Keith Laumer - Of Death What Dreams

“Left hand,” the thin man said tonelessly. “Wrist up.”

William Bailey peeled back his cuff; the thin man put something cold against it, nodded toward the nearest door.

“Through there, first slab on the right,” he said, and turned away.

“Just a minute,” Bailey started. “I wanted—”

“Let’s get going, buddy,” the thin man said. “That stuff is fast.”

Bailey felt something stab up under his heart. “You mean—you’ve already … that’s all there is to it?”

“That’s what you came for, right? Slab one, friend. Let’s go.”

“But—I haven’t been here two minutes—”

“Whatta you expect—organ music? Look, pal,” the thin man shot a glance at the wall clock. “I’m on my break, know what I mean?”

“I thought I’d at least have time for … for …”

“Have a heart, chum. You make it under your own power, I don’t have to haul you, see?” The thin man was pushing open the door, urging Bailey through into an odor of chemicals and unlive flesh. In a narrow, curtained alcove, he indicated a padded cot.

“On your back, arms and legs straight out.”

Bailey assumed the position, tensed as the thin man began fitting straps over his ankles.

“Relax. It’s just if we get a little behind and I don’t get back to a client for maybe a couple hours and they stiffen up … well, them issue boxes is just the one size, you know what I mean?”

A wave of softness, warmness, swept over Bailey as he lay back.

“Hey, you didn’t eat nothing the last twelve hours?” The thin man’s face was a hazy pink blur.

“I awrrr mmmm,” Bailey heard himself say.

“OK, sleep tight, paisan.…” The thin man’s voice boomed and faded. Bailey’s last thought as the endless blackness closed in was of the words cut in the granite over the portal to the Euthanasia Center:

“ … send me your tired, your poor, your hopeless, yearning to be free. To them I raise the lamp beside the brazen door.…”

Bailey’s first thought when he opened his eyes was one of surprise that a girl had taken the thin man’s place. She looked young, with a finely chiseled, too-pale face.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Her voice was soft and breathy, but with an undernote of strength.

He started to nod; then the wrongness of it penetrated. This wasn’t the Euthanasia Center. Behind the girl, he saw the dun walls and plastic fixtures of a Class Yellow Nine flat. He made an effort to sit up and became aware of a deathly sickness all through his body.

“My chest hurts,” he managed to gasp. “What happened? Why am I alive?”

The girl leaned closer. “You were really—inside?”

Bailey thought about it. “I remember going into the cubicle. The attendant gave me a hypo and strapped me down. Then I passed out…” His eyes searched the girl’s face. “Am I dreaming this?”

She shook her head without impatience. “I found you in the serviceway behind the center. I brought you here.”

“But—” Bailey croaked, “I’m supposed to be dead!”

“How did you get outside?” the girl asked.

For an instant, a ghostly memory brushed Bailey’s mind: cold, and darkness, and a bodiless voice that spoke from emptiness… “I don’t know. I was there… and now I’m here.”

“Are you sorry?”

Bailey started to answer quickly, then paused. “No,” he said, wonderingly. “I’m not.”

“Then sleep,” the girl said.

“Why?” the girl asked. She sat across from Bailey at the fold-out table, watching as he ate carefully a bowl of lux-ration soup, with real lichen chunks.

“Why did I go?” He made a vague gesture with a thin, pale hand. “Everything I wanted to do, everything I tried; it all seemed so hopeless. I was trapped, a Ten-Level Yellow-Tag. There was no future for me, no chance to improve. It was a way out.”

“You feel differently now?”

Bailey nodded slowly. “I used to grieve for the old days, when the world wasn’t so crowded and so organized. I always told myself what I would have done if I’d lived then. Now I see that’s just an easy out. It’s always been up to a man to make his own way. I was afraid to try.”

“And now you’re not?”

“No,” Bailey said, sounding surprised. “Why should I be? All that out there”—he made a gesture which encompassed all of society—“is just something built by men. I’m a man, too. I can do what I have to do.” He broke off, glancing at the girl. “What about you?” he asked. “Why did you help me?”

“I… know how it is. I almost jumped from the Hudson Intermix once.”

“What changed your mind?”

She lifted her shoulders, frowned. “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Maybe I lost my nerve.”

Bailey shook his head. “No,” he said. “You didn’t lose your nerve. Helping me took plenty of that. I don’t know what the law says about leaving the center via the back door, but I left all my papers there. You’re harboring a tagless man.” He put down his spoon and pushed the chair back. “Thanks for everything,” he said. “I’ll be going now.”

“Are you sure you feel well enough?”

“I’m all right. And there are things I have to do.”

“Where will you go? What will you do?”

“First I’ll need money.”

“Without your cards, how can you apply for assignment?”

“You’re thinking about legal methods,” Bailey said. “I’m afraid that’s a luxury I can’t afford. I’ll go where the cards don’t count.”

“You mean—Preke territory?”

“I don’t have much choice.” Bailey leaned across to touch her hand. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Forget me. At worst, I won’t be any worse off than when I was strapped to a slab in the slaughterhouse.”

“I still don’t know how you got away.”

“Neither do I.” Bailey rose. “But never mind the past. It’s what comes next that counts.”

Bailey took the walkaway to the nearest downshaft, rode the crowded car to Threevee Mall. No one paid any visible attention to him as he walked briskly along past the glare-lit store fronts through the streaming crowd that bumped and jostled him in a perfectly normal fashion. He passed the barred entry to a service ramp, continued another thirty feet past the green-uniformed Peaceman lounging near it; then he flattened himself against the rippling façade of a popshop. A stout man with an angry expression bellied past, trampling his foot. Bailey stepped out behind him, delivered a sharp kick to the calf of the fat man’s left leg, instantly faded back against the wall as the victim whirled with a yell. One windmilling arm caught another pedestrian across the chest. The latter dealt the fat man a return blow to the paunch. In an instant, a churning maelstrom of shouting, kicking, punching humanity had developed. Bailey watched until the Greenback arrived, cutting a swatch through the crowd with his prod; then he moved quickly along to the gate, jumped to catch its top edge, pulled himself up. There were a few shouts, one ineffective grab at his leg by a zealous citizen who staggered back with a bruised chin for his efforts. Then Bailey was over, dropping on a wide landing. Without hesitation, he started down the dark stairs toward outlaw territory.

The odor of Four Quarters was the most difficult aspect of that twilit half-world for Bailey to accommodate to. The shops were shabby antiques, badly lit by primitive fluorescents and garish neon, relics of an age that had by-passed and buried the original city under the looming towers of progress. The Prekes—the lawless ones, without life permits, work papers, or census numbers—seemed not much different than their catalogued and routinized brethren on the levels above, except for the variety of their costumes and a certain look of animal alertness. Bailey moved along the wide street, breathing through his mouth. He strolled for an hour, unmolested, before a tiny, spider-like man with sharp brown eyes materialized from a shadowy doorway ahead.