkable water of the cities. Witches and satanists were blamed. Chance, then Heaven, then China, then television (it was thought that the viewing of disgusting sex and violence throughout the day might somehow drip the forces of monstrousness from the eyes down into the wombs of TV-watching women), then various types of food were all in their turn blamed for the plague of freakish births in America. In fact, the cause was not with the women, nor with their husbands, nor was it even with their Government, but rather with the ones who came before them, their forefathers, those victorious generations who left behind them many records of their existence and victories, and evidences of their thinking very highly of themselves, tbe many arts bearing forth their lighted images, but had also, by their harder, more technical doings, (and largely unknown to themselves, truth to be told) left behind them the unhappy causes of monstrous births, by evil actions taken during a war in Asia. There, in the sea, in the air, coursing through the mouths and flesh of animals, adding to the weight and cell walls of the stiff capillaries of the growing plants eaten by men, or by the animals eaten in turn my men, America had used the chemical denuder of trees called Agent Orange, cacodylic acid 2,4,ï·“5,Tï·“, which contains the impurity 2,3,7,8ï·“tetrachloroï·“dibenzoï·“pï·“dioxin. This chemical was sprayed down with generous abandon by a nation so long fruitful with the blessings of argiculture that it did not think to modify its actions through a memory of any economical contingency when it came to matters of the land, but spread the cacodylic acid over three quarters of the farmland of Viet Nam, and poured it into the rivers, the result there being monstrous examples among all the species of that place: crooked trees, grasses, fishes, rice, water buffalo, and so on and on. There were children there whose tear ducts were placed in their throats in such a way that when they first cried they were strangled, there were cyclopses, there were twoheaded children, and children who did not fully separate from the formless home of all matter; and all were seen, or heard of, by an expedition that went from Harvard University, led by the scientist Matthew Meselson, and made its report in Nature Magazine, but it was too late, and so it happened that after not too many years, that poison came on the tides, back to the place of its past manufacture, and the monsters America had caused to be born in Asia soon had brothers and sisters in America itself. Then, laws were passed, whose object was the early detection and killing of the freaks. These laws were generally considered to be just, and were for the most part obeyed. The birth of children became tied to public policies and controls. The Institutions and Agencies that had it as their job to cover the land with words, made no mention of the cacodylic acid, for it was felt this knowledge might cause embarrassment in certain inviolable crypts. All well and good -- but as a result of the withholding of the true cause of the monstrous births, there were many theories, legends and prophecies that sprang up, carried forth by crackpots and men claiming an education they did not possess, and believed by the poor. And, as it has been whenever monsters seem to be advancing numerically over a place, the foremost thought soon became that the Government would fall, that the world would change hands... It then happened that, despite the law, there came to be women who did not take themselves to hospitals, but gave birth at home, and if the children were freaks, did not bring them to the hospitals, but hid them, in order to preserve their lives. Of those in the first noticeable wave of monstrous births, most did not survive past the first year or two. Some died of diseases unknown to those around them, some from more commonplace illnesses which they had no chemical ability to combat, some by the action of the Government, which had made the decision to strike forcefully against the new freaks. The freaks were becoming objects of veneration for the poor; around the core of their love for the freaks, they leaned all their hopes, for they were superstitious, believing in signs, studying events from a religious standpoint, as opposed to a historical one, and therefore believing that the cause of things follows its effects in time. The Government, seeing the people in a mood of rebellion, launched an attack against the symbols of the rebellion, the freaks, no matter how innocent the freaks may have been (none of them was over 2 years old when the program was approved) of themselves harboring rebellious thoughts. Innocence often suffers for the hopes of the guilty, and against the lives of a few freakish births ï·“ the kind that until recently all right-thinking parents had prayed against ï·“ how could you measure the peaceful continuance of American society? Therefore, assassins were chosen and trained to kill the freaks and those who protected them, for it was illegal to have one and not to have turned it over to the Government... Thus, when Katherine Casey's son Raphael was three weeks old he was taken across the street to another house. The child of another woman, who had been born without much fanfare at almost the same instant as Raphael, was placed in Katherine's arms. This child was also a boy, but his features were usual. The other woman had made the suggestion herself. This was a thing the women of the canals did for one another, to preserve the lives of the mutant children. Katherine placed the normal child's head against her breast when she heard the footsteps of the man from the State. He was a gray man, wide, with a mustache and beard. His shadow moved across the low bed. "Katherine Casey?" he said, without first introducing himself. She said yes. "Is this the child?" said the man, touching the normal boy under the chin with a plastic pencil. "His name is Raphael, he is three weeks old," she said. She turned her face from the boy so her words would not touch his face. The man touched the boy lightly on the ear with the eraser of his pencil, and said, "Welcome to the dole." Then he wrote on a clipboard, which he carried at his hip. Katherine found it difficult to look up at the generalized form of the man. "How much can we get?" she asked. He replied with a number that did not surprise her but made her heart sink in her bowed chest, for it was an amount of money that would not assure her and Raphael even the most basic needs of their young lives. Before he left, the man threw a bill on the bed, saying "Your emergency funds." Then he tore five tickets out of a book and they wafted to the small table. They were food stamps, yellow, with a drawing of abundant fruits, grains and one or two edible animals gathered together in the center. When he was gone, Katherine replaced the boy on the bed, and removed herself from contact with him. She was already thinking of Raphael, and of the moment when he would return. For this reason, she was not attentive to the other woman's child. No one came to her room for a long time. She fell asleep. Later, they woke her to tell her that the child had fallen from his side of the bed, and had been found there crying and screaming, when his mother and several other people entered the room. This boy's mother was a woman older than Katherine, who dressed in the bleak clothes of someone who long ago was a college student and continues to sheath herself in those days. Her fury worked its way through the levels of her sociality like an animal hurtling itself through a maze, until it flashed from her eyes and throat, and louder than she had ever spoken, she screamed at Katherine, she would never forgive what she took to be Katherine's contempt for her child's life. "Every day I will ask for the death of your monster," she said. Her child's skin was broken and he was bleeding. The woman took him to a doctor in Santa Monica, who said his cranium had been damaged in the fall. In the years that followed, Raphael and the other boy grew up among the other children of the area. The other boy was not able to move his legs or speak, and for years the enraged face of the mother was seen at the bay window of her house, looking out at the street, watching Raphael and the others playing in the street. Katherine made every effort to win the forgiveness of the other woman, whom she had wronged by placing her longing for her son higher in her thoughts than her responsibility to the neighbor who had been kind to her. The other woman refused to be comforted or aided by Katherine. However, the woman was also full of many beliefs, and conducted her life without the principle of vengeance, and she never reported Raphael to the State, and only lived quietly in her house with her crippled son. Six years later, Raphael heard in conversation among friends about the woman who had cursed his existence. His eye, never still in the head, darted and glanced down the streets of the town looking for that woman's house. When he was led there by his friends they found the paralyzed boy rocking in a hammock that hung between two trees beside the black and silver canal. Raphael looked down on the other boy. The other was not startled to see the cyclopean. The woman, however, saw through the window that the cause of her son's misery once again had crossed the path of her son. The fears that illuminated her mind when she dreamed joined her now in broad daylight. She had always had it in her to burst forth in one moment of violence, given half a chance, to revenge herself and to convey her anger to the spiritual beings she felt watched over her, and whose testing her, she felt, was the cause of her sorrows. She ran into the yard with a flat pan, holding it as if to strike the head of Raphael. When she arrived at the place where they were, she saw that Raphael held her son's head cradled in his hands, and she saw that a huge tear dropped from the tip of Raphael's nose onto her son's forehead. Then, to see his mother standing there was so funny to the boy that he emitted the first vocal noise, a low growl, that she had heard from him in almost six years. While Raphael watched, sitting in the gravel and glass of the untended white dust, the woman reached into the hammock to manipulate her son's legs, as she often had done before, to find now, for the first time, that the muscles offered resistance, in the form of weak tremors from some distant center. Within a week, the boy was walking in and out of the house, up and down the street, laughing and shy, congratulated wherever he went. His mother sat up that first night, and in the morning she told another woman that Raphael was a miraculous healer. CHAPTER 2. John Cade parked his car and stood up in the openair parking lot. He walked to the front of the car and touched the long scratch in the paint. Then he turned and walked toward a low building made of cinder blocks painted green. There was a small sign of wood with the words, "Government Records" to the side of the red iron door. When he reached it, it opened from the inside and he entered. An old man wearing a grey uniform with a white belt crossing his chest said, "Good day to you, Mr. Cade." Cade went down the corridors he knew so well. There were many others in the corridors, and they all knew Cade. But Cade and they did not speak. He did not look at the people who passed him by, for he had long ago learned there was no use in it. They would not look him back, although for all the time he was not looking at them, they looked him strongly up and down. They knew who Cade was, although theoretically they didn't. They didn't know the full story but they knew that even among the asssssins, he was a special case. These were the same people, whom Guttmann called Cade's "colleagues," who lived in the apartment complex where he lived, but there, as here, they had no exchanges with Cade. Still, he loved the physical attributes of his organization. He loved that here there was no smell. Even in the cafeteria there was only the heaviness of the steam, but the steam had no smell. The people had no smell. Only the women, who sometimes smelled like flowers. Everyone in a great organization knows the pleasurable and terrible sensation of being on the immense platform, either in the sky or under the ground, with all the others of the organization going around at their work. He loved the sound of the computers. Electricity and fluorescence were all around. Cade remembered at the beginning ï·“ï·“ the beginning of what, he could not remember ï·“- when he had asked Guttmann if he could sleep here at night, possibly on a couch in Guttmann's office, but Guttmann had said, "Your apartment has been set aside for you. Don't be afraid to be alone." Here it was different than the apartments. Here was less foliage. Instead there were furniture and carpentryï·“work, carpets, pools of paperfiltered light, and the dusty air of a former century. On the walls were maps, charts, tables, lists of names, lists of specializations, instructions and announcements, with only the rarest illustration, to break the tedium of reading, and these not pleasant, but sad to see. He would rather have been spared such pictures, but for Cade it was part of his job to study them, and to make sure of seeing them all, each morning when he came in. Today there were one or two new additions. Cade went up to them and began his looking, into which he threw his whole back. Dr. Guttmann came up behind Cade. He had been in his office, behind pebbled glass, when he had seen the unmistakable shadow of Cade in the corridor. "This is your next," said Guttmann, about a picture. Guttmann was Cade's mentor. He rubbed the back of Cade's neck as he and Cade studied the photograph. Greenï·“gowned medical corpsmen went by behind them. Cade felt proud to be so publicly the one nearest to Guttmann, although this was not from any sense of a hierarchy, according to which he may have been considered to have surpassed any of the others who went by, by the favor in which he was held by Guttmann. Cade was well aware of his position's constancy. It was a position outside the Governmental tables of organization, one with no advancement and no diminishment, and as far as Cade was able to remember, he had always held his present position, and done this job. No one was above him except Dr. Guttmann. He barely knew anyone but Dr. Guttmann ï·“ and the idea of his taking over Guttmann's job had never occurred to him, nor could it, any more than the body could think of taking over the job of the mind, which it knows to have been there before itself, and even suspects to have created it. "Does it have a name, Doctor?" asked Cade. "This is called Raphael," said Guttmann, his face much rounder than Cade's. His eyes were almost hidden among coppery mounds and creases. "It is a cyclopean" he continued, almost needlessly, thought Cade, although it wasn't up to him to pass judgment on Guttmann's choice of when to speak and when to be silent, when to teach and when to refrain from teaching, and he did not pass judgment, although he could see for himself the child was oneï·“eyed. Behind Cade and Guttmann, came all the other Agents in Cade's section, and all went into the door of their classroom, where they sat waiting, until Guttmann came in with Cade. "There we go, said Guttmann." "Time to begin the class." In they went, Cade with his erect posture, and Guttmann with his stooped scrapingï·“along style of walking that Cade sometimes wished were also his. Cade went to his seat and put his notebooks down. He lost track of things for a few moments, then there was an increase in the level of noise, or perhaps it was a decrease in the temperature, and a wind blowing through, but whatever it was, something drew his attention from the void and returned it to the classroom. A pamphlet taped to a page in a ringï·“binder was passed around the classroom from employee to employee: "I want you men to read this carefully," said Guttmann, standing in front of the blackboard: Cade took it from his neighbor's hand: THE CURRENT RISE IN MUTANT BIRTHS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND ESPECIALLY IN AMERICA IS A CLEAR SIGN, AND A PORTENT THAT THE EARTH IS GOING THROUGH A PERIOD OF UPHEAVAL, AND IT IS SEEKING TO THROW MAN OFF. MAN IS OVER! MAN HAS HAD HIS DAY! WE ARE SPECIES ï·“ DEAD, SPECIES UNWORTHY! MUTANT REVERENCE! MUTANT ENRAPTUREMENT! Cade snorted with a low crackle and said to himself: "What dizzy characters run around in this world," and he thought of them, writing pamphlets, defending the wide assortment of mutants which Cade had come to loathe, and he was grateful he had escaped the fate of a simpleton and had instead been born with the native intelligence required to work for the Federal Government at the high level he had recently attained. As he passed the pamphlet to his left, to the man he knew as Agent White, a meanï·“looking, stocky man of approximately forty years, Cade attempted to attract White's attention with a contemptuous sneer. White took the binder in both of his protuberant hands. He did not catch Cade's friendly signal. He took the book as though it were a hunk of meat and he were starving. Looking around him, Cade thought it was pleasant to be among a group of such attractive men, and in the case of four or five, women. He knew, for they had all been told on the first day of the briefings, that one of the primary reasons for which he and the rest of them in this Section had been chosen, from all the people working for the Government in the various capacities, was their physical beauty... Guttmann went on to say that the proï·“mutation forces with foreign funds were increasing their propaganda and organizing efforts by leaps and bounds. That by the date of the present lecture the mentation of a large number of the nation's poor had been contaminated with the sentiments of this and similar publications. Cade felt sorry for the poor and the ignorant. This sorrow resulted in his laughing, something he didn't understand, but accepted. While the man in front spoke, Cade touched the contours of his own face with his fingertips. That he was himself. That his bones were perfectly proportioned and delineated. That his flesh was firm. Putting one hand before his face, he stuck his tongue out of its place and touched its tip to the skin of his face, and looking around the room he saw that many of the men and women, on the tiers of the theatre, were also touching their own skin. Some of them tried to hide their selfï·“fascination, to have private moments. Cade was like a beach over which the beauty of his fellow employees washed in waves. Sardonic Guttmann walked back and forth as he spoke with his spine bent forward and his head cocked so that the right ear rested on the right shoulder. While still attractive, of course, in an expensive wool suit and pale grey shirt, it might be said that he was the least beautiful person in the room, possibly because of his craneï·“like walk, possibly because of his bent expression, sarcastic and selfï·“pitying simultaneously, possibly because of the constant wandering of his eyes in their sockets, conceivably, for a combination of these attributes, but still, no employee in any class would ever have thought of Dr. Guttmann as "unattractive," but rather the opposite, for which reason he found it necessary to instruct his students not to emulate him too closely, flattering as their mimicry may have been to him. Still, the success of the program itself was more important. It had been decided by Guttmann and the inner circle of senior officials, that when finally it was evident to public knowledge that the mutant children were being systematically assassinated and kidnapped, which stage they expected would be reached within two years, then it would be a clearï·“cut contest between the deformed mutants, and the Government forces, who would therefore have to be attractive and worthy of emulation. In preparation for that future publicity, all members of the squad who were likely to become famous for terminating mutants were given "exemplary biographies," which the assassins themselves believed to be the truth. The hideous mutants would be repudiated; the handsome assassins would earn, through their obvious sincerity and patriotism, a celebrity status from which some would go on to politics, some to show business, some to industry, and some would remain in the field of law enforcement, englamourizing it with their presence. Guttmann was proud of the husbandry of humanity's emotions of which he deemed himself capable. The President of the United States had personally requested Guttmann to draw up a system for extermination of the mutants that would be palatable to the citizens in general, and it had taken Guttmann two weeks, sitting in his characteristic position bent over a low desk scribbling on a yellow pad, leaving the office only when he was hungry to walk disheveled through the daytime or nighttime streets of Cambridge, Mass., and sit in a bright cafeteria laughing to himself and watching the other people who might be in the cafeteria, also eating, or working there, and yearn to share with them the details of his plan, as it unfolded, which was actually just another scheme based on a low interpretation of man, and no better than any of them, but of course aesthetically perfect to its creator, Dr. Guttmann, who, on being passed the ringï·“binder by Thom Dentone, thus indicating that everyone in the room had looked at it, now continued the short class. He jiggled with a switch on the table before him. A holographï·“movie in the empty area between Guttmann's blonde-wood podium and the theatre of seatï·“modules gathered into existence. Out of the wisps soon was visible the figure of a small, thin child sitting on a patterned blanket. The holographic image was directly between Cade and Dr. Guttmann, and the Dr. appeared to Cade as a colorless ghost through the child's form. This made Cade unhappy, for the first time during the class, but soon his attention was fully on the bright image. One of these projections was shown every day of the course, and he had learned to look for each child's qualities of strangeness. With this one, he thought a mistake had been made, for the boy had both his eyes, regularly proportioned and situated limbs, and a straight posture. Nose. Mouth. Then he saw it, at first only a vague suggestion that something was wrong. Then, nausea went through him like a crease in a windï·“blown shirt, and straightened his spine. He realized ï·“ this child looks like an old man! ï·“ the naked body was covered with deep leathery folds, sags and wrinkles ï·“ thick black veins stood out on the face, neck, arms and legs. The boy sat with less than full energy and seemed to have no muscles except in slack plaques falling heavily from his bones ï·“ "Pirogeia!" said the Doctor through the brightly colored holograph. "Until the late 1960's this condition was almost unknown. Rather hilarious actually - " The Doctor's eyes watered and his nose dripped. "Those born with pirogeia appear at parture normal, but age so quickly that most pirogeiacs die of old age diseases by the time they are fifteen years old. By the fifth year they are growing body hair and beards begin to show. The intellect also matures at an astonishing rate. Before he was ten, this boy, who now resides at the Government installation in Alamagordo, New Mexico, where he is under constant observation, this boy had completed most of the One Hundred Great Books, and had written a book himself, "The Autobiography of a Pirogeiac"." Dr. Guttmann walked around to the left of the threeï·“dimensional film carrying his rubber tipped pointer in his fingers, and stabbed through the image here and there to direct the class's attention to the shoulders' stoop, the eyes' sadness, the ears' smallness. Cade wrote in his notebook concerning these things, in order to study and memorize. The image of the child rotated around the axis of the spine leftward seven times. The first time, from face-forward to faceï·“forward, the Doctor spoke of the skin, the second time, the bones, the third, the nervous system's idiosyncracies, the fourth, the child's mental characteristics, the fifth, the history of former pirogeiacs as far as it was known, the sixth, the legends which concern them, the seventh, the Doctor was silent, and the class closed its eyes, and each one saw against the black walls of his own mind's cave the child's rotation, finally each one having the feeling that each one was the boy himself. Cade in his mind's eyes shrivelled. He felt the cells catabolize. Much faster, much faster. He felt his brain grow brilliant. His teeth fall out. Juice drain. This final rotation of the holograph, in the mind of each one, was done so that each one would be able to kill such a pirogeiac when it happened that in the course of his work he met one. Soon after this, class was over. Cade went back to his car, and took it out, through the hedgeï·“walls of The New Century section of the city. The interior of Cade's car was like the inside of a mouth, he thought. Just a certain amount of giving to pressure, as well as other things. The thoughts in his brain were all of that kind any man might have who has attained a middle status before his middle age, thought Cade. Thoughts about things which the main herd didn't have the time, or the attunement, even to notice, let alone to let drift, which gave him an idea for his diary. He hoped he'd remember it later, when he sat on his great bed, with the pages of his diary open on his legs. It was a private moment in his car, provided by the Bureau, as it crushed its way to the little town, then through the town, to the church itself... He thought his superiors must appreciate him very much to give him such a car, to give him a .50ï·“.50 that took zeroï·“eights and did a five ninety, so much so as to have provided him with a 360, a 490 point 7 with double liners, an Emï·“Three, and so on, as well as his clothes, the outfit on his back and the ones that hung in bags, and the taped songs that lullabyed him on the long drives from town to town... Sometimes he would become lonely, on the road so long, or despondent over the nature of his work, which he found to conflict with the meditative and sentimental nature of his personality, as he knew it from the evidence of his face in the mirror, and those eyes that had so often caught, and reproduced, his gaze. Cade wondered how it could have happened that he did murder, after having known himself in childhood, but, as he explained it to himself, he would not do it if he were not paid to do it. Being paid to do it made it almost a thing he didn't do, but was done through him, by others. He drove through, observing the residents. Cheap labor (not to mince words with himself) nourished on a diet of beans, (since the flight of our cattle to Japan) the poor were less and less energetic and even Cade, who did not make it a habit to lecture himself on the things he saw around him, was forced to notice that the people here were spinelessly fluttering, like leaves of paper, on the stairways and porches, so weak were they. He passed a field of dust and then came to the green square of a church's lawn, where hundreds of people were either on one of the spiral lines, at one of the food tables, or pacing in the gutter and sidewalks near the church's white fence. Cade was surprised that among all those people none of them was acceptable, none of them was normal, and there was not one with whom he would have wanted to have a conversation. He wondered if any of these people would know a mutant from a member of their own species. Many eyes followed the rear of his car as he turned down the hill and disappeared to their seeing. Then Cade pulled up beside a brown telephone pole, and parked in the shade of a crooked tree. He did not change his clothes or disguise himself, but he did wrap his gun in a woolen jacket. He was using a shot gun with the barrel sawed to 18" and bullets whose noses had been hollowed out and filled with mercury. When he stepped from the car he squinted up the hill at the church. He said to himself, "Count your blessings, count your blessings," and this gave him the impetus to go up the hill. All around him the air was warm and fragrant. He stood under the bough of an apple tree, with his back gently touching the white boards of the building, and black and yellow leaves dry beneath his feet. For a few moments he listened, hearing a man sobbing and then a crowd moaning as one, and then shuffling, talking in low voices, all above the low noises of several radios throughout the crowd. He threw his jacket onto the ground below the white window sill. Then, touching the knee of his trousers to be sure it was not snagged, he lowered himself to the ground on that knee. He sat facing away from the church, down the hill at his own car, meticulous and perfect, luscious as a fruit, although he could not prevent himself from regretting the scratch he knew was on the hood, even though it was invisible from this distance. In the center of the blue sky stood a white steeple. Trees were around it like billowing hair. Cade noticed the warm light, and the lensï·“like tones of the birds that flew around and stood in the bell tower. The lines of people were partially visible to Cade, down the stairs from the church all the way to the pavement, then following the border of the lawn, around its corner, to the hedge, where it turned again, so that the people were lined up in two spirals, in such a way that the ones who came later had to go through the layers of one or the other spiral to the very center of it, and these centers were tightly packed like the springs of a watch. The front of each line fed into one or the other side of the church's rows of pews. A minister distributed pieces of yellow cake from a large tin box. Three women stood at a long table set up on the pavement beyond the area of the lines, giving away plates of chicken and white potatoes, still in their translucent skins. Further down the street several street merchants with pennants, buttons, booklets and post cards, all with pictures of Raphael, and various phantasmagoric biographies, sold their souvenirs to the crowd. Cade peered into the dark place. Soon he could make out the form, and finally the face, of the child. Raphael was standing before a packed house. Behind him there was a vast empty area. He stood near a podium of old, whitewashed wood. He was wearing a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his thin arms, and a pair of khaki trousers. His feet were bare. He did not slouch down, but searched the crowd with great attention, the lone central eye casting its strength from person to person in the church. One and two at a time they approached, and Raphael touched them. He always smiled, in a way that appeared to Cade to be a sign of an idiocy that had no shame of its own idiocy. Not always, but often, when a person approached, Raphael grabbed him, or her, and gave that one a loud kiss, that aroused the crowd repeatedly to applause and laughter, helping them forget their illnesses. An old man wearing a nylon shirt that floated around his body, held high his fist almost horrified to be staring at it. "He gave me a new hand! A new hand!" and his wife transferred her handbag from right to left forearm and with right hand then tentatively reached toward the reddish emanation at the end of his sleeve. The child laughed and gestured with his thin hands in such a way as to mock his own presumption. Katherine was 25 years old, but as she sat to the right and the rear of Raphael, she seemed still to be a child. The eyes of Cade rested on her for a long time. She was white and the outline between herself and the walls that surrounded her was dim to the point that she appeared as a cloud to the people who must wait for such a long time and always were looking forward. There was a weary smile on her lips, for she was to some extent bored with the miracles of her son, and impatient with his growing importance to the sufferers, and his obvious selfï·“satisfaction. Of course, every day she sat with him, whether it was in those early notorious days when he healed without interrupting the daily course of his life, when she would spend the days leading the ill to the places where Raphael was playing, fishing, or lecturing to his peers, gaping fanatics; or in the latter days, after he had first happened to enter this white church, in the dramatic and nostalgic bifurcations of the afternoon light of that warm day, and had gone without any invitation, directly to the podium, as though he had decided, in his tenth year, to begin his life's career in all seriousness. She had never taken up any activity, as a result of the welfare payments, and therefore there was nothing else she could think of to do. She observed every healing, filled with tranquilizers, smiling in a way that she imagined was reassuring to the endless faces, increasingly to her like infinite species of small birds, weak, full of sorrowful cries, in large flocks. A woman carried an infant toward the cyclops and said, "L'il Raphle, ah cum all th way frim Arkansas." Katherine smoked cigarettes and stubbed them in a can labelled Crosse and Blackwell's Date Nut Roll, infuriated for some reason she could not understand. "I am still Katherine," she thought, retrieving the words from something she had read, "who wakes up indignant every morning." Cade left off looking at Katherine, and lifted the stock of the gun to his shoulder. He fired a bullet that tore the miraculous child's head from his shoulders so that it flew upward through the air like a parrot. Several witnesses, including a formerly blind surgeon of Los Angeles Hospital, seeing now for the first time in some years, thought they saw the face of the child chewing the enormous bullet which had been forced into it... Cade, in the bright day beyond the congregation, watched with fascination. Raphael's body fell to its knees, then flat on the floor. After a few seconds it crawled along the floor, then planting its palms, it began to raise itself up... the body got to its knees and rocked unsteadily left and right. The people covered their eyes and drew themselves back from Raphael, his mother rising from her seat in a fountain of energy, allowing to slide down the gingham of her dress the book she had been reading.. the body tilted and almost fell forward, but did not, and raised its right knee, putting the foot flat on the floor, then standing on its feet and stumbling a step backward. Cade watched the body through the window. He didn't understand this phenomenon. He was certain the child must be dead. He should escape... Forward the small foot, forward the other foot, over the rug and boards of the stage. A dog rubbed itself against the child's side for affection, and to the surprise of the witnesses the right hand descended and fondled the face of the dog and was licked by the tongue... Then the child began what was probably a mere effect of the dead body's inertial staggering, but seemed to be some kind of a dance. It was slow, and the effect seemed to be of pushing upward, upward, all up the body to the place of the separation, the tendrils and stalks rising from the well of the neck, which continued to float and encircle, as though they were suspended in a liquid solution... The head had been deï·“systematized in the extreme, Cade could see that; and it adhered in different sections to the walls and ceiling... Any other body would have fallen by now. Should he fire again into the body? The child was twisting around and around the small table on the podium, twisting among the fallen figures of the guests of the church. Always the hands pushing upward as though to force what was into the area of what wasn't. Now the body, with its hands held before it, took two steps toward the mass of people. Some in the crowd uncovered their eyes as though they were looking into a fire. "He's walking." The Minister fell to his knees saying, ï·“ï·“ "A miracle!", but Katherine, looking from her son to the minister, hesitated in judgment. It was then that she saw Cade at the window, seeing clearly only the dark shelf of his brow, but detecting a glint from below that ledge which would allow her to believe throughout the coming year or so, until she happened to see him again, that she had looked into the killer's eyes... The body turned decisively and walking as though with conscious purpose, with hands feeling the air in front of it, moved toward the window through which the bullet had come ï·“ï·“ Cade lifted the shotgun again and squeezed the trigger. Another tremendous blast. The chest of the shirt was torn open, the body went backward, and fell to the stage. Cade turned and walked to his car. Katherine went to the window and stood on her toes, to look down the green slope. Her fingers held the side of the window to hold her up higher. His broad back disappeared from her vision, then the black smudge of his head, and then she turned away. The body of Raphael was spread from the podium to the eastern wall, and everywhere along its distance those who had not run away now looked for bits of his garments for remembrance and those curative powers, for which they had been waiting patiently. Katherine saw a head of dark hair, and thought it was Cade, but it turned out not to be. Soon the local men, who had followed Cade as far as his getaway car, but had left the chase to a smaller group of themselves, came back to the church and surrounded her, assuring her that they would assume the responsibility of burying Raphael. CHAPTER 3. On the highway, going back to his home, Cade met a young girl. She was a beautiful girl with long hair and the uniform (unsuccessfully disguised as civilian clothes by the girl) of some school. She stood stoopï·“shouldered by the side of the road with a stack of books pressed to her stomach. Her head tilted away from the highway. She held her thumb out as though her hand was so heavy it was about to fall off. She squinted down the road. On her feet were brown shoes and gray socks that ended just below her knees. Cade pulled over to the side of the onï·“ramp. She had to run up to where he was, and he watched her in the rearview. She had brown hair. She seemed to be a student, about 19-20 years old, and wearing a look of concentration and seriousness. She had a hard time with the door. Cade did not turn his head toward her, but after a while he reached down on the dash and touched the electric switch that controlled it. The door clicked and sat in the midair away from the car. As she scrambled onto the seat Cade could not help himself and turned toward her. He could not take his eyes away from her ï·“ her face, her throat, her hollow arms, her long hands. He could not hold his vision still on any part of her, and he could not remove it from her. She endured his long gaze. Her pink lips, however, soon separated over her blueï·“white teeth, the better to breathe. She felt herself grow hot, tears welled behind her eyes, blurring her vision. The fact that a man of Cade's age had stopped for her had been, even before his appreciative staring, a matter of great apprehension to her. "Where are you going," Cade said, in an even voice. His voice was devoid of most of the characteristics of speech. It was toneless, without emotion, and without color. The girl, whose name was Sarah, felt herself attracted to this man when she heard his voice. It seemed to her she could almost read his words upon the air, so much were they like the words in a book. "Sacresty," she said. Cade pulled off the freeway at the next exit and turned down a tree shaded street. "What are you doing?" she asked him. Cade stopped the car near a tree that was dense with branches, stubbed the cigarette he had been smoking, and said "Look at this." He pressed a button on the dash and the windows clouded over with a sepia gas that seemed to be trapped between two layers of glass in each window. Now the world outside the car was obscure and distant. Cade opened the fly of his pants. "Please mister," she said. Cade pushed the material of her skirt higher on her thighs until a white point of cotton was visible. Her legs were pressed together. She continued to plead with him in a voice that drifted off from time to time. His face, his eyes, were completely expressionless, Sarah observed. There seemed to her to be great honesty in Cade. He communicated absolutely nothing. Like his voice, his face appeared to her as the purest in the world of humanity. Why? Because long ago she had learned to hate the facial expressions of the people she met. Every one was a lie ï·“ every smile, every look of yearning, of listening, of pain, of disappointment ï·“ every one was a purposeful arrangement designed to make an appearance. But this man had no facial expression at all. Having no emotion, he expressed none. She took from this the idea that he was an honest man. Soon their position had placed her face above his. She looked downward at him, and there flooded through her a force beyond her controlling ï·“ tenderness, the desire to protect Cade, the sensation that he needed her love ï·“ seeing the curls of his hair, the white ledge of his forehead, the tip of his nose, all facing the softness of her breasts and moving silently, pushing into her. Meanwhile, Cade's feelings were those of a dead man. His teeth clamped around one of the girl's nipples. His hips rose and fell for a long time. He was in a dream that he was flying through space, flying into different scenes. When he had ejaculated, he took his mouth from her breast and lifted her immediately from his lap. They then sat side by side. He was smiling but soon turned down his lips. After a few seconds, the windows of the car cleared, the dark smoke being drawn to a place below the bottom of the glass, and they went on in silence. Sarah wondered what Cade was thinking about. He forgot for a long time that she was beside him. Sarah and Cade, each in his or her own way, were falling in love with one another. As for Sarah, it went like this: she had not been surprised when he had raped her. After all, she had known before she got into his car that he was a man of the Middle Class, and that it was understood a Middle Classer had the right to expect any Underclass female to have sex with him in return for a favor such as Cade was doing for Sarah by allowing her into his beautiful car, and giving her a lift to Sacresty. Often the Underclass female was lucky, and the Middle Classer gave her some money after the sex, or she was able to steal some. Or some food. Sarah looked around the floor of the car for food, and she turned to search the back seats for anything she might be able to take. But at the same time, (how could she control it?) her mind was already making up stories and painting pictures in which she could see herself beside this man, a part of his life, having drawn from him the tenderness that would cause him to ask her to live with him, and to join him as a member of the Middle Class. For Cade, it was like this: a few minutes ago his whole mind and body had contracted to a single point of concentration, and he had pieced together from vague memories and former readings of books and magazines the idea that he loved the girl whom he had raped; he had come to the point of concentration an assassin must come to when the moment of the assassination is at hand; he was alert, he was intelligent, he was accountedï·“for. The reason for this, unknown to him, until months afterward, when he had read those pages containing the secrets of his existence held back from him by his superiors, was that he was remarkably susceptible to mental suggestion. They had fallen in love through two entirely different mechanisms. She had fallen in love with him through thoughts of what life with him, in his world, might be like, and the love she felt she did not disguise. Her face, her eyes - her feelings could no more have been hidden than if they had been a torch she set afire in the enclosed space of the car. But his love was nothing more than a copy of her own, for copying was his way of learning, and, thanks to what had been done to him in the past, (about which, more later) the way of most of his being. Now he looked out the window of the car, alert to the needs of driving, and he had almost forgotten he had ever met her, although it must be said that he was still in love with her. That is to say, the intense feelings of the moment when all his attention was upon her were still with him, but now he directed them toward the road before his eyes. His affection for the road, for the pane of glass between himself and the road, for the tail of the black car in front of his, was a feeling he had never had before. Also, some of his love was distributed to the sphere of hus aural life, and the voice of a singer entering his ears through the speakers in the headrests and roof of the car, skimmed off a certain amount of Cade's love. Sarah stared at the profile of Cade. She said finally, "This car must have run you a bundle." Cade made no response. She cleared her throat. She wondered if, after satisfying his sexual hunger, Cade had fallen asleep at the wheel. "What do you do?" she asked. There was no answer from Cade. "I mean do you have a job or something?" Nothing from Cade. Then she touched his jacket, grabbing a section of the arm's material, pushing and pulling it. He turned with a startled expression played out over his features and in a short while focused on Sarah. "Do you have a job or something?" she said again. She laughed to see him so confused. This quality he had of seeming to be submerged in the sea made him all the more wonderful to her, and she rubbed his jacket back and forth with her palm while he talked. He told her briefly the story dreamed up by his superiors at the Agency, according to which he was a "troubleshooter" for an insurance firm. She had no reason to doubt him, or to think any more about it. They entered the Boundary Area over one of the treelined highways, and turned down a wide street where, fifty yards from the highway, was a high, vineï·“covered wall... A candy striped guard house stood at the side of the road and two metal gates hung in midï·“air over the center. She knew they were entering one of the exclusive neighborhoods of the Middle Class. Twice before she had been allowed to come into one of these areas. In her family there was an uncle who was in the Middle Class, and when he had died, she was among the ones who had gotten special permission to enter for the funeral. The second time had been when she applied for a job as a waitress in one of the sumptuous Middle Class Dining Rooms, massive halls where the citizens feasted like one family each night beneath the concrete structures of their homes. The place where she had applied for the job was called The Lodge Door. Sarah remembered now, as she entered the neighborhood, packed with trees and shadows, and with white tall buildings shooting up on either side of the passing car, that the maitre d' of the Lodge Door had seen on her hand a small glass ring, a ring that had been given to her by her mother, at that time already dead, and he had assumed immediately that she had stolen the ring. Without a word, he had pulled it roughly from her finger, and walked her through the door holding her upper arm higher than her shoulder. All such indignities were now in the past as she rode into the preserve, confident beside Cade. This area was beautiful and rare to her eyes. Allowed in only twice, Sarah had often secretly entered The New Century, to steal, but always late at night, when the streets and underground malls were almost entirely dark and empty of people. They drove down long boulevards where the sidewalks glittered with arrows of gold and the red and white dashes of the curbs were covered with luminous clear wax. All of the tall buildings were steel and glass. Many of their walls were massive mirrored surfaces of gold, silver and brown. The store windows were like bright beams and their goods were displayed gigantically with distorting lenses, so that bulb after bulb of merchandise rushed forward to the eyes. The people striding from store to store Sarah recognized as Middle Class because of their shapes, which she had often seen in magazines that hung by chains in the Reading Room at her school. The people had determined by the mechanism of fashion through the use of creams and hormones, to arrest the development of their backsides at the age of ten. Thus, their legs emerged from their middleï·“areas like powerful tubes, as did the upper body, ballooning out from the incredibly (by some standards) tiny waist. She saw a young girl go nervously from one doorway to another ï·“ a thief studying the older women who shopped here. Sarah observed the people's figures with admiration and envy, and wondered if she would ever be able to have her shots. She knew they were expensive. She also knew that if she didn't have hers by the time she was 21, no matter what her accomplishments might be through the rest of her life, she would always be less than equal to her fellow citizens. This thought lay over her mind as Cade drove the moving sac they shared through a low gateway, the entrance to a tunnel. "This is where I live," said Cade. "This is the parking lot," he said, unnecessarily, she thought. He drove into a space marked out on the concrete, between yellow lines. They stepped from the car into the vastness of the underground lot. Sarah walked to the back of the car and waited for Cade to indicate the direction. When they were standing together at the fin of the car, they both saw for the first time how large he was. She stood well below his shoulder. With his muscles and age, he was much wider than she. They both laughed at the disparity, she putting her hand over her mouth. They went through the doors of the basement floor. The green corridor. Yellow rug. Mural paintings of various cartoon heroes of the day: "There's Beverly Everly!" said Sarah. Never had she seen this idol so large, with the red hair so familiar to millions of children. The murals seemed to stand out from the walls. "Textured projection," said Cade, with the obvious selfï·“satisfaction of anyone who finds himself in a position to explain anything to anyone, especially a technological thing, whereby he feels he has gained ownership of that thing for a few moments. Next, into the forestï·“like elevator. To the thirtyï·“third floor. To Cade's apartment. To the balcony. A white slab that stands in the air. Below them the city. The lush green starfish of the Middle Class Neighborhoods all connected and living amid the larger, rust and black, organism, that was the rest of the city, filled with houses worn to their skeletons. Cade's balcony had a plant. "How beautiful," said Sarah. She thrust her head among the long leaves to see a gray rat that was trapped in the tiny needles where the fat base of each leaf was joined to the plant's thick trunk. The rat lay there pinioned with a look of exhaustion on its face. "How did this rat get all the way up here?" she asked, speaking directly toward the rat, so that Cade received her words couched in the tones of the plant's leaves, which made them sound somewhat harsh and querulous to his ears. By this purely mechanical accident, their first argument was initiated. He, joining the words she had spoken to the tone he imagined, came to a sum, in a sense, which represented Sarah. He then compared that sum to the sum of his possessions and found that his possessions, the greater sum, had been challenged by the lesser sum. He watched her with annoyance as her head failed to return from the leaves, and he found that her posture made him furious. He laughed: "You have a back like a camel." Did she mean to mock him by sailing through his apartment without a single word, only to call his attention to a rat on the balcony? Did she mean to level their positions by withholding her approval from his home? He did not realize that Sarah had not meant to offend him in the slightest. She was still at the age, however, when living things can excite an interest that can blind us to our other interests. Then, to make matters worse, she continued to pay attention to the trapped rat instead of smiling at Cade. She tried to part the tapering leaves with her small hands, in order to reach in and extricate it. Cade stood apart. He tried to regain her attention with insults ï·“ï·“ but she made no response, and soon, soon he could not believe that Sarah was not purposefully avoiding him, purposefully disguising her responses by hiding her face. "I found you in the gutter!" said Cade. He spoke to the back of her skirt, that shimmered as she struggled with the rat. Finally he grabbed her by the waist and dragged her backward. During their struggle Cade pulled her hair, grabbed her breast, pushed his hand underneath her skirt, lifted her straining form and turned her toward himself. For a moment she could not understand what he might actually have in mind. But then she saw Cade's cloudy look. "What is it, what is it?" she said, pressing her ear to his chest. Cade was silent at first. The rage that had welled up so fast when her back was toward him ebbed slowly now that she was facing him for the same reason that a cell will give up a liquid only with the greatest reluctance, once the liquid has attained the shelter of that cell, unless it is driven out by the strength of another liquid's inflowing. It would have required a forceful effort on Sarah's part to inject her apology through cells swollen with rage. However, she did not know what she had done to offend Cade, whose rage grew. The seconds ticked by. Still no soothing words. Finally, knowing somehow what Cade needed, she said, "I'm sorry." Again, more distant, more lost, "I'm sorry." He was satisfied. He put her down, and went out to the balcony. He broke the trunk of the plant and grabbed the rat around its middle. The rat strained and paddled its feet. Sarah stood back as Cade passed her with the rat. He opened the door of the apartment, and put the rat down in the corridor. He watched it walk away, down the carpeted corridor. Sarah joined him and touched his shoulder as the rat went around the corner, toward the center of the building, and the banks of elevators. "Where will he go?" she asked Cade. "Hopefully, into someone else's apartment," said Cade. Sarah laughed. Why, he knew not. Sarah had been on her own for the past two years, since the death of her grandfather, her last living relative. He left her in possession of two rooms filled with collections of things he had picked up from the street. In order to support herself, she had taken to stealing, a profession it was not worth working at except inside the foliage-covered walls of The New Century. She dressed herself in stolen clothes, and stole what she could in the streets and corridors of The New Century. She was able to enter and leave through secret spaces in the walls, known only by the children who earned their livings in ways similar to Sarah's. She sometimes grabbed a purse that would enable her not to steal for several months, during which time she and Mrs. Lena, who had been a friend of Sarah's grandfather, and who lived in the floor above Sarah's, illegally practicing her art of seeing the future, would eat well and discuss Mrs. Lena's future observations. However, one day Sarah was caught, having broken the window of a luggage store on the Concourse Drive, to steal a briefcase with gold latches. She was grabbed around the neck, and the briefcase pulled from her bentï·“back fingers. The man smashed the side of her head until she was unconscious. She had been put in a reform school outside the city. At the time of her meeting with Cade, she had just run away. She was a girl of great intelligence who hated her guards and the teachers of the reform school. She had some quality, probably instilled into her by her beloved grandfather, that boosted her above the general docility of the inmates, a docility that was shared by the guards and teachers too, and not only by them, but by the society at large. In the city, in the nation itself, there was no impetus for action on the part of anyone, imprisoned or free, no matter of what class, and there was much less jostling even among those who could always be expected to jostle among themselves, in any case where there was enough food for daily life. Any motion to alter such a case would only be a senseless hazard, and few citizens would have thought of it. In places like the reform school where Sarah was kept, where for the most part girls only had to endure the docile, infrequent caresses of the caretakers to assure themselves of a healthy feeding schedule, there was little reason to escape. Sarah alone was willing to traverse the dark forest and sewage area that surrounded the school. It was not that the others were cowards, for they didn't mind laying in wait for the much larger women who guarded them and engaging them in battles that often left the girls badly injured, battles fought with no hope of freedom, only for the pleasures of the fighting. But why would they think of escaping, when they had no image of improvement before their mind's eyes, they were indissolubly bound moment to moment with fate? Whatever happened to them they acknowledged but nothing more, as though anything at all except the most absolute, irrevocable calamity was as normal as any inward or outward breath. Not so with Sarah. Something told her that if could escape the school, she would find a better set of circumstances. Perhaps this was the result of the two years she had spent, after her parents' death, travelling the highways with her grandfather; perhaps, in some way, she had run away to find her grandfather again, (at least, someone like him) somewhere on the road. Well, she had already improved on her situation, although Cade, except for his taciturnity, was nothing like her grandfather. She liked the apartment. It made her think of Cade as competent to handle the problems of life, and she trusted him all the more when she saw his bedroom, the largest bedroom she had ever seen. The huge bed where he soon laid himself out did not cover one tenth length of the room. Its vastness was broken up by four small islands of furniture ï·“ each a round table and two chairs ï·“ and everywhere were magazines, large, rubbery, stacked against the walls, bulging out from shelves and niches in the walls, thrown everywhere on the rugs, narrow sliding roads of magazines wherever she looked. How did they achieve that quality of a compulsion greater than life with their cameras and film, printing, and presentation? She did not know. She only knew that she, like all people, was grateful for the existence of magazines. Cade had a magazine on his knees. He had a halfsmile on his lips. He looked up and said, "Not bad the way they treat me, is it. I've got a wallï·“screen in every room. Since I made G44 last July,I even got the Guide. You know what the Guide is? Every half hour it tells you what's on. It comes through the speakerphones." Sarah was not able to respond, but noticed that Cade looked at her for a long time with his halfï·“smile. Then he returned his gaze to the magazine. She thought, Other men wouldn't have been so open about their love for their home, other men might have held back rather than to appear to be impressed by things they must already be used to, but not Cade. He is like a child. He is completely honest. His tastes may not be my tastes, but his were formed in a state of abundance, and mine were formed in a condition of need. She left that room and went to the others. Soon the speakerphones spoke up, sharply: "Bob Casperson, Deep Sea Detective, guest appearance by Sally Smith...Manny the Cop gets in a scuffle with one of his old enemies, thought to be dead..." In the refrigerator there was no food, except for a white juice she had never seen before. There was a stove in the kitchen, but no cooking utensils. The mystery of this was soon solved for her when there was a soft knock on the door, such as no one would have heard who hadn't been standing next to it, then it was opened from the outside, and she was face to face with a black man. He wore a light green uniform. He smiled at her. From the bedroom, she heard the sound of Cade's voice call out, "Dinner!" Dinner was served from a metal cart covered with a white cloth; but first, Cade instructed Sarah in the practice of washing, in the way it was done in The New Century, by scraping the hands on both sides with a metal brush and applying alcohol. It was painful to Sarah, as she had often heard it was. The waiter smiled more and more openly as he worked, and to Sarah it seemed he held Cade in high regard, although neither man said anything to the other one. They sat at a square table set on a thick carpet. They looked out toward the terrace and the two walls behind them were mirrored. The carpet was red and black, in a pattern of borders and vines. To Sarah's left were the three carpeted stairs and the black rail that separated the dining area from the living room. The living room had a couch, two armchairs, a cane chair and two small tables, on which were lamps, ashtrays and glasses. There were a series of niches in the walls of the living room, some containing shelves for books and trophies that belonged to Cade. Hanging down from the ceiling of the dining area over the door to the terrace was a giant screen. Cade's head was almost motionless, and he didn't bother with his food as it was served to him. He watched on the screen the image of the cyclopean he had murdered. First the child was seen (thanks to footage provided by the police) playing in the street, and in the action of his illegal healings; and then as he looked after his death. Sarah gasped at the bloody image, and bent her eyes toward the inescapable sight of her full plate. Cade heard her gasp and looked at her, then he too examined her plate. The waiter went out of the room to wait until Cade and Sarah were finished with their meal. When Sarah had recovered from the sight of the cyclops, she began to eat her food, and soon was able to enjoy it. There was food of the kind she had never before tasted, cooked vegetables covered with melted butter, and a loaf of bread from which Cade cut slices with a glass knife. "All we ever get in school is recon two," said Sarah. Recon two was the standard square of food sometimes served as a watershake. After their meal, Cade was helped into a long robe by the waiter, who then took Cade's clothes out of the apartment. He came back with a robe for Sarah, and she allowed him to place it over her shoulders, after she had taken off her clothes. He took her clothes as he had taken Cade's. Cade curled up with a magazine, very shiny, that looked and smelled like rubber to Sarah. She sat on the huge bed in Cade's bedroom. He was lost in his reading. The magazine was called "Voices from the Place Where There Are No People," ("This is the last issue of your four year free trial subscription.") and was filled with startlingly colorful pictures of flowers. As he read, a giant wall screen flickered, like the one over the terrace. Soon she was drawn to it, until, relaxed (although she realized there were many things she had not settled with Cade, and much to know about her future before she could have any real peace) she drifted off to sleep. Her soft breathing told Cade she was asleep. He looked up from his magazine, and then down at her face. He reached out, and touched her hair. He touched the velvet skin of her cheek. Then he went to the wall opposite his bed, and took from the second shelf a notebook, with a black cover. He returned with it to the bed, and lay down beside Sarah. He ran his fingers over the surface of the binding. He opened it and began to write, using a thinï·“leaded pencil on an empty, white sheet. "Today I met a girl named Sarah. Now she is here, as I write, which I do because I have resolved to continue my written record. This meeting with her, when I have written it down, will be the start of a series of daily records that will finally, I hope, lead me to discover the cause of certain things that have been bothering me, as see previous pages..." He paused. The page began to swim before his eyes. Soon, his head fell heavily onto his chest. Weariness was overtaking him, although he tried to fight it, to continue, now that he had begun what he really hoped would be the telling of the story of his life, with evidence concerning his feelings from day to day, collected over many days. With that in mind, he raised his head. The colors of the immense wall screen battered against a suddenly sensitive Cade, like the wings of a bee. "At the side of the highway..." he wrote, before his head again fell forward, and he was asleep. The notebook fell to the floor. In a few minutes, a bent figure entered the room and approached the large bed. It stood looking downward at Cade and Sarah, then it took the notebook in which Cade had been writing and put it back on its shelf. Then the figure returned to the bed and covered Cade and Sarah with a blanket, switched off the lamp, then it went into the living room, where it encountered the figure of the waiter, just getting a glass from one of the tables and putting it on the metal cart. "Go. Hurry." said the figure to the waiter. They both left Cade's apartment. "I am John Cade. I track down the freaks. I am from The New Century. I have won many awards and been presented with plaques, and from the beginning of my employment in the job I now hold, I have been assured that one day my name and face would be made known to many millions. So far, this has not happened, but it means little to me." This is the first entry in the diary of John Cade. He wrote with an eye toward publication. He was aware of the glamorous aspect to his experience, which he hoped the public would seek, probably bringing him a fortune. However, there was another reason he took up the pen each day, beginning with this unnumbered one in what month... He was beginning to experience the sensation of a divided past; that is, he found himself remembering a number of memories that could not have been his own. That these shadows were memories and not imaginings, was clear to Cade by the feelings they aroused, and by their tendency to link dendritically of their own accord, until, lately, they had formed themselves into something he could see as a complete past, a total life history, none of which Cade could claim as his own. He saw himself as a young man, carrying his books, riding the bus to his campus with a book in his hands, and he could smell the evening air, and see the grey sky over a row of twoï·“story houses, or argue with some strange girl or boy, all in a city where he never had lived; not to mention the college, entirely foreign to his actual experience, to his own technical past. He also had memories of a set of parents, that stood as equal in their reality to the memories he actually deserved ï·“ those of his uncle, whose orange face and red beard, and whose white hair should have been sufficient guardians to recollect, but seemed to be losing out to this completely new set of recollections, those of the set of parents. His real parents, as he knew from his uncle, had died when Cade was born, as though there had been a plague. Now, in his 37th year, to have pop into his thoughts these aristocratic parents, and to see himself among them, cared for as an infant, as a child, as a young adult, and even as an adult of working age, by the two personages, was upsetting to Cade, and even more so because he was normally opposed to looking inward, where he now was forced to look, by this mystery. In a second short entry, he wrote: "I have thought about the possibility that I am remembering a former life, when these pictures of that unlived past come over me. However, I do not believe in reï·“incarnation, for it would mean that even though we are alive, we are also dead. It would make the percentage of death's influence on our living world a very high one. But then, what are these imaginings that feel like memories?" The truth of Cade's existence, which he did not know, was that he was a man who had once been dead and had been brought back to life by the one who was now his superior, Dr. Guttmann. Guttmann had been experimenting many years with his theories of reanimation, supplementing them with prayers and imprecations to unscientific spirits, before finally succeeding in the creation of John Cade, after which he expected many rewards that were not to be his. The recollections Cade had were of his former life, when he had had a different name. He was not supposed to have any memory of that life. He was supposed to be fully occupied with the almost two thousand sensory images (mostly derived by Guttmann from his own memorable moments) that had been implanted into Cade for the purpose of his entertainment in selfï·“speaking, but Cade's true past had begun to seep through, as an area of soda might seep through a sheet of paper, and while the name of the one he had once been had not yet come into his thoughts, Guttmann dreaded that event's coming with every reading he made of Cade's diary. Guttmann was well aware of the danger to himself if the family from which the young dead man had come were even now to realize the actual fate of his corpse, no matter how well it was serving the Nation, or that its occupation was not so different from the military career for which that other young man, the preCade, had been trained for many years to follow. CHAPTER 4. Sarah awoke to the sounds of the metal gears that seemed to be behind the walls, and under the floor of Cade's bedroom. As they shifted and groaned the room opened to the light. Shortly thereafter, the wall screen facing Cade's bed came to life with all its colors, that did not suffer from the pouring sun, but stood out more brightly than anything else in the room, including Cade himself, who lay beside her. She observed him in the veil of greatï·“moleculed sunlight that made him an amorphous thing, impressed with the stiffness of his posture. He was a solid board from head to toe. She touched his chest. It was as hard as marble, until the voice of a woman, mellifluous and sweet, came over the loudspeakers, saying, "Time to wake up...Time to wake up...Time and tide wait for no man..." The voice repeated until after Cade's eyes had opened, after he had sat up in a single motion, until he had swung around in the bed and placed the weight of his feet on the floor. At that moment, the voice stopped, to be replaced by the quickly mounting sounds of the television screen. Cade looked to his right, at the wall screen, and Sarah was drawn to do the same. What had caught Cade's attention was a news item..."These people are among the thousands who've come to see the famous twins..." said the disillusioned, deep voice of a newscaster. The camera swept the crowd, and then showed the Bains Brothers, joined back to back at birth, lying in their own blood on a plastic shower curtain in a parking lot under a dark, drizzly sky in Baltimore. A row of men with their arms interlocked held back the weeping crowd. Cade walked to the bathroom, shuffling through the magazines. Sarah's eyes remained on the screen. The bloody corpses were held on view for a long time. She watched as Cade, in the bathroom, stood inside a contraption of metal pipes and glowing hot wires, such as she could not remember having seen before, with his back pressed against the mass of the pipes, that were set into an alcove in the tile wall of the bathroom. He remained there until a spitting sound was heard from the wires, and smoke rose from Cade's back. Sarah wanted to call out, to tell him to take himself away from the red heat, but the expression on Cade's face stopped her. He did not seem to be in pain. He seemed to relax, to be gradually returning to a state of calm, after some long period of anger or fear. His blue eyes, which were open and staring, looked in the direction of Sarah, but without appearing to rest on her. When he finally let go of the pipes that he had held onto, he went to the toilet and sat down to urinate. Sitting there, he put his trembling hands into a space in the wall and pulled out a glass syringe with a long needle on the end. He then pushed the needle into a green rubber circle in the wall, and pulled the plunger back, filling the needle with clear liquid. He looked at the full syringe, then, squinting his eyes, he put the point of the needle against a blue spot in the crook of his elbow. He stuck the needle through the blue spot in his flesh and pulled the plunger out a small way, filling the syringe with dark blood, that swirled among the clear liquid; then pushed the plunger back, and sent the mixture through his veins. He groaned deeply, closed his eyes, and opened them. Then his eyes comprehended what they beheld. Sarah, the girl he had met on the day before, was looking at him with a look of wonder, which he returned to her. He replaced the syringe in the wall, stood up, and walked toward Sarah. Her expression changed to one of affection. He recalled, he recalled...more and more. Finally, she bit her lip, closed her eyes tightly, and reached up for his neck, which she encircled with her thin arms. She pressed her face against his. She prayed he was not dying. There was a bustling in the dining area. A young waiter went back and forth. Cade wrapped a terry cloth towel around his waist, and called Guttmann. He told Guttmann about the assignment's outcome of the day before, and then about his meeting with Sarah. He told Guttmann that Sarah was with him at the moment, to which Guttmann replied that he had been aware of the girl's presence. He asked Cade if Cade intended to keep the girl with him, in his apartment. Cade said he would like to. Guttmann said, "That will be all right, but we'll have to train her in certain things." Cade thought about what Guttmann had said, but the words went to a black place away from his view. After a while he said, "There's a scratch on the hood of my car." Guttman said, "That will be taken care of." Cade said, "Should I come in this morning?" Guttmann said, "No, go to the home of the Fishï·“Girl." Cade said, "Yes, sir." "Take care," said Guttmann. You know how we admire what you're doing. "Thank you," said Cade. Guttmann clicked off, and so did Cade. To Sarah, he said, "That was Dr. Guttmann. You'd like him." An old woman knocked on the wall beside the doorway. She entered the room and walked across, behind Cade, to the closet. She went into the closet, and came out with a white shirt on which were red horses galloping. She approached Cade, and put the garment around his shoulders. She came around to his front and buttoned the shirt. She helped Cade into his pants, but when she turned to Sarah, on her knees in the center of the bed, she seemed not to know what to do about her. There was a look of fear, or so Sarah interpreted it, in her eyes, as she looked at Sarah. Soon she went out, holding her hands folded on her stomach. Cade went into the dining area and sat down to breakfast and Sarah followed. Breakfast consisted of eggs, scrambled, surrounded by triangles of cheese, ham and butter. There was a silver bowl filled with plain biscuits, with butter, jam and honey to cover them. They drank coffee, which Sarah had with sugar, but so much sugar, since they didn't have it at the school, that she felt sharp pains shooting through her skull. Cade told Sarah that she could stay in this place if she wanted to. She did not respond, or look up. He made a telephone call, saying, "This is John Cade. I have someone here who needs Credidentifax Marking. We'd like you to get someone to do it, this morning, if possible." "It is possible," said the representative of Credidentifax. Cade hung up, and explained to Sarah the credit system of The New Century. Soon he returned to his bedroom, leaving Sarah alone. She watched the wall screen. He reï·“entered the living room, fully dressed in a grey suit and brown leather shoes. His hair was combed back, and was wet. Sarah was struck once again by his great good looks. After saying a garbled phrase of farewell to her, with a look of nervous worry on his face, and his foot pawing the carpet, he left. She watched the door close. When it opened again, a young girl entered. Her uniform was gold with white rope braided around her shoulders, hanging in three loops. The girl smiled and walked directly over to Sarah. She was clearï·“eyed and beautiful. Sarah immediately liked her. She had with her a metal box painted green with one side open and a mirror visible inside the box, placed at a 45 degree angle to the open side. She put Sarah's right hand inside the green box. Then she looked through a lens at the top of the box, adjusting two dials, or knobs. Soon a bright flash of blue and white light pierced the box and Sarah felt a sharp pain throughout her hand. It was immediately over. The girl took her right hand and rubbed a white lotion over the spot. "Now you have your number," she said. Sarah couldn't see anything. "Do you know the shopping areas?" she asked kindly, knowing Sarah was one of the outside girls who frequently were taken in by such men as Cade. Sarah saw no reason to let it be known that she had been inside The New Century before, to this girl or anyone, and so let the girl continue to direct her to the shopping center in the basement of the building they were in, and beyond that, to the one that ran out in the open streets. "My name is Corey," she told Sarah. Sarah said she hoped to see her again, before Corey left the apartment,carrying the green box. Then Sarah left the apartment, as much to escape the relentless brightness of the wall screens, which were across her path in every room of the apartment, unable to be turned off, as to see the lower areas. She went into the hallway outside the apartment, and was impressed by the painting that covered it, making the walls appear to be full of green grass, tall trees, falling leaves, blue skies, storm clouds and distant small buildings and cars. The illusion of the vast landscape was reinforced by wheat stalks and grass stuffed in the corners of the hallway, stapled to the bottoms of the walls. She took the elevator to the basement. The shopping area, except for a low ceiling, was full of light. Wellï·“dressed women, along with a few men retired from work, or who didn't have to work, walked back and forth. Stores were lined up in a glass corridor, with dresses, shoes, makeï·“up, food, cards, books, rugs, vases, briefcases, flowers, sports equipment, wall screens, cars, men's clothes, toys, perfume, hardware, plants, appliances, and bicycles, for example, on sale. Cade had told her to buy clothes, but she only did buy one yellow dress and a pair of white shoes. What she liked best was being able to sit in the coffee shop, order coffee, and pour sugar into it until it overflowed and drink it as she watched the women go by and enjoy the chance for leisurely observation. A man sat down at the small table where Sarah was. He smiled, his eyes beamed, he ran his hand over his hair many times. She didn't understand most of what he said. Soon, he grabbed her hand and turned it over. She pulled it away and left the table. Following no plan, she soon came to a store and went in. On the wall was a photo of an infant looking out at her, from where it sat on a blueï·“painted sheet of paper. Around the room were other such pictures. There were also the pictures opposite to those ï·“ of the freaks ï·“ and orange strips covered with slogans. "Normalcy is the Strength of the Nation," "Protect the Maternal Imagination," "Beautiful Surrounds Make Beautiful and Sound." Sarah was in a place that represented the Appian Termï·“ofï·“Pregnancy Retreats, a chain of farms, located on hillsides chosen for their beauty where the Middle Class women were supposed to go as soon as they discovered they were pregnant. It was believed that the freaks might have their origins in the maternal imagination, rather than in any chemical conditions present during their early lives. Those who could afford it, following the custom of the ancient Romans, in order to protect the minds of their wives from hideous thoughts that might become manifest in the flesh of their children, sent them to beautiful areas, where they were surrounded by statues of wellï·“formed men and women, so as to direct their meandering reflections along the most pleasant possible routes during the crucial months. The atmosphere of the retreats was very strained, with the women attempting to appear as though their minds were filled only with the loveliest thoughts, while actually, their fear and apprehension at the knowledge that they would be blamed for any deformities in the children they were to bear, made the thoughts of the women dwell on the very things they sought to drive from their minds, and when the husbands would visit them, on the few days they did, wearing pale green visiting sheets, they sometimes could detect, beneath the brave joy, the growing terror. Many of the women went mad ï·“ many killed themselves before the fearful day of birth arrived, that might reveal to everyone the contents of their secret thoughts. Most of these unfortunate women, who did not see it through to the end, would have given birth to normal children, for the incidence of mutation was much less than it had ever been, but the anticipation of the possible shame, most of which was brought about by the current association of that form of birth with the despised population that worshipped it, and the certainty that they would be accused of having had relations with dogs or other animals, brought them to their ends. Sarah, as a new arrival to The New Century, had an interest in the brochures of the Appian Company, and she took some with her. Then she roamed in the narrow corridors a while longer, and then boarded the elevator that took her back to Cade's apartment, opening the door by placing her hand in an indentation lined with plastic, allowing a light to go through it. CHAPTER 5. Cade was seen for many hours standing outside an apartment building in a poor area. Not on the street of the building itself, but watching it from the perpendicular streets, loafing in the sharp shadows. He made mental notations of the guards deployed around the building. The most obvious were the two stationed at the front steps, a mammoth pale-skinned black man and a more normal sized yellow-skinned black man. The yellow one wore a tï·“shirt with no sleeves. Neither of them would Cade have wanted to fight. There were also two men whose job it was to walk around the block in opposite directions. When they crossed they winked or made some other gesture that all was well. Cade could also see a man on the roof of the building, and, as far as he could distinguish among a group that was to him somewhat resistant to immediate particularization of its members ï·“ the nonï·“freaks, there were five others who hung from the three windows of the apartment where they were keeping the mutant. Sometimes one of these would appear at the narrow entrance of the building to take the place of one of the stoopmen or streetmen. It would be hard to get an assassin into the child's room. That was obvious. Of course, the special Tactical Squad could attempt to take the building by force, but Cade knew the blacks would put up a fight. It was certain they would be armed with an arsenal of automatic weapons, stolen, or bought by their nameless backers. Cade knew that if there was a battle, the Tactical Squad would soon be surrounded by the hostile poor, and if they were forced to retreat it would certainly be bad publicity for the mutant extermination campaign, and in fact the poor would probably ascribe their defeat to some great power of the child itself. What we need, thought Cade, is a soft in. I don't care if the out is hard, as long as the kid is already dead. Next, he stepped out of the shadows and into a taxi. The taxi would seem to any observer to be cruising the street, but it was one of the Agency's. "Just drive three or four blocks," said Cade. "I'll walk back." In the back seat he removed the blackface with tissues from his face, neck and hands. He took off the white shirt and blue pants he had worn for his disguise. His change of clothes was a grey repairman's coverall. It was uncomfortable getting into this oneï·“piece suit in the cramped area of the back seat. The suit indicated that its wearer worked for the Brittania Heat Company, and the name Bradley was sewn in red thread over the breast pocket. To complete the picture, he held a mirror before his face and combed his hair into a style not so recent as to attract attention although sufficiently current to be believable on a man of Cade's age. This style boasted of a double part, one over each ear, with the hair in the center gathered to a peak and tied with a ribbon. Once the ribbon was knotted, Cade inserted a long needle with the letters BOS on a white shield soldered to one end in the center of the gathered hair and it was held erect by the tight ribbon. Most of the workers in the city would be wearing similar sets of three letters in their topï·“knots. Cade's indicated that he was a fan of the Boston Bruins. To himself, of course, the needle with the letters looked absurd. "No wonder these people are poor," he informed himself. The taxi pulled up to a curb and Cade pretended to hand the driver money. While he was leaning forward, he told the man which strategy he had chosen for the kill. He made a final examination of the case he would carry with him. Everything he needed was there. He walked the four blocks back to the building, this time strolling onto the street directly opposite the windows of the mutant's rooms. He went into a candy store and sat on the stool closest to the door, from where he could see the windows. He drank coffee and read a newspaper. The man who owned the store was Puerto Rican. When he first got there the place was full of characters eating their morning rolls and danish. He watched the blacks enter and leave the building. Finally, there were no blacks hanging from their windows, and the two who circled the block were both out of sight, beyond their turning off. He threw a quarter on the counter, picked up his case and crossed the narrow street. Having drawn the attention of the two on the front steps, he waved to them. He walked into the super's entrance, a narrow doorway next to the main entrance of the building. He saw why the two guards had not stopped him. There was a black man sitting in an arm chair next to the dumbwaiter, leaning back with his feet on one of the garbage cans. The basement smelled like wet chalk and had a low ceiling and close walls. Hearing Cade, the black man had drawn his gun and it was pointed at Cade's groin when he reached the intersection of tunnels where the entrance tunnel met that of the dumb waiter. "Hey, hey, friend," said Cade. "Who you?" asked the man. He was not suspi