can’t hear the voices.”

  She slithered under the covers, pulling the blankets over her head. A thick

  mound in the bed, a lump, like a rabbit in a snake’s belly. From underneath came

  muffled words. “What’s going to happen to us, Paul? We’re both crazy.”

  Macy got in beside her, and abruptly she turned to him with such fantastic

  ferocious passion that the breath was knocked from him. Grappling with him,

  knotting her arms and legs about his. Her belly pushing at his. Her pubic bone

  jabbing him painfully. Lissa clutching him as if she wanted to devour him. As a

  boy living in Seattle in the life he hadn’t lived, he had watched a starfish in

  a tidepool going to work on a clam, pulling its shell open with its suction

  cups, then turning itself inside out so that its stomach might go forth and

  ingest. He thought of that now as Lissa writhed against him. Waiting for

  something long and slimy to extrude from her slit and begin digesting him. Thank

  you, Dr. Gomez, for that lovely image. Do you hate women too, you mindfucking

  bastard?

  “Paul,” she murmured. “Paul. Paul. Paul.” Rhythmic exclamations. To his surprise

  he found his member stiffening despite everything, and in a single swift gesture

  he slipped it into her. She was hot and wet. As he speared her he expected

  Hamlin to surface and interfere with things again, but this time he was allowed

  the privacy of his genitals. Lissa cried out and came almost immediately. Her

  spasms were still going on when his began, a million and a quarter years later.

  At half past seven he woke again. Lissa seemed to be sleeping soundly. Hamlin

  quiescent. He showered and went into the little kitchen-cum-dinette. Picked up

  the phone, tapped out the delayed-message code, and instructed it to call the

  network at nine to say that he was sick and wouldn’t be coming in. Then he

  called the Rehab Center and arranged for today’s post-therapy session to be

  moved up from four in the afternoon to nine in the morning. He didn’t want to

  lose any time getting the Hamlin problem dealt with. “Will you hold?” the

  Center’s computer asked him, and he held, and two or three minutes later the

  machine came back to him and said, “I’ve checked Dr. Ianuzzi’s schedule, Mr.

  Macy, and it will be possible for her to see you at nine today.” The computer’s

  face, on telephone screen, was that of an efficient, good-looking brunette.

  “Fine,” Macy said, winking at her.

  He peered into the bedroom. Lissa lay face down, one arm dangling to the floor.

  Snoring faintly. Well, she’d had a hard night. He programmed breakfast for

  himself.

  Macy wondered if Dr. Gomez would be at the Center today. He wanted to see the

  look on the little Mex’s face when he showed up with a supposedly obliterated

  identity surfacing in his brain. Macy could still hear the doctor’s cocky spiel.

  “If I tell you Hamlin is eradicated, it’s because Iknow Hamlin is eradicated.”

  Sure. “I’m not just being a bullheaded bastard.” No, of course not. “Nat Hamlin

  doesn’t exist any more.” You tell it, baby. “Hamlin exists only as an abstract

  concept.” Right on, sweetheart. How was Gomez going to explain any of last

  night’s events? I hope Hamlin spits right in his goddam face. With my mouth.

  He thought he had a good idea what had brought Hamlin back to life. Who. Lissa

  was who. This telepathy business of hers had somehow managed to nudge the

  expelled ego out of limbo and give him at least a partial grip on his former

  body. Looking back over his relationship with Lissa, Macy saw the pattern

  clearly. That first day, two weeks ago exactly, when she’d collided with him on

  the street, that first moment of recognition, Lissa refusing to honor his Rehab

  badge and calling him by Nat Hamlin’s name: right then, at the beginning, he’d

  felt a stabbing pain, as if he were Hamlin and back at the Center having his

  past uprooted. And then, a few minutes later, same incident, when Lissa had

  leaned close and grabbed his wrist: that feeling of heat in his brain, that

  sense of an intrusion. Clearly it was her ESP stirring things up in him.

  Producing an instant of confusion, of double identity, when he wasn’t sure

  whether he was Hamlin or Macy. Probably that was the moment at which Hamlin’s

  return to conscious existence was stimulated. When I got that vision of myself

  in Hamlin’s studio, Lissa posing for me. And thought I was having a heart attack

  on the street.

  And then? Later the same day, when he almost passed out in front of Harold

  Griswold’s Hamlin sculpture, that must have been Hamlin giving a wild whoop and

  a leap inside him at the sight of something familiar. That night he had the

  first of his pursuit dreams. Hamlin loose in his head, and chasing him. Next?

  When Lissa sent the letter threatening suicide, and he met her on the street.

  Good Christ, was that only last night? And he walked up to her and there was

  that doubleness again, the nausea, the confusion. No doubt she had given Hamlin

  another little nudge. Lastly, when he tried to leave her in the restaurant, and

  she cried out for him to come back. The sheer mental voltage of that must have

  been the clincher, awakening Hamlin fully, giving him a chance to jump to the

  conscious level. He was so stunned by Lissa’s telepathic scream that Hamlin was

  able to grab some of the cerebral centers and start talking to him. Even to

  seize the facial muscles on the right side for a little while. He doesn’t have

  solid control of anything, not for long, he holds on a while and slips away, but

  he’s there. Lissa’s fault. Of course she didn’t intend to. A weird telepathic

  accident, is all. Or maybe not so accidental. It was Hamlin she loved, he

  thought; I’m just a stranger in his body. Suppose this is her way of getting rid

  of me and helping him come back.

  No.

  He didn’t want to believe that. She hadn’t meant to yank Hamlin into

  consciousness. All the same, she was responsible. Now he had to get Hamlin

  removed again. Anguish and turmoil, most likely. After which he’d better not

  fool around with Lissa. Self-preservation has to come before concern for others,

  right? Out she goes.

  The Rehab Center was just across the Connecticut line in Greenwich. Ten minutes

  by long-hop gravity tube from Manhattan North. Macy took the uptown shuttle to

  the nearest loading point for the tube. A gray, misty morning, more like late

  autumn than like late spring. Taut-faced commuters running this way and that.

  Most of them going the other way, thank God. They kept bumping into him. Giving

  him funny stares and going on. For over a week now he had been free of his

  obsession that people were staring at him, but this morning it returned. The

  Rehab badge seemed like a beacon drawing all eyes. Announcing: Here walks a

  former sinner. Doer of dreadful deeds! Behind this bland mask lurks the purified

  brain of a famous criminal. Do you recognize him? Do you remember the news

  stories? Go up close, take a good look, enlarge your life-experience through a

  moment of proximity with somebody who has been a household word. Guaranteed not

  to harm you. Guaranteed to be regenerated and redeemed from sin. He walks, he

  talks, he suffers like an ordinary human being! See the former monster! See!

  See! See!

  “Greenwich,” Macy said huskily to the ticket-scanner, and tapped out his account

  number. From the slot came a plastic ticket with thin golden filaments embedded

  in it. Clutching it tightly, Macy made his way to the loading gate. The doors of

  the train were open. Plenty of seats inside. He found one next to the wall. No

  windows in here. People drifting aboard. He sat passively, thinking as little as

  possible. Floating in here. Just as the train itself, within its tube, floated

  in a larger tube on a two-foot-deep cushion of water.

  “All aboard,” the computer voice calls. The pressure-tight door sliding shut. We

  are sealed within. Gliding forward, through the airlock. The valve swinging

  open. Nearvacuum in front of the train, full pressure behind: the train goes

  squirting into the tube. Very clever. Little sensation of motion, because of the

  dynamic flotation system and the sleek roller-bearing wheels. Onward, zooming

  silently eastward, driven by cunning pneumatic forces, the air to the train’s

  rear gradually becoming more tenuous, the air in front undergoing steady

  compression. Ultimately the air in front will be our cushion for deceleration.

  Meanwhile gravity also drives us as we swoop through a gently sloping tunnel. To

  the midpoint, where we will begin to rise and slow. How shrewd these engineers

  are. If I could only ride the tube all day, coasting from here to there and back

  again at a lovely 300 mph. The ecstasies of free fall. Or almost free.

  Macy sat with eyes closed. Not a twitch out of Hamlin. Stay hidden, you

  murderous bastard. Stay hidden.

  He didn’t understand how it was possible for Hamlin to have come back. At the

  Center he had picked up a good working knowledge of the Rehab process, and from

  what he knew of it he couldn’t see any chance for the spontaneous or evoked

  resurrection of an obliterated identity. What’s identity, after all, if not just

  the sum of all the programming we’ve received since the initial obstetrical slap

  on the rear? They pump into us a name, a set of kinship relations, a structural

  outlook toward society, and a succession of life experiences. And after a while

  feedback mechanisms come into play, so that what we’ve already become directs

  our choice of further shaping experiences, thereby reinforcing the contours of

  the existing self, creating the attitudes and responses that we and others

  consider “typical” of that self. Fine. And this accumulation of events and

  attitudes is engraved on the brain, first in the form of electrical impulses and

  patterns, then, as short-term memories are accepted for long-term storage, in

  the form of chains of complex molecules, registering in the chemical structure

  of the brain’s cells.

  And so, to undo the identity-creating process, one merely undoes the

  electrochemical patterns by which the identity is recorded. A little electronic

  scrambling, first, to inhibit synapse transmission and rearrange the way the

  electrons jump in the brain. Then, when defenses are down, start the chemical

  attack. A shot of acetylcholine terminase to interfere with short-term memory

  fixation. One of the puromycin derivatives to wash out the involuted chains of

  ribonucleic acid, brain-RNA, that keep memories permanently inscribed in the

  brain. Flush the system with amnesifacient drugs, and presto! The web of

  experiences and attitudes is wiped away, leaving the body a tabula rasa, a blank

  sheet, without identity, without soul, without memory. So, then: feed in a new

  identity, any identity you like. Building takes longer than destroying,

  naturally. You start with a vacant hulk that has certain basic motor reactions

  left and nothing else: it knows how to tie its shoelaces, how to blow its nose,

  how to make articulate sounds. Unless the wipeout job has been done with

  excessive zeal, it can even speak, read, and write, though probably on a

  six-year-old level. Now give it a name. Using nifty hypnagogic techniques, feed

  it its new biography: here is where you went to school, this is your mother,

  this is your father, these were your childhood friends, these were your hobbies.

  It doesn’t have to be crystalline in its consistency; most of our memories are

  mush anyway, out of which a bright strand projects here and there. Stuff they

  reconstruct with enough of a past so he won’t feel disembodied. Then train him

  for adult life: give him some job skills, social graces, remind him what sex is

  all about, et cetera, et cetera. The peripheral stuff, reading and writing and

  language, comes back faster than you’d imagine. But the old identitynever comes

  back, because it’s been hit by fifty megatons of fragmentation bombs, it’s been

  totally smashed. Right down on the cellular level, everything making up that

  identity has been sluiced away by the clever drugs. It’s gone.

  Unless. Somehow. Skulking in the cellular recesses, traces of the old self

  manage to remain, like scum on a pond, a mere film of demolished identity, and

  from this film, given the right circumstances, the old self can rebuild itself

  and take command of its body. What are the right circumstances? None, if you

  listen to Gomez & Co. No recorded case of an identity reestablishing itself

  after a court-ordered eradication has been carried out. But how many

  reconstructs have ever been exposed to ESP? The full blast of a telepath

  reaching out toward old and new identities simultaneously? It’s a statistical

  problem. There arex number of reconstructs walking around today. Andy number of

  telepaths.X is a very small number andy is even smaller than that. So what are

  the odds against anx meeting ay? So big, apparently, that this is the first time

  it’s ever happened. And now look. That psychopathic fucker Hamlin crawling

  around loose in my brain. Why mine?

  “Greenwich,” said the voice of the computer, and the train slid placidly to a

  halt on its cushion of compressed air.

  The Rehab Center was north of the city, in the old estate district, which

  through inspired and desperate zoning arrangements had managed to resist the

  grinding glacier of population pressures which had devastated most of suburbia.

  Several acts of reconstruction and rehabilitation had been performed on the

  Center itself. The main building, a gray pseudo-Tudor stone pile three stories

  high, with grained stockbroker-Gothic ceilings and leaded-glass windows, had

  been a private residence in the middle twentieth century, the mansion of some

  old robber baron, a speculator in energy options. In the end the speculator had

  outsmarted himself and gone into bankruptcy; the big house then had been

  transformed into the headquarters of a therapy cult that relied a good deal on

  year-round nudity, and it was in this era that the five plastic geodesic domes

  had been erected, forming a giant pentagram around the main building, to serve

  as wintertime solaria. Recriminations and lawsuits did the cult in within five

  years, and the place became an avant-garde secondary school, where the scions of

  the Connecticut gentry took courses in copulatory gymnastics, polarity traumas,

  and social relativity. The various minor outbuildings, with many ingenious

  electronic facilities, were added at this time. The school collapsed before it

  had produced its first graduating class, and the county, taking possession of

  the premises for nonpayment of realty taxes, speedily turned it into the first

  Rehab Center in the western half of the state in order to qualify for the

  federal matching-funds grant then being offered; the national government, eager

  to get the Rehab program off to a fast start, was throwing its meager resources

  around quite grandly then.

  As one rode up the thousand-yard-long driveway leading to the main building, one

  could behold all the discrete strata of construction marking the epochs of the

  Center’s past, and, if one were imaginatively inclined, one might envision the

  old speculator placing phone calls from pool-side, the health fanatics toasting

  in the solaria, the youthful scholars elaborately fornicating on the lawn, all

  at once, while through the leafy glades wandered today’s candidates for

  personality rehabilitation, smiling blankly as voices out of earphones purred

  their pasts to them.

  Macy saw none of these things today, not even the driveway. For, as he emerged

  from the tube station in downtown Greenwich and looked about for an autotaxi to

  take him up to the Center, he felt a sensation much like that of a hatchet

  landing between his shoulder blades, and toppled forward, dazed and retching,

  sprawling to the pavement. For some moments he lay half-conscious on the elegant

  blue and white terrazzo tiling of the station entrance. Then, recovering

  somewhat, he managed to scramble up until he crouched on hands and knees, like a

  tipsy sprinter awaiting the starter’s gun. More than that he could not do.

  Rising to a standing position was beyond him now. Flushed, sweating, stricken,

  he waited for his strength to return and hoped someone would help him up.

  No one did. The commuters obligingly parted their ranks and flowed by him to

  either side. A boulder in a stream. No one offers to assist a boulder. Perhaps

  they have a lot of epileptics in Greenwich. Can’t let yourself get worked up

  over one ofthose. Damned troublemakers always flopping on their faces, chewing

  on their tongues: how’s a man going to get to work on time if he stops for them