I looked from him to Jeffty and back again. Jeffty was like a zombie. He had come where I’d pulled him. His legs were rubbery and his feet dragged. The past, being eaten by the present, the sound of something in pain.

  I clawed some money out of my pants pocket and jammed it into Jeffty’s hand. "Kiddo... listen to me... get out of here right now!" He still couldn’t focus properly. "Jeffty," I said as tightly as I could, "listen to me!" The middle-aged customer and his wife were walking toward us. "Listen, kiddo, get out of here right this minute. Walk over to the Utopia and buy the tickets. I’ll be right behind you." The middle-aged man and his wife were almost on us. I shoved Jeffty through the door and watched him stumble away in the wrong direction, then stop as if gathering his wits, turn and go back past the front of the Center and in the direction of the Utopia. "Yes sir," I said, straightening up and facing them, "yes, ma’am, that is one terrific set with some sensational features! If you’ll just step back here with me..."

  There was a terrible sound of something hurting, but I couldn’t tell from which channel, or from which set, it was coming.

  Most of it I learned later, from the girl in the ticket booth, and from some people I knew who came to me to tell me what had happened. By the time I got to the Utopia, nearly twenty minutes later, Jeffty was already beaten to a pulp and had been taken to the manager’s office.

  "Did you see a very little boy, about five years old, with big brown eyes and straight brown hair... he was waiting for me?"

  "Oh, I think that’s the little boy those kids beat up?"

  "What!?! Where is he?"

  "They took him to the manager’s office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents--"

  A young girl wearing an usher’s uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.

  I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office. She looked insulted and snorted something rude, but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.

  He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren’t opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been, Grand Central Station, Let’s Pretend, The Land of the Lost, God only knows which one it might have been.

  He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station... and they’d been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn’t exist for anyone but Jeffty.

  They had beaten him badly... as everyone watched.

  And then they had run away.

  I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21" Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.

  "Shhh, it’s okay, kiddo, it’s Donny. I’m here. I’ll get you home, it’ll be okay."

  I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have. I should have done that.

  When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn’t move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. " A couple of kids peat him up at the theater." I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. "Jesus Christ," I shouted, "he’s been beaten! He’s your son! Don’t you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!"

  Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.

  So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.

  And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.

  John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.

  I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.

  I heard the bath water running upstairs.

  After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.

  "Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?" Leona said.

  I didn’t answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room. Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs? I started to say something, and then knew... Oh, God... no!

  I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.

  Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.

  I fell twice rushing up the stairs.

  There isn’t much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a second-hand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don’t use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn’t work. I’ve sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn’t look as if it’s moving at all sometimes.

  But I can’t find Captain Midnight or The Land of the Lost or The Shadow or Quiet, Please.

  So she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can’t hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn’t such a terrible thing.

  It’s a good world, all things considered. It’s much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it?

  Isn’t it?

  Tell me.

  Somebody please tell me.

  STONE

  Edward Bryant

  1

  Up above the burning city, a woman wails the blues. How she cries out, how she moans. Flames fed by tears rake fingers across the sky.

  It is an old, old song:

  Fill me like the mountains

  Fill me like the sea

  Writhing in the heat, she stands where there is no support. The fire licks her body.

  So finely drawn, and with the glitter of ice, the manipulating wires radiate outward. Taut bonds between her body and the flickering darkness, all wires lead to the intangible overshadowing figure behind her. Without expression, Atropos gazes down at the woman.

  Face contorting, she looks into the hearts of a million fires and cries out.

  As Atropos raises the terrible, cold-shining blades of the Nornshears and with only the barest hesitation cuts the wires. Limbs spread-eagled to the compass points, the woman plunges into the flames. She is instantly and utterly consumed.

  The face of Atropos remains shrouded in shadows.

  2

  ALPERTRON PRESENTS

  IN CONCERT

  JAIN SNOW

  with

  MOOG INDIGO

  Sixty-track stim by RobCal

  June 23, 24

  One show nightly at 2100

  Tickets $30, $26, $22.

  Available from all Alpertron

  outlets or at the door.

  ROCKY MOUNTAIN

  CENTRAL ARENA

  DENVER

  3

  My name is Robert Dennis Clary and I was born twenty-three years ago in Oil City, Pennsylvania, which is also where I was raised. I've got a degree in electrical engineering from MIT and some grad credit at Cal Tech in electronics. "Not suitable, Mr. Clary," said the dean. "You lack the proper team spirit. Frankly speaking, you are selfish. And a cheat."

  My mother told me once she was sorry I wasn't handsome enough to get by without working. Listen, Ma, I'm all right. There's nothing wrong with working the concert circuit. I'm working damned hard now. I was never genius enough that I could have got a really good job with, say, Bell Futures or one of the big space firms. But I've got one marketable talent-what the interviewer called a peculiarly coordinative affinity for multiplex circuitry. He looked a little stunned after I finished with the stim console. "Christ, kid, you really get into it, don't you?"

  That's what got me the job with Alpertron, Ltd., the big promotion and booking agency. I'm on the concert tour and work their stim board, me and my console over there on the side of the stage. It isn't that much different in principle from playing one of the instruments in the backup band, though it's a hell of a lot more complex than even Nagami's synthesizer. It all sounds simple enough: my console is the critical link between performer and audience. Just one glorified feedback transceiver: pick up the empathic load from Jain, pipe it into the audience, they react and add their own load, and I feed it all back to the star. And then around again as I use the sixty stim tracks, each with separate controls to balance and augment and intensify. It can get pretty hairy, which is why not just anyone can do the job. It helps that I seem to have a natural resistance to the side-band slopover radiation from the empathic transmissions. "Ever think of teaching?" said the school voc counselor. "No," I said. "I want the action."

  And that's why I'm on the concert circuit with Jain Snow; as far as I'm concerned, the only real blues singer and stim star.

  Jain Snow, my intermittent unrequited love. Her voice is shagreen-rough; you hear it smooth until it tears you to shreds.

  She's older than I am, four, maybe five years; but she looks like she's in her middle teens. Jain's tall, with a tumbleweed bush of red hair; her face isn't so much pretty as it is intense. I've never known anyone who didn't want to make love to her. "When you're a star," she said once, half drunk, "you're not hung up about taking the last cookie on the plate."

  That includes me, and sometimes she's let me come into her bed. But no often. "You like it?" she said. I answered sleepily, "You're teally good." "Not me," she said. "I mean being in a star's bed." I told her she was a bitch and she laughed. Not often enough.

  I know I don't dare force the issue; even if I did, there would still be Stella.

  Stella Vanilla---I've never learned exactly what her real last name is-is Jain's bodyguard. Other stim stars have whole platoons of karate-trained killers for protection. Jain needs only Stella. "Stella, pick me up a fifth? Yeah, Irish. Scotch if they don't."

  She's shorter than I am, tiny and dark with curly chestnut hair. She's also proficient in any martial art I can think of. And if all else fails, in her handbag she carries a .357 Colt Python with a four-inch barrel. When I first saw that bastard, I didn't believe she could even lift it.

  But she can. I watched Stella outside Bradley Arena in L.A. when some overanxious bikers wanted to get a little too close to Jain. "Back off, creeps." "So who's tellin' us?" She had to hold the Python with both hands, but the muzzle didn't waver. Stella fired once; the slug tore the guts out of a parked Harley-Wankel. The bikers backed off very quickly.

  Stella enfolds Jain in her protection like a raincape. It sometimes amuses Jain; I can see that. Stella, get Alpertron on the phone for me. Stella? Can you score a couple grams? Stella, check out the dudes in the hall. Stella- It never stops.

  When I first met her, I thought that Stella was the coldest person I'd ever encountered. And in Des Moines I saw her crying alone in a darkened phone booth ]nin had awakened her and told her to take a walk for a couple hours while she screwed some rube she'd picked up in the hotel bar. I tapped on the glass; Stella ignored me.

  Stella, do you want her as much as I?

  So there we area nice symbolic obtuse triangle.. And yet- We're all just one happy show-biz family.

  4

  This is Alpertron, Ltd.'s, own chartered jet, flying at 37,000 feet above western Kansas. Stella and Jain are sitting across the aisle from me. It's a long flight and there's been a lull in; the usually boisterous flight conversation. Jain flips through a current Neiman-Marcus catalogue; exclusive mail-order listings are her present passion.

  I look up as she bursts into raucous laughter. "I'll b e< goddamned. Will you look at this?" She points at the open catalogue on her lap.

  Hollis, Moog Indigo's color operator, is seated behind her.. She leans forward and cranes her neck over Jain's shoulder:. "Which?"

  "That," she says. "The VTP."

  "What's VTP?" says Stella. Hollis says, "Video tape playback."

  "Hey, everybody!" Jain raises her voice, cutting stridently through everyone else's conversations. "Get this. For a.small fee, these folks'll put a video tape gadget in my tombstone. It's got everything-stereo sound and color. All I've got to dis go in before I die and cut the tape."

  "Terrific!" Hollis says. "You could leave an album of greatest hits. You know, for posterity. Free concerts on the.

  grass every Sunday."

  "That's really sick," Stella says.

  "Free, hell." Jain grins. "Anybody who wants to catch the: show can put a dolllar in the slot."

  Stella stares disgustedly out the window.

  Hollis says, "Do you want one of those units for your: birthday?"

  "Nope." Jain shakes her head. "I'm not going to need one."

  "Never?"

  "Well... not for a long time." But I think her words sound, unsure.

  Then I only half listen as I look out from the plane across:. the scattered cloud banks and the Rockies looming to the, west of us. Tomorrow night we play Denver. "It's about as close to home as I'm gonna get," Jain had said in New:. Orleans when we found out Denver was booked.

  "A what?" Jain's voice is puzzled.

  "A cenotaph," says Hollis. "Shut up," St21?a says. "Uainn .it."

  5

  We're in the Central Arei2, the architectural pride of Denver District. This is the la est gathering place in all of Rocky Mountian, that heterogeneous, anachronistic strip-city clinging to the front ranges of the continental divide all the way from Billings down to the southern suburb of El Paso.

  The dome stretches up beyond the range of the house lights. Ii it were rigid, there could never be a Rocky Mountain Central Arena. But it's made of flexible plastic-variant and blowers flame up heated air to keep it buoyant. We're on the inner skin of a giant balloon. When the arena's full, the body heat from the audience keeps the dome aloft, and the arena crew turns off the blowers.

  I killed time earlier tonight reading the promo pamphlet on this place. As the designer says, the combination of arena and spectators turns the dome into one sustaining organism. At first I misread it as "orgasm."

  I monitor crossflow conversations through plugs inserted in both ears as set-up people check out the lights, sound, color, and all the rect of the systems. Finally some nameless tech comes on circuit to give my stim console a run-through.

  "Okay, Rob, I'm up in the booth above the east aisle. Give me just a tickle." My nipples were sensitized to her tongue, rough as a cat's.

  I'm wired to a test set fully as powerful as the costume Jain'll wear later-just not as exotic. I slide a track control forward until it reaches the five-position on a scale calibrated to one hundred.

  "Five?" the tech says.

  "Right."

  "Reading's dead-on. Give me a few more tracks."

  I comply. She kisses me with lips anti tongue, working down across my belly.

  "A little higher, please."

  I push the tracks to fifteen.

  "You're really in a mood, Rob."

  "So what do you want me to think?" I say.

  "Jesus," says the tech. "You ought to be performing. The crowd would love it."

  "They pay Jain. She's the star." I tried to get on top; she wouldn't let me. A moment later it didn't matter.

  "Did you just push the board to thirty?" The tech's voice '_ sounds strange.

  "No. Did you read that?"

  "Negative, but for a moment it felt like it." He pauses. "You're not allowing your emotional life to get in the way of your work, are you?"

  "Screw off," I answer. "None of your business."

  "No threats," says the tech. "Just a suggestion."

  "Stick it."

  "Okay, okay. She's a lovely girl, Rob. And like you say, she's the star."

  "I know."

  "Fine. Feed me another five tracks, Rob; broad spectrum this time."

  I do so and the tech is satisfied with the results. "That ought to do it," he says. "I'll get back to you later." He . breaks off the circuit. All checks are done; there's nothing now on the circuits but a background scratch like insects climbing over old newspapers. She will not allow me to be exhausted for long.

  Noisily, the crowd is starting to file into the Arena.

  I wait for the concert.

  6

  There's never before been a stint star of the magnitude of Jain Snow. Yet somehow the concert tonight fails. Some where the chemistry goes wrong. The faces out there are as always-yet somehow they are not involved. They care, but not enough.

 

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