We ran for perhaps six blocks. I had no choice; his hold on my wrist was adamant, though not painful. We stopped when I stumbled for the third time, my breath sore in my windpipe. We’d reached the chainlink border of the Fair. He let the wire stop him and rolled until his back was against it, propped up on the fence. He was panting, too, and clutching his left side. His eyes were closed, his face set in concentration. I dropped onto the curb and took inventory of him. Not every stranger rescues me from the pink-haired, bug-eyed monsters. Or whatever he’d just done.

He was a little sharp-featured, but a wide mouth and dark thick eyebrows saved his face from austerity. His hair was foxy brown, glossy in the oil-lamp light. I could imagine people telling him he was handsome. Bad for his character, probably. He had a tapering, athletic look, and long legs. I was surprised at how much the six blocks seemed to have taken out of him. He looked more durable than that. He wore a polished cotton jacket in the style the SouthAm meres had affected, back before the Big Bang. It might have been that old, too; the glossy finish had dimmed along every surface subject to friction.

He opened his eyes, and they seemed to take a moment to clear, as if he’d been in pain and it was passing away. His eyes were darker than I’d expected, piercing as the stare of some fearless animal. They fastened on me and he grinned, wide and crooked.

“Well, thank you,” he said.

“What?”

“Never mind.” With the whole of his mobile face, he was laughing at me. He just wasn’t using his lungs.

I folded my arms over my knees, as if I was prepared to stay where I was in spite of him or an entire migratory flock of gray-suited, pink-haired men. “So, what the hell did you do that for?”

He looked confused for a moment. Then he dropped down onto the curb next to me, stretched out his legs, and leaned back on his elbows. “Nothing personal. I’m figuring to get to heaven on the strength of my good deeds.” His grin was strictly nonporous; nothing would get past it.

I looked at him, my mouth partway open in case some telling comment came to mind, and waited for the explanation that was owed me. He would realize it soon, that he owed me.

“Okay, okay. But you gotta keep this to yourself, all right?” He shifted on the pavement, settling in for a long chat. “I’m an agent from the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Those folks back there are ops of the Nic government in exile. See, they thought you were one of our guys.” He shook his head. “Probably figured to torture you for the location of our headquarters. ”

I made my eyes big. “Then if they try again, I just have to click my heels together three times to get away?”

“You got it.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Oh! I’m sorry.” He smiled and stuck out his right hand. “Mick Skinner. Call me Mick, or Skinner, or whatever you want.”

He had a quarter twist of accent that I thought might be Texas. There was no guile in his face, only an alert sort of sweetness (except for those eyes). It annoyed me. Either Mick Skinner was the village idiot, or he didn’t rate me high enough to deserve a little cunning. Unless that was the most thorough cunning of all.

Then I recalled that the people in the City who would know his joke could be numbered on one hand and leave fingers left over. Only a few more would have gotten mine, about the heels. But he had.

Stiffly, I said, “If you work for the City, I just live here.”

He smiled the impenetrable grin. “Hell, no. I just got here. Not long ago, anyway. It’s not a good thing to work for the City?”

“Depends on the work.” I stood up. “From the samples you’re giving out, I’d say you’re a traveling fertilizer salesman.”

“And you’re not buying.”

“You want something to grow around here, try sprinkling some truth on it.” I looked at him expectantly.

“Ooo-kay.” The truth, to judge from his face, gave him less pleasure. “They thought you might be me.”

I waited for something more; when it didn’t come, I said, “Gosh, we do look so much alike.”

“They don’t know what I look like. They’re hunting on the basis of something else.”

“What?”

“Just something else. Last night I — in the bar, you did things they thought were a giveaway. So they bagged you.”

In front of the brownstone that edged the sidewalk was a ruined wrought-iron fence. I caught and held it to keep me still. Last night. My whole downtime seemed to have been in the spotlight last night, illuminated for everyone but me. “You mean they expected you to order drinks you couldn’t pay for and get kicked out of a club?”

He seemed to find that quietly funny. “Nooo. That was when you began to act like somebody else to throw ’em off the scent. Too late, though.”

Now I had motives, too, out of my control, beyond my comprehension. I wished that the curb was twenty feet high, so I could throw myself off it. And drag Mick Skinner with me. “What else do you know about last night?”

A swift look up into my face. It wasn’t startled or guilty or meaningful at all; it was just a look. “Nothing,” he said.

“And how do you know it?”

“I was there.”

“The hell you say. In what capacity?”

“An observer of the human condition.”

I figured out, then, what his eyes reminded me of. I’d once seen a pet wolf, tame as any dog, loyal and trusty and true. But around the eyes was an incipient feral craziness, a sense that this animal didn’t figure the odds like a real dog did. Skinner’s eyes made his most earnest expression seem ironic.

I pushed off from the railing. “Sure. I’ll go find the guy in the gray suit and ask him.”

“No!” Skinner sat up with a wince. “My God, don’t go making deals with those people, they’ll peel you like an onion. Your one chance now is to make sure they mark you for an innocent bystander.”

I was shaking. Maybe it was anger. Maybe not. “You listen to me. You have no business knowing one goddamn thing about my life. You have no business giving me advice. If I bump into that guy again, I’m going to tell him what you look like and where you are. Then you’ll all be out of my hair.”

Skinner scrubbed at his face with both hands. My getting angry hadn’t scared him. “Well, for your sake, I hope it’s that easy. Jesus, I’m beat. You from around here?”

He spoke as if the question were friendly, the answer inconsequential. But that line of inquiry is one of my least favorite. “No,” I said. And, “Indiana,” I lied.

“Kee-rist. You came up the river? When?”

“Long time ago. I don’t remember it.”

Skinner shook his head. “Last time I passed that way, you had to be careful somebody didn’t eat you. I didn’t mean that far back, though. D’you live around here?”

Now, what was I supposed to make of that? “Yes and no.”

He worried that in his head; I took pleasure in watching him do it. “Let me put it this way. I need someplace to crash tonight. You know anybody might lend me a corner?”

The Snake is a strange set of chemicals. You think it’s worn off long ago; when it really lets you go, you think someone opened a trapdoor under your feet. Suddenly you see the world with the ghastly accuracy you took it to escape from in the first place. In the middle of Mick Skinner’s speech, I fell off the Snake’s Tail. All distortion, illusion, alteration of mood, emptied out and left me beset with a clear head. With it, I recognized several things: First, that I wanted to go home.

Second, that Mick Skinner did not owe me. I owed him. I didn’t know what the man in gray had wanted; but my wrist still ached where he’d had hold of it. I had been given a drug the night before by someone who was not concerned that I have a good time on it. And tonight I might have ended up in something vile, if this bastard hadn’t carried me off like a bandit stealing a chicken. The obligation might have been forced on me, but I couldn’t deny that I had one to Skinner.