Before leaving the bushes, he looked both ways down the path. No one was in sight.

He started to walk across the path.

A voice rang out, "Hold it!"

He whirled around to his right. A male organic with a ho! stered gun had just come around the bend inthe path. The weapon told him that the two officers were looking for a fugitive and that the fugitive was probably Isharashvili.

Not wanting to lead the organic into the woods and straight to his hiding place, desperate, panicky, he turned and ran down the path. He crossed the bridge, hearing the man shouting to his partner to come up and help him. A glance behind showed Caird that the organic had not yet drawn his weapon. But he soon would.

He passed something lying in the path, a reminder of what seemed to be the far distant past. The name associated with it flashed through his mind and was forgotten.

Just as he had decided to leap into the bushes, he heard another shout behind him. It was not the stern command or warning he had expected. It was a yell of surprise. He turned just in time to see the organic stretched out a few feet above and parallel with the ground. His legs were spread wide; his arms were flailing. Then he struck the path hard on his back, and he was silent and unmoving.

Just beyond the man's head was a banana peel.

"Rootenbeak!"

That was the name that had darted across his mind.

The peel had probably not been dropped by Rootenbeak- what would he be doing so far north of Washington Square?- but it had certainly been dropped by someone like him.

And that inconsiderate slobbishness was helping him escape. He ran into the woods. Looking to one side, he saw the conical helmet and auburn hair of the female organic who had been under the bridge. Then the heavy bushes and trees screened her. He slowed down, not wanting her to hear him, until he was several hundred feet from the path. Zigzagging through the growth, he headed for the creek. When he was close to it, he got down on all fours and looked from behind a bush that grew close to the bank of the stream. At first, he could hear loud voices but could see no one. Then a man appeared in a break between two trees. He was an organic and had a large green pack on his back. A thick wire ran from the pack to a small square plate he held in one hand. Another wire ran to a long tube with a disc at its end that he held in the other hand. This was being moved from side to side and then up and down.

Caird groaned quietly. The tube held equipment that would probe for the heat of his body, sniff for his odor, and listen for his breathing and the beating of his heart.

If only he could have crossed the stream and gotten to the cave. If only he could have gotten here before the rain.

("If only, hell!" Repp said. "You got two guns! Fight, man, fight! Go down with guns blazing!")

("No! No!" Isharashvili said.)

Light suddenly appeared in him and swept across, followed by a shadow. The light seemed to spill out of his eyes, blinding him, and then the blindness was made even darker by the shadow. He shook. What was happening? Was he at last falling apart, taking refuge in disintegration?

("I am back," a voice said.)

Caird bit his lip to keep quiet.

("You?" Ohm said.)

("I was taken up by God, and He weighed me in the balance and found me wanting.")

("Father Tom!" Dunski said.)

("How in hell can a fictional God reject a fictional soul?" Ohm said.)

("He told me to go back to my maker," Zurvan said. His voice was as deep and muffled as the bell of a sunken ship swayed by a current. "He hurled me out of the kingdom of glory back into the nothingness from which I came.")

Caird wanted to yell at the voices. If he did so, he would be located immediately, and he would be done for. But what dif ference did it make if he was silent, or screamed? He was going to be caught. The only question just now was whether he would surrender quietly or shoot to kill until he was killed.

("Killing is not the right path," Isharashvili said. "You ... I we, I mean, have taken many wrong paths. Don't take this most evil of all.")

("Hypocrite!" Ohm screamed. "Hypocrite! Hypocrites all! But just this once, Isharashvili, you're right!")

The voices babbled on while he lay prone, his chin on his arm. The blindness had passed, but he seemed to be seeing through a veil of heat. The tall grass before him wavered.

A grasshopper ended its leap upon the stem of a weed. It swayed back and forth with the weed, clinging to it. It was a brightly colored metronome, back and forth, back and forth.

And in and out. His eyes focused, then unfocused. The insect became clear, then fuzzy. But he could make out the purple-painted antennae, the Kelly-green head, the golden eyes, the orange legs, and the green-and-black-checked body.

He groaned, "Ozma!"

He began weeping, and the grasshopper dissolved in the tears.

He had turned into a river of tears shaken by an earthquake. He could not control himself even if he had wanted to. He sobbed and stretched his arms out and clawed at the earth.

He had betrayed the state, the immers, his lovers, his friends, and himself.

The voices within him screamed, roared, and tore at him. He rolled over to look up into the trees. He was dimly aware that two men were looking down at him.

Tuesday-World

FREEDOM, Seventh Month of the Year

D6-W4 (Day-Six, Week-Four)

Chapter 34

Today was Tuesday's Christmas.

Jeff Caird looked out the window down at the huge yard surrounding the institution. It was on West 121st Street, near the junction of Frederick Douglass and St. Nicholas avenues. A light snow, which was quickly melting, formed patches of white and green. It was the first of the winter and might be the last. There were no holiday decorations in the yard or on the trees, but many of the windows of the apartment building across the street displayed holly or figures of Santa Claus and his reindeer.

"Saint Nicholas," Caird said. "The great giver of gifts. The state."

He turned and walked across the large room past the desk of the psychicist and sat down in an easy chair.

"Frederick Douglass, the slave who led his people out of bondage. Me."

"Your people are dead," the psychicist said.

"The immers?" Caird said, looking startled.

"No," the psychicist said, smiling. "I didn't mean the immers, and you know it. I referred to the others. Your personae."

Caird was silent. The psychicist said, "You still feel a sense of great loss?"

Caird nodded and said, "The big wringout. The grasshopper was the key, the stimulus, the trigger, the catalyst."

"The funny thing, the peculiar phenomenon, I mean," the psychicist said, "is that you grew new nerve paths when you grew your personae. They should be dying, you know, since you no longer use them. There's no sign of shrinkage in the neural circuits. Yet, you've been cured. Cured, I mean, of your multiple personality disorder."

"You know that for sure?"

"Don't you? Of course, you do. Just as we know. That is, unless you've found some way of cheating the truth mist. if you have, you're the first, and I'm one hundred percent sure that you haven't."

"You even know that I haven't once, not once, thought of an escape plan."

The psychicist frowned. She said, "That's an even more puzzling phenomenon, I don't mind telling you. Even though you had no desire to escape, you still should think about it now and then. You should at least fantasize about it. Fantasizing is part of your nature. I don't understand it."

"Maybe I'm completely cured. The state finally has its perfect citizen."

The psychicist smiled again. "There is no such creature, any more than there is or ever will be a perfect state. Our society is as close to perfection as it can be. It's a benevolent despotism, but that has to be. You know something of history. You know that no other government has provided plenty of food, good housing, luxuries, free education, free medical treatment ..