“You do what you want,” Heather said presently. “I’m going to turn myself in at the academy.”

“They want you, too?” he said.

“Can’t you read the whole article? Can’t you just do that? They want my testimony. As to how you felt about my relationship with Alys. It was public knowledge that you and I were sleeping together then, for Christ’s sake.”

“I didn’t know about your relationship.”

“I’ll tell them that. When”—she hesitated, then went on—“when did you find out?”

“From this newspaper,” he said. “Just now.”

“You didn’t know about it yesterday when she was killed?” At that he gave up; hopeless, he said to himself. Like living in a world made of rubber. Everything bounced. Changed shape as soon as it was touched or even looked at.

“Today, then,” Heather said. “If that’s what you believe. You would know, if anyone would.”

“Goodbye,” he said. Sitting down, he fished his shoes out from beneath the couch, put them on, tied the laces, stood up. Then, reaching, he lifted the cardboard box from the coffee table. “For you,” he said, and tossed it to her. Heather clutched at it; the box struck her on the chest and then fell to the floor.

“What is it?” she asked.

“By now,” he said, “I’ve forgotten.”

Kneeling, Heather picked up the box, opened it, brought forth newspapers and the blue-glazed vase. It had not broken. “Oh,” she said softly. Standing up she inspected it; she held it close to the light. “It’s incredibly beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

Jason said, “I didn’t kill that woman.”

Wandering away from him, Heather placed the vase on a high ‘shelf of knickknacks. She said nothing.

“What can I do,” he said, “but go?” He waited but still she said nothing. “Can’t you speak?” he demanded.

“Call them,” Heather said. “And tell them you’re here.”

He picked up the phone, dialed the operator.

“I want to put through a call to the Los Angeles Police Academy,” he told the operator. “To General Felix Buckman. Tell him it’s Jason Taverner calling.”

The operator was silent.

“Hello?” he said.

“You can dial that direct, sir.”

“I want you to do it,” Jason said.

“But, sir—”

“Please,” he said.

27

Phil Westerburg, the Los Angeles Police Agency chief deputy coroner, said to General Felix Buckman, his superior, “I can explain the drug best this way. You haven’t heard of it because it isn’t in use yet; she must have ripped it off from the academy’s special-activities lab.” He sketched on a piece of paper. “Time-binding is a function of the brain. It’s a structuralization of perception and orientation.”

“Why did it kill her?” Buckman asked. It was late and his head hurt. He wished the day would end; he wished everyone and everything would go away. “An overdose?” he demanded.

“We have no way of determining as yet what would constitute an overdose with KR-3. It’s currently being tested on detainee volunteers at the San Bernardino forced-labor camp, but so far”—Westerburg continued to sketch—“anyhow, as I was explaining. Time-binding is a function of the brain and goes on as long as the brain is receiving input. Now, we know that the brain can’t function if it can’t bind space as well … but as to why, we don’t know yet. Probably it has to do with the instinct to stabilize reality in such a fashion that sequences can be ordered in terms of beforeand-after–that would be time—and, more importantly, space-occupying, as with a three-dimensional object as compared to, say, a drawing of that object.”

He showed Buckman his sketch. It meant nothing to Buckman; he stared at it blankly and wondered where, this late at night, he could get some Darvon for his headache. Had Alys had any? She had squirreled so many pills.

Westerburg continued, “Now, one aspect of space is that any given unit of space excludes all other given units; if a thing is there it can’t be here. Just as in time if an event comes before, it can’t also come after.”

Buckman said, “Couldn’t this wait until tomorrow? You originally said it would take twenty-four hours to develop a report on the exact toxin involved. Twenty-four hours is satisfactory to me.”

“But you requested that we speed up the analysis,” Westerburg said. “You wanted the autopsy to begin immediately. At two-ten this afternoon, when I was first officially called in.”

“Did I?” Buckman said. Yes, he thought, I did. Before the marshals can get their story together. “Just don’t draw pictures,” he said. “My eyes hurt. Just tell me.”

“The exclusiveness of space, we’ve learned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them. Trillions, theoretically, in fact. But in itself, space is not exclusive. In fact, in itself, space does not exist at all.”

“Meaning?”

Westerburg, refraining from sketching, said, “A drug such as KR-3 breaks down the brain’s ability to exclude one unit of space out of another. So here versus there is lost as the brain tries to handle perception. It can’t tell if an object has gone away or if it’s still there. When this occurs the brain can no longer exclude alternative spatial vectors. It opens up the entire range of spatial variation. The brain can no longer tell which objects exist and which are only latent, unspatial possibilities. So as a result, competing spatial corridors are opened, into which the garbled percept system enters, and a whole new universe appears to the brain to be in the process of creation.”

“I see,” Buckman said. But actually he did not either see or care. I only want to go home, he thought. And forget this.

“That’s very important,” Westerburg said earnestly. “KR-3 is a major breakthrough. Anyone affected by it is forced to perceive irreal universes, whether they want to or not. As I said, trillions of possibilities are theoretically all of a sudden real; chance enters and the person’s percept system chooses one possibility out of all those presented to it. It has to choose, because if it didn’t, competing universes would overlap, and the concept of space itself would vanish. Do you follow me?”

Seated a short way off, at his own desk, Herb Maime said, “He means that the brain seizes on the spatial universe nearest at hand.”

“Yes,” Westerburg said. “You’ve read the classified lab report on KR-3, have you, Mr. Maime?”

“I read it a little over an hour ago,” Herb Maime said. “Most of it was too technical for me to grasp. But I did notice that its effects are transitory. The brain finally reestablishes contact with the actual space-time objects that it formerly perceived.”

“Right,” Westerburg said, nodding. “But during the interval in which the drug is active the subject exists, or thinks he exists—”

“There’s no difference,” Herb said, “between the two. That’s the way the drug works; it abolishes that distinction.”

“Technically,” Westerburg said. “But to the subject an actualized environment envelopes him, one which is alien to the former one that he always experienced, and he operates as if he had entered a new world. A world with changed aspects … the amount of change being determined by how great the so-to-speak distance is between the space-time world he formerly perceived and the new one he’s forced to function in.”

“I’m going home,” Buckman said. “I can’t stand any more of this.” He rose to his feet. “Thanks, Westerburg,” he said, automatically extending his hand to the chief deputy coroner. They shook. “Put together an abstract for me,” he said to Herb Maime, “and I’ll look it over in the morning.” He started off, his gray topcoat over his arm. As he always carried it.

“Do you now see what happened to Taverner?” Herb said.

Halting, Buckman said, “No.”

“He passed over to a universe in which he didn’t exist. And we passed over with him because we’re objects of his percept-system. And then when the drug wore off he passed back again. What actually locked him back here was nothing he took or didn’t take but her death. So then of course his file came to us from Data Central.”