Dream-dust. The remembered fragrance of it was still in his nostrils, and there was an ominous dry thirst beginning to assert itself beneath his tongue, a thirst no liquid would assuage.

  I've got to get cured. First of all, I've got to get cured.

  He knew dream-dust. It wasn't incurable, but it was habit-forming. Worse than that, really, because once you went under the deadly stuff you didn't come out again. There were no rational periods during which you could commit yourself for cure. Not until the organism built up antibodies, and that took almost a lifetime. Even then the dream-dust virus could mutate so rapidly that the rational term didn't last. You dropped back into dreams, and eventually, you died.

  Panic struck Sam for a moment. How long would this rationality last? How long had it lasted already? At any time now would the dusty dreams strike again and his newly emerged identity go under? Immortality was useless if he must sleep it all away.

  He had to get cured. The thirst mounted now as he recognized it for what it was, a darker thirst than the average man ever knows. The cure took money. Several thousand korium-credits, at least. And he had nothing. He was rich beyond dreams of avarice if this immortality meant what he believed it meant, but the wealth of his endless years might vanish in any instant now because he had no material wealth at all. Paradox. He owned centuries of the future, but for lack of a few current hours he might be robbed of his treasure laid up in time.

  Panic was no good. He knew that. He forced it down again and considered very quietly what he had to do. What he had to learn. How to go about it. Two things were paramount—his immortality and his dream-dust addiction.

  Money.

  He hadn't any.

  Immortality.

  That was an asset quite apart from the future it promised, but he didn't yet know how to spend it most wisely. So—keep it a secret.

  How?

  Disguise.

  As whom?

  As himself, of course. As Sam Reed, but not Sam Reed Immortal. Sam as he should have looked at the age of eighty. This tied in with the money angle. For the only way to get money was to return to his old haunts, his oldest practices. And he must not throw away his most precious secret there. Already a dim stirring in his brain hinted at the wonderful use he might make of this secret. Time enough for that later. Time in spilling-over plenty, if he could salvage it soon enough.

  But first, a little money, a little knowledge.

  Knowledge was easier and safer to acquire. It came first. He must learn immediately what had been happening in the past four decades, what had happened to himself, whether he had dropped out of the public attention, when and how. Clearly he was no longer a public figure, but where he had been the past forty years was still a question.

  He stepped off onto a cross-Way and let it carry him toward the nearest library. On the way he considered the problem of money. He had been a very rich man when Rosathe blew the dream-dust in his face. Some of the credits were in his own name, but four caches privately hidden held most of the fortune. It seemed likely that at least one still remained secret, but whether he could collect the money in any identity but his own remained to be seen. That had waited forty years—it would wait a few hours longer.

  He had not even the few cents required to buy the privacy of a room or a booth at the library, but he seated himself at one of the long tables and bent forward, hiding his face between the sound-absorbent wings that jutted out from the middle-partition. He lowered his eyes to the viewpiece of the visor. He touched control buttons and waited.

  A general newscast forty years old unrolled itself on the magnificent screen below him. It was a weekly summary that covered the last seven days he could remember.

  -

  Rip van Winkle could have helped his own disorientation by reading a twenty-year-old newspaper. It wouldn't have told him what had happened since he slept, but it would have restored the firmness of the world he woke in. In all the Keep, in all the planet, this old newscast was the only thing that could have put solidity under Sam Reed's feet. Outside the library danger and unfamiliarity waited everywhere, because the frames of reference had changed so much.

  The little things change most—fads, fashions, slang—and lapses from that superficial norm are instantly noticed. But a lapse from a basic can often remain undetected.

  Sam watched the past unroll which seemed so vividly the present that he could almost smell dream-dust puffed freshly in his face from Rosathe's hand. When he thought of that the dryness of his thirst suddenly choked him, and he remembered anew how urgent his need for haste was. He pressed his forehead to the viewpiece and sped the roll faster.

  SAM REED DREAM-DUSTS! The thin voice from the past shrilled ghostlike in his ears while the tri-di pictures moved swiftly by. Sam Reed, promoter behind the Land Colony, today gave up his career and dream-dusted, amazing everyone who knew him ... found wandering through the city ...

  It was all there. The investigation that followed his apparent suicide, the scandal as his swindle began to emerge. Four days after Sam Reed disappeared, after a dozen reputable witnesses saw him under the influence of dream-dust, the Colony bubble burst.

  Robin Hale, the Free Companion, had no answer to make. What could he say? Three hundred percent of the stock had been sold, speaking louder than any words of the fact that the Colony's promoters had known it could not succeed. Hale did the only thing he could do—tried to weather the storm as he had weathered so many in his long lifetime, man-made storms and the violent tornadoes of landside. It was impossible, of course. Emotions had been strung too high. Too many men had believed in the Colony.

  When the bubble burst, little remained.

  Sam Reed's name bore the brunt of the opprobrium. Not only was he a swindler, but he had run out—given up completely and lost himself in the suicidal escape of dream-dust. No one seemed to wonder why. There was no logic behind such a step. But publicity-wise minds behind the telling of the story wasted no time that might give people a chance to think the thing out. If the Colony was foredoomed to failure, Sam had only to wait to collect his illicit three hundred percent in safe secrecy. His suicide might have argued that he feared the Colony would succeed—but no one thought of that. It seemed only that, fearing exposure, he took the quickest way out.

  Investigation followed him, back-tracked and discovered the caches of swindled money that he hadn't concealed quite cleverly enough. Not against the deductive technology of the Keeps and the Immortals. They found the caches and emptied them—all of them. There had been four. The old newscasts gave details.

  Sam leaned back and blinked in the dim air of the library. Well, he was broke, then.

  He could see the hands of the Harker Family moving behind this four-decade-old game. Zachariah's face came back to him like something seen an hour ago, smooth and smiling in the visor screen, remote as a god's face watching ephemeral mortals. Zachariah had known exactly what he was doing, of course. But that was only the start of the game. Sam was a pawn to be used and discarded in the opening move. He turned back to the newscast to learn how the rest of the moves had been carried out

  And he was surprised to find that Robin Hale went ahead and started the Land Colony, in the face of the lack of all popular support—in the face of actual enmity. He had only one weapon. He still had the granted charter, and they couldn't take that away from him, especially since the money Sam stole had been recovered. Doggedly Hale must have forged ahead, laying his long-term plans as the Families laid theirs, looking forward to the time when these petty scandals would have blown past and he could start anew with a fresh generation and fight the Families to win this generation over as he had won the last—for a while.

  Yes, the Colony was started. But remarkably little news had been recorded about it. There was a spectacular murder in Delaware Keep and then a new play was produced that had all undersea Venus scrambling for tickets, and presently Sam found week after week of newscast spinning by with only the briefest references to the fact that a Colony had been started at all.

  That was deliberate, of course. The Harkers knew what they were doing.

  Sam stopped the newscast and thought. He would have to rearrange his tentative plans, but not much. He still needed money—fast. He swallowed dryly against the drug-thirst. The cached money was gone. What remained? Only himself, his experience, his priceless secret that must not yet be squandered—and what else? The old land charter issued in his name forty years ago was still on file, he assumed, since the charters were irrevocable. He couldn't claim it in his own name, and in any other name it would be invalid. Well, deal with that later.

  Right now—money. Sam's lips tightened. He got up and left the library, walking lightly, seeking a weapon and a victim. He couldn't get two or three thousand credits by robbery without taking long risks, but he could manage a simple blackjacking up an alley for twenty or thirty credits—if he was lucky.

  -

  He was lucky. So was the man he stunned, whose skull didn't crack under the impact of a sock filled with pebbles. Sam had taken careful stock of himself, and was surprised to find that physically he seemed to be in better shape than he had any right to expect. Most dream-dust victims are skin-and-bone mummies by the time they die. It raised another mystery—what sort of life had he been leading during these forty dreaming years?

  Memory of the man in the alley where Sam woke returned bafflingly. If he had only been clear-headed enough to keep his grip on that collar until he could shake the information he needed out of the watcher who had stood waiting above him. Well, that would come, too, in its time.

  With forty-three credits in his pocket, he headed for a certain establishment he had known forty years ago. The attendants there kept their mouths shut and worked efficiently, in the old days, and things did not change fast in the Keeps. He thought they would still be there.

  On the way he passed a number of big new salons where men and women were visible being embellished to a high point of perfection. Apparently the demand had increased. Certainly more foppery was evident in the Keep now. Men with exquisitely curled beards and ringlets were everywhere. But privacy and discretion were necessary to Sam's purpose. He went on to his semi-illegal establishment, and was not surprised to find it still in business.

  His nerve shook a little as he paused before the entrance. But no one had recognized him on the Ways, apparently. Forty years ago his televised face had been thoroughly familiar in the Keeps, but now—

  Rationalization is a set pattern in men's minds. If they looked at him and saw familiarity, they decided automatically that it was a remarkable likeness, no more. The unconscious always steers the conscious toward the most logical conclusion—the one grooved by channels of parallel experience. Sometimes striking resemblances do occur; that is natural. It was not natural to see Sam Reed as he had looked forty years before, moving along a Way. And many of those he passed had been unborn at the time of the Colony fiasco, or had seen Sam Reed with the indifferent eyes of childhood. Those who might remember were old now, dim-sighted, and many faces in public life had superimposed themselves on these failing memories since then.

  No, he was safe except for random chance. He went confidently through the glass door and gave his orders to the man assigned to him. It was routine enough.

  "Permanent or temporary?"

  "Temporary," Sam said, after a brief pause.

  "Quick-change?" There was a call for emergency quick-changes of disguise among the establishment's clientele.

  "That's right."

  The artist went to work. He was an anatomist and something of a psychologist as well as a disguise expert. He left Sam's pate bald, as directed; he dyed and bleached the red brows and lashes to pepper-and-salt that could pass for either dark or light, depending on the rest of the ensemble. With the beard, they passed for grimy white. The beard was a dirty, faded mixture.

  He built up Sam's nose and ears as time would have built them had it touched Sam. He put a few wrinkles in the right places with surrogate tissues. The beard hid most of Sam's face, but when the artist had finished eighty years of hard living looked out above its grayish mask.

  "For a quick change," he said, "take off the beard and change your expression. You can't remove the surrogate quickly, but you can iron out those wrinkles by the right expression. Try it, please." He wheeled Sam's chair around to the mirror and made him practice until both men were satisfied.

  "All right," Sam said finally. "I'll need a costume."

  They settled on three things only—hat, cloak, shoes. Simplicity and speed were the factors behind the choice. Each item was a special article. The hat could be completely altered in shape by a pull and a twist. The cloak was opaque, but of a texture so thin it could be crumpled and stuffed into a pocket. It was weighted to hang straight when worn, to hide the fact that the body beneath was not an old man's body. Sam had to practice the proper gait. And the shoes were nondescript in color, like the hat, but their large, dull buckles could be opened to release puffy blue bows.

  Sam went out by a back way. Moving stiffly, like one who felt the weight of his eighty years, he returned to the library. He was a remarkably well-preserved eighty, he concluded, watching his reflection in windows as he passed, a hale and hearty old man, but old—old. It would do.

  Now he wanted to study the current crime news.

  -

  In a way the criminal classes are agrarian—if you look at them over a span as broad as Sam's. They move as they feed, drifting from pasture to greener pasture. The Blue Way had been a skid-row forty years ago, but no more, Sam realized, listening to reports from the telecast. As for the crimes themselves, they hadn't altered much. That pattern was basic. Vice, through the ages, changes less than virtue.

  Finally he located the present green pasture. He bought a vial of water-soluble red dye and a high-powered smoke bomb. The instructions on the bomb told how to use it in hydroponic gardens to destroy insect pests. Sam didn't read them; he had used these bombs before.

  Then he had to locate the right place for his trap.

  He needed two alleys, close together, opening on a Way not too well-traveled. In one of the alleys was a cellar Sam remembered. It was deserted now, as in the old days. He hid near the entrance several fist-sized chunks of metal he had picked up, and he made a hiding-place for the smoke bomb in the cellar. After that he was ready for the next step.

  He did not let himself think how many steps the stairway contained altogether. When he thought of that, he remembered that he had all the time he needed—now!—and that sent him into drunken, elated dreams far divorced from the immediate necessity of redeeming his future. Instead, he reminded himself of his drug-addiction and the need for money and curative treatment.

  He went to the current green pasture and drank rotgut whisky, the cheapest available. And he kept in mind always the fact that he was a very old man. There were little tricks. He remembered never to fill his lungs with air before speaking; old men are short of breath and their voices lack resonance. The result was convincing. Also he moved slowly and carefully, making himself think of each move before he made it. A hobble doesn't indicate age, but action that is the result of old thought-processes does indicate it. The old have to move slowly because it's necessary to consider whether the stiff legs and weak muscles can manage obstacles. The world is as dangerous to the very old as to the very young, but a baby doesn't know the peril of gravity.

  So Sam didn't creak or hobble. But he didn't seem to have much breath and he apparently wasn't conditioned to fast moving any more—and it was an old man who sat in Gem o' Venus drinking rotgut and getting quietly drunk.

  It was a dive. A colorful dive, just as many of the dives of Imperial Rome must have been, the jetsam of costumes and customs drifting down from the higher levels, so that the eye caught here and there the flash of a gilded belt, the blood-brilliant scarlet of a feather-pierced cap, the swirl of a rainbow cloak.

  But basically Gem o' Venus was for drinking and gaming and more sordid uses. In the upper levels men gambled with fantastic devices, tricky so-called improvements on the ancient games of chance. There you might encounter such dubious streamlined tricks as roulette which employed a slightly radioactive ball and Geiger counters; there you had the game of Empire with its gagged-up cards and counters, where men played at winning imaginary galactic empires.

  In Gem o' Venus there were some gadgety games too, but the basics remained constant—dice and cards. Faces were not familiar to Sam here, but types were. Some of the customers didn't care where they sat; others always faced the door. These interested Sam. So did a card game on the verge of breaking up. The players were too drunk to be wary. Sam picked up his drink and kibitzed. After a while he slid into the game.

  He was rather surprised to find that the cards they were using were not the familiar pipped and face-cards of the old days. They were larger, patterned with the esoteric pictures of the tarot. The old, old cards of Earth's cloudy past had been drifting back into favor in Sam's earlier life, but it was a little surprising to find they had reached such depths as these in forty years.