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A black-and-white evidently had noticed something in Charles Freck’s driving he hadn’t noticed; it had taken off from its parking spot and was moving along behind him
Another fantasy film rolled suddenly into his head, without his consent:
“Kill the pushers,” Arctor said, and walked back to his chair.
What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.
That way we won’t even have to go outside.
believed not so much in thrift as in ingenuity. You should be able to use the first thing that came to hand to achieve your objective, Barris preached.
His agony at that point was mainly real.
They had brought it up and drilled it into his own memory banks during his police training at the academy. Or else he had read it in the newspapers.
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.
But, he thought, who am I? Which of them is me?
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then, briefly. Under very specialized conditions, such as today.
If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.
Those taller than he was, and in a position to impose their strength and will on him, whether it was reasonable or not. Just agree, he thought. And do what you’re told.
But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.
Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost . . .
perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A
(which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn)
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, her war, her taking on a symbol and a reality that outweighed her. Now my insurance rates will go up, she realized as she climbed from her car.
