“Do that,” Jason said. “Put her through the wringer.” His tone had become savage. “Bust her. Put her in a forced-labor camp.”

You sixes, Buckman said to himself, have little loyalty to one another. He had discovered this already, but it always surprised him. An elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another. To himself he laughed, letting his face show, at least, a smile.

“You’re amused?” Jason said. “Don’t you believe me?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Buckman brought a box of Cuesta Rey cigars from a drawer of his desk, used his little knife to cut off the end of one. The little steel knife made for that purpose alone.

Across from him Jason Taverner watched with fascination. “A cigar?” Buckman inquired. He held the box toward Jason.

“I have never smoked a good cigar,” Jason said. “If it got out that I—” He broke off.

“‘Got out’?” Buckman asked, his mental ears pricking up. “Got out to whom? The police?”

Jason said nothing. But he had clenched his fist and his breathing had become labored.

“Are there strata in which you’re well known?” Buckman said. “For example, among intellectuals in forced-labor camps. You know—the ones who circulate mimeographed manuscripts.”

“No,” Jason said.

“Musical strata, then?”

Jason said tightly, “Not anymore.”

“Have you ever made phonograph records?”

“Not here.”

Buckman continued to scrutinize him unblinkingly; over long years he had mastered the ability. “Then where?” he aske4, in a voice barely over the threshold of audibility. A voice deliberately sought for: its tone lulled, interfered with identification of the words’ meaning.

But Jason Taverner let it slide by; he failed to respond. These damn bastard sixes, Buckman thought, angered—mostly at himself. I can’t play funky games with a six. It just plain does not work. And, at any minute, he could cancel my statement out of his mind, my claim to superior genetic heritage.

He pressed a stud on his intercom. “Have a Miss Katharine Nelson brought in here,” he instructed Herb Maime. “A police informant down in the Watts District, that ex-black area. I think I should talk to her.”

“Half hour.”

“Thanks.”

Jason Taverner said hoarsely, “Why bring her into this?”

“She forged your papers.”

“All she knows about me is what I had her put on the ID cards.”

“And that was spurious?”

After a pause Jason shook his head no.

“So you do exist.”

“Not—here.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me how you got those data deleted from all the banks.”

“I never did that.”

Hearing that, Buckman felt an enormous hunch overwhelm him; it gripped him with paws of iron. “You haven’t been taking material out of the data banks; you’ve been trying to put material in. There were no data there in the first place.”

Finally, Jason Taverner nodded.

“Okay,” Buckman said; he felt the glow of discovery lurking inside him, now, revealing itself in a cluster of comprehensions. “You took nothing out. But there’s some reason why the data weren’t there in the first place. Why not? Do you know?”

“I know,” Jason Taverner said, staring down at the table; his face had twisted into a gross mirror-thing. “I don’t exist.”

“But you once did.”

“Yes,” Taverner said, nodding unwillingly. Painfully.

“Where?”

“I don’t know!”

It always comes back to that, Buckman said to himself. I don’t know. Well, Buckman thought, maybe he doesn’t. But he did make his way from L.A. to Vegas; he did shack up with that skinny, wrinkled broad the Vegas pols loaded into the van with him. Maybe, he thought, I can get something from her. But his hunch registered a no.

“Have you had dinner?” Buckman inquired.

“Yes,” Jason Taverner said.

“But you’ll join me in the munchies. I’ll have them bring something in to us.” Once more he made use of the intercom. “Peggy—it’s so late now … get us two breakfasts at that new place down the street. Not the one we used to go to, but the new one with the sign showing the dog with the girl’s head. Barfy’s.”

“Yes, Mr. Buckman,” Peggy said and rang off.

“Why don’t they call you ‘General’?” Jason Taverner asked.

Buckman said, “When they call me ‘General’ I feel I ought to have written a book on how to invade France while staying out of a two-front war.”

“So you’re just plain ‘Mister’.”

“That’s right.”

“And they let you do it?”

“For me,” Buckman said, “there is no ‘they.’ Except for five police marshals here and there in the world, and they call themselves ‘Mister,’ too.” And how they would like to demote me further, he thought. Because of all that I did.

“But there’s the Director.”

Buckman said, “The Director has never seen me. He never will. Nor will he see you either, Mr. Taverner. But nobody can see you, because, as you pointed out, you don’t exist.”

Presently a gray uniformed pol woman entered the office, carrying a tray of food. “What you usually order this time of night,” she said as he set the tray down on Buckman’s desk. “One short stack of hots with a side order of ham; one short stack of hots with a side order of sausage.”

“Which would you like?” Buckman asked Jason Taverner.

“Is the sausage well cooked?” Jason Taverner asked, peering to see. “I guess it is. I’ll take it.”

“That’s ten dollars and one gold quinque,” the pol woman said. “Which of you is going to pay for it?”

Buckman dug into his pockets, fished out the bills and change. “Thanks.” The woman departed.

“Do you have any children?” he asked Taverner.

“No.”

“I have a child,” General Buckman said. “I’ll show you a little 3-D pic of him that I received.” He reached into his desk, brought out a palpitating square of three-dimensional but nonmoving colors. Accepting the picture, Jason held it properly in the light, saw outlined statically a young boy in shorts and sweater, barefoot, running across a field, tugging on the string of a kite. Like the police general, the boy had light short hair and a strong and impressive wide jaw. Already.

“Nice,” Jason said. He returned the pic.

Buckman said, “He never got the kite off the ground. Too young, perhaps. Or afraid. Our little boy has a lot of anxiety. I think because he sees so little of me and his mother; he’s at a school in Florida and we’re here, which is not a good thing. You say you have no children?”

“Not that I know of,” Jason said.

“‘Not that you know of’?” Buckman raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you don’t go into the matter? You’ve never tried to find out? By law, you know, you as the father are required to support your children in or out of wedlock.”

Jason nodded.

“Well,” General Buckman said, as he put the pic away in his desk, “everyone to his own. But consider what you’ve left out of your life. Haven’t you ever loved a child? It hurts your heart, the innermost part of you, where you can easily die.”

“I didn’t know that,” Jason said.

“Oh, yes. My wife says you can forget any kind of love except what you’ve felt toward children. That only goes one way; it never reverts. And if something comes between you and a child—such as death or a terrible calamity such as a divorce—you never recover.”

“Well, hell, then”—Jason gestured with a forkful of sausage—“then it would be better not to feel that kind of love.”

“I don’t agree,” Buckman said. “You should always love, and especially a child, because that’s the strongest form of love.”

“I see,” Jason said.

“No, you don’t see. Sixes never see; they don’t understand. It’s not worth discussing.” He shuffled a pile of papers on his desk, scowling, puzzled, and nettled. But gradually he calmed down, became his cool assured self once more. But he could not understand Jason Taverner’s attitude. But he, his child, was all-important; it, plus his love of course for the boy’s mother—this was the pivot of his life.