“Okay,” he said, and felt very little.

Behind him, Ruth Rae emitted a muffled shriek.

“You also, miss,” the pol with the stripes said, motioning toward her with his nightstick.

“Can I get my coat?” she asked timidly.

“Come on.” The pol stepped briskly past Jason, grabbed Ruth Rae by the arm, and dragged her out the apartment door onto the walkway.

“Do what he says,” Jason said harshly to her.

Ruth Rae sniveled, “They’re going to put me in a forced-labor camp.”

“No,” Jason said. “They’ll probably kill you.”

“You’re really a nice guy,” one of the pols—without stripes—commented as he and his companions herded Jason and Ruth Rae down the wrought-iron staircase to the ground floor. Parked in one of the slots was a police van, with several pols standing idly around it, weapons held loosely. They looked inert and bored.

“Show me your ID,” the pol with stripes said to Jason; he extended his hand, waiting.

“I’ve got a seven-day police pass,” Jason said. His hands shaking, he fished it out, gave it to the pol officer.

Scrutinizing the pass the officer said, “You admit freely of your own volition that you are Jason Taverner?”

“Yes,” he said.

Two of the pols expertly searched him for arms. He complied silently, still feeling very little. Only a half-assed hopeless wish that he had done what he knew he should have done: moved on. Left Vegas. Headed anywhere.

“Mr. Taverner,” the pol officer said, “the Los Angeles Police Bureau has asked us to take you into protective custody for your own protection and welfare and to transport you safely and with due care to the Police Academy in downtown L.A., which we will now do. Do you have any complaints as to the manner in which you have been treated?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”

“Enter the rear section of the quibble van,” the officer said, pointing at the open doors.

Jason did so.

Ruth Rae, stuffed in beside him, whimpered to herself in the darkness as the doors slammed shut and locked. He put his arm around her, kissed her on the forehead. “What did you do?” she whimpered raspingly in her bourbon voice, “that they’re going to kill us for?”

A pol, getting into the rear of the van with them from the front cab, said, “We aren’t going to snuff you, miss. We’re transporting you both back to L.A. That’s all. Calm down.”

“I don’t like Los Angeles,” Ruth Rae whimpered. “I haven’t been there in years. I hate L.A.” She peered wildly around.

“So do I,” the pol said as he locked the rear compartment off from the cab and dropped the key through a slot to the pols outside. “But we must learn to live with it: it’s there.”

“They’re probably going all through my apartment,” Ruth Rae whimpered. “Picking through everything, breaking everything.”

“Absolutely,” Jason said tonelessly. His head ached, now, and he felt nauseated. And tired. “Who are we going to be taken to?” he asked the pol. “To Inspector McNulty?”

“Most likely no,” the pol said conversationally as the quibble-van rose noisily into the sky. “The drinkers of intoxicating liquor have made you the subject of their songs and those sitting in the gate are concerning themselves about you, and according to them Police General Felix Buckman wants to interrogate you.” He explained, “That was from Psalm Sixty-nine. I sit here by you as a Witness to Jehovah Reborn, who is in this very hour creating new heavens and a new earth, and the former things will not be called to mind, neither will they come up into the heart. Isaiah 65:13, 17.”

“A police general?” Jason said, numbed.

“So they say,” the obliging young Jesus-freak pol answered. “I don’t know what you folks did, but you sure did it right.”

Ruth Rae sobbed to herself in the darkness.

“All flesh is like grass,” the Jesus-freak pol intoned. “Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given. The crooked shall be made straight and the straight loaded.”

“Do you have a joint?” Jason asked him.

“No, I’ve run out.” The Jesus-freak pol rapped on the forward metal wall. “Hey, Ralf, can you lay a joint on this brother?”

“Here.” A crushed pack of Goldies appeared by way of a gray-sleeved hand and arm.

“Thanks,” Jason said as he lit up. “You want one?” he asked Ruth Rae.

“I want Bob,” she whimpered. “I want my husband.”

Silently, Jason sat hunched over, smoking and meditating. “Don’t give up,” the Jesus-freak pol crammed in beside him said, in the darkness.

“Why not?” Jason said.

“The forced-labor camps aren’t that bad. In Basic Orientation they took us through one; there’re showers, and beds with mattresses, and recreation such as volleyball, and arts and hobbies; you know—crafts, like making candles. By hand. And your family can send you packages and once a month they or your friends can visit you.” He added, “And you get to worship at the church of your choice.”

Jason said sardonically, “The church of my choice is the free, open world.”

After that there was silence, except for the noisy clatter of the quibble’s engine, and Ruth Rae’s whimpering.

14

Twenty minutes later the police quibble van landed on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Academy building.

Stiffly, Jason Taverner stepped out, looked warily around, smelled smog-saturated foul air, saw above him once again the yellowness of the largest city in North America … he turned to help Ruth Rae out, but the friendly young Jesus-freak pol had done that already.

Around them a group of Los Angeles pols gathered, interested. They seemed relaxed, curious, and cheerful. Jason saw no malice in any of them and he thought, When they have you they are kind. It is only in netting you that they are venomous and cruel. Because then there is the possibility that you might get away. And here, now, there is no such possibility.

“Did he make any suicide tries?” a L.A. sergeant asked the Jesus-freak pol.

“No, sir.”

So that was why he had ridden there.

It hadn’t even occurred to Jason, and probably not to Ruth Rae either … except perhaps as a heavy, shucky gesture, thought of but never really considered.

“Okay,” the L.A. sergeant said to the Las Vegas pol team. “From here on in we’ll formally take over custody of the two suspects.”

The Las Vegas pols hopped back into their van and it zoomed off into the sky, back to Nevada.

“This way,” the sergeant said, with a sharp motion of his hand in the direction of the descent sphincter tube. The L.A. pols seemed to Jason a little grosser, a little tougher and older, than the Las Vegas ones. Or perhaps it was his imagination; perhaps it meant only an increase in his own fear.

What do you say to a police general? Jason wondered. Especially when all your theories and explanations about yourself have worn out, when you know nothing, believe nothing, and the rest is obscure. Aw, the hell with it, he decided wearily, and allowed himself to drop virtually weightlessly down the tube, along with the pols and Ruth Rae.

At the fourteenth floor they exited from the tube.

A man stood facing them, well dressed, with rimless glasses, a topcoat over his arm, pointed leather Oxfords, and, Jason noted, two gold-capped teeth. A man, he guessed, in his mid-fifties. A tall, gray-haired, upright man, with an expression of authentic warmth on his excellently proportioned aristocratic face. He did not look like a pol.

“You are Jason Taverner?” the man inquired. He extended his hand; reflexively, Jason accepted it and shook. To Ruth, the police general said, “You may go downstairs. I’ll interview you later. Right now it’s Mr. Taverner I want to talk to.”

The pols led Ruth off; he could hear her complaining her way out of sight. He now found himself facing the police general and no one else. No one armed.