A desk in the back room appeared to have been cleared hastily; all the drawers were empty, but under it was a scrap of paper with its curl frozen into it. On it was scrawled, Susan — start the evacuation at dusk — A. Hana brought the scrap out to show it to me; when I was done examining it I gave it back to her and walked away. Dark and cold in the empty street. The voices behind were like those of workers in a tavern. I sat on my old apartment stoop, turned up my suit’s heat, felt the hot air waft out of my hood vents onto my face. I breathed the cold night air deep into me. So they had broken the dome of New Houston. And how many other cities had died like it?

The others left the tavern in a group, arguing. “Obviously there was a well organized resistance,” Hana said angrily. “This is one of their headquarters! The reason we’ve never found more evidence of them is they were a secret organization, and the police didn’t want to acknowledge their existence—”

“I know,” Petrini said in a soothing voice. “Professor Nederland has argued that view very cogently for many years.” They walked before a light spearing the length of the street and split it four ways. “But still — Hjalmar, you must admit this,” he said to me on my stoop. “You are explaining an absence of data, not the presence of it. And you can’t rely on those samizdat you prize so highly. After all, we have samizdat accounts of green Martian natives joining the riots from their hideaways” — this got a laugh or two from his staff — “and then leading the defeated rioters into their Pellucidarian refuge. But we can’t believe in them just because there is a suspicious lack of other data proving their existence, now can we.”

I suppose he thought he was being funny. “Here’s your evidence,” I said.

Satarwal spoke up. “This is just the nest of some of the rioters who destroyed this city. An isolated cell of killers.”

“I notice they’re the dead ones.”

Satarwal waved a finger at me angrily. “There was no organized resistance! No Washington-Lenin Alliance, as some of your cohorts call it. It is nothing more than a malicious fiction, made up by dissidents to attempt to embarrass the government.”

Wearily I explained to Petrini, “The size of the revolt is itself the largest and most obvious sort of evidence. There is no way a spontaneous revolt could have held off the police for five months. And taken over all these cities.”

“That was due to the Soviet fleet’s defection,” Satarwal answered.

“That was the Lenin half of the Alliance. Here we stand in a Texan city that had to be destroyed, it was so well defended. This is the Washington half.”

“The rioters themselves destroyed the city,” Satarwal insisted. “I have proved this—”

“You work for the Committee,” I said, and stood. My head spun, lights crawled in my vision. I spoke loudly so everyone there would hear me. “The rebels didn’t destroy this city.” Hana stared at me, consternation deforming her face. The rest of them stared as well. “The police troopers did it. I know because I was there.” I waved around me. “I was right here when it happened!”

“You may have been in the city,” Petrini said reassuringly, “but you can’t possibly recall the incident—”

“It wasn’t an incident. It was war — a massacre, do you understand? They blasted the dome and came down on rocket packs and — and killed everybody! When I stood in this street I had an epiphanic recollection — you’ve all had those, you know what they’re like — and I remembered it all. I was young then, but I remember.”

“Ridiculous!” Satarwal cried furiously. “Why should we believe somebody so biased- ”

“Because I was there!” At that moment a student bumped the light, and its beam fell on me. In an intact window across the street I could suddenly see my reflection: short, tubby, licks of electric hair tufting away from a large head, rubbery small-eyed face puffy with vehemence… an old man fizzing with indignation, over something only he cared about. And there were Hana and Bill and Xhosa and Heidi and all the rest, staring at me. What a ludicrous figure I must have cut, crying out my testament as though anyone there would believe it! In disgust I snarled and twisted away, as if when I could not see my reflection, they could not see me.

But I had been there, and I remembered.

Petrini, pleading in his let’s-be-reasonable tone: “A three-hundred-year-old memory, Hjalmar? Again you must agree, it’s not very strong evidence.”

I shrugged, wishing to escape. “When human witness becomes weak evidence we’re in bad trouble. I say it happened. I was here, I saw it. That’s how we make history, by eyewitness accounts. That’s what the samizdat are.”

“Even the green Martian one?” Petrini said gently. “Besides, we are archaeologists.”

I shook my head, stared around at the dark apartments, desperation filling me, flooding me. “We are amnesiacs,” I cried. Helplessly I saw again the rock behind the door, the dome falling. My students watched me tensely, ready for an opportunity to extricate me from my folly; they didn’t believe me any more than Petrini did.

Graben — a depressed crustal block, bounded by faults on its long sides.

Once I said nearly the same thing to the Shrike. We were up in his bedroom on the eightieth floor of the Barnard Tower, and he adjusted the wall-sized window so we could see out. He stood before the glass watching a big Arctic eagle gliding on the stiff wind coursing over Alexandria. From the bed I observed his supple back, the curve of his buttock against the bruised sky and the last flare of the dusk mirrors’ sunset. Below the myriad city lights blinked on. “We’re amnesiacs, Shrike,” I said to him. I call him Shrike (he doesn’t get it); his real name is Alexander Graham Selkirk (his father’s best joke). So I watched him there at his island’s window lighting a pipe, and I said, “We’re amnesiacs, it doesn’t matter what we do. It doesn’t matter what you do, Shrike. You won’t remember it in a century.”

“By that time I doubt I’ll care,” he said, expelling the fruity smoke of his pipe. “Why should I? Besides, there’s always the memory drugs.”

“They don’t work.”

He shrugged. “It depends on how particular you are when you say work. Besides, what can you do? Would you rather be dead?” He puffed energetically. “It’s just the way things are.”

“Sometimes I get so tired of things as they are. Look down there at all those people in the street, Shrike. Can you see them?”

“They look like ants.”

“Very original. And that’s how you think of them, too. The workers, the poor, the miners who make this planet profitable to its owners on Earth — what do you care for them? You live up here like Syrtis grass in its sheath of ice, shielded from the grubby Martian world and all its ants.”

“You’re up here too, aren’t you.”

“Who wouldn’t be if they could? But we’re all bound in the same system. We struggle in our casings and then forget whatever efforts we make.”

“The way you describe it, perhaps it’s better that way.”

“Bah. Have you ever been poor, I mean Martian poor?”

“Yes. I was born in a mine, actually. And grew up in a mining-camp.”

“And do you remember it?”

“Of course not. Can’t say I’d care to.”

“You’d rather stay sheathed in privilege.”

He nodded. “And so would you. Please — don’t protest. How often you’ve said all this. Get comfortable and you start feeling guilty. Is that why you like going off on those awful digs all the time? And now you’re being kept from it? But don’t be cross. You’ll get your dig, I’ll see to that.”

“You haven’t been on the Committee long enough to see to anything,” I said. “You’ve got a century more of running errands first. And the Committee will let me go to New Houston as soon as I’m no longer department chair, and no sooner.”