The vidphone in the living room rang.

'Excuse me.' Pat Carry rose and skipped from the kitchen. He sat silently, no particular thoughts in his mind, only a little of the old weariness weighing on him, and then suddenly she was back. 'For you. Dr Sweetscent; that's you, isn't it?'

'Who is it?' He labored to get up, his heart strangely leaden.

'The White House in Cheyenne.'

He made his way to the vidphone. 'Hello. This is Sweetscent.'

'Just a moment, please.' The screen blanked out. The next image which formed was that of Gino Molinari.

'Well, doctor,' Molinari said, 'they got your reeg.'

'Jesus,' he said.

'When we got there all we found was a banged-up big dead bug. Somebody, one of them, must have seen you go in. Too bad you didn't take it directly to TF&D. Instead of that hotel.'

'I see that now.'

'Listen,' Molinari said briskly. 'I called to tell you because I knew you would want to know. But don't knock yourself; those 'Starmen are professionals. It could have happened to anyone.' He leaned closer to the screen, speaking with emphasis. 'It's not that important; there're other ways to contact the reegs, three or four – we're looking into how best to exploit it right now.'

'Should this be said on the vidphone?'

Molinari said, 'Freneksy and his party just now took off for Lilistar, shot out of here as fast as they could. Take my word for it, Sweetscent, they know. So our problem is that we have to work fast. We expect to raise a reeg government station within two hours; if necessary we'll do our negotiating on an open broadcast with Lilistar listening in.' He glanced at his wrist watch. 'I have to ring off; I'll keep you posted.' The screen, then, became dark. Busy, in hectic haste, Molinari had gone on to the next task. He could not sit gossiping. And then, all at once, the screen relit; again Molinari faced him. 'Remember, doctor, you did your job; you forced them to honor that will I left, that ten-page document they were passing back and forth when you arrived. I wouldn't be here now except for you; I already told you that and I don't want you to forget it – I haven't got time to keep repeating again and again.' He grinned briefly and then once more the image faded. This time the screen stayed dark.

But to fail is to fail, Eric said to himself. He walked back into Pat Garry's kitchen and reseated himself at his cup of coffee. Neither of them spoke. Because I messed it up, he realized, the 'Starmen will have just that much more time to close in on us, come rushing here to Terra with everything they have. Millions of human lives, perhaps years of occupation – that's the price we'll collectively pay. Because it seemed, earlier today, a good idea to put Deg Dal Il in a room at the Caesar Hotel instead of bringing him directly to TF&D. But then he thought, They have at least one agent at TF&D too; they might even have gotten him there.

Now what? he asked himself.

'Maybe you're right, Pat,' he said. 'Maybe I ought to become a military surgeon and go to a base hospital near the front.'

'Yes, why not?' she said.

'But in a little while,' he said. 'and you don't know this, the front will be on Terra.'

She blanched, tried to smile. 'Why is that?'

'Politics. The tides of war. Unreliability of alliances. The ally of today is the enemy of tomorrow. And the other way around.' He finished his coffee and rose. 'Good luck, Pat, in your television career and in every other aspect of your glowing, just beginning life. I hope the war doesn't touch you too deeply.' The war I helped bring here, he said to himself. 'So long.'

At the kitchen table she remained seated, drinking her coffee and saying nothing, as he walked down the hall to the door, opened it, and then shut it behind him. She did not even nod good-by; she was too frightened, too stunned by what he had told her.

Thanks anyhow, Gino, he said to himself as he descended to the ground floor. It was a good idea; not your fault nothing came of it. Nothing but a greater awareness on my part of how little I've done and how much harm – by commission or omission – I'm responsible for in my time.

He walked the dark Pasadena street until he located a cab; he hailed and boarded it, then wondered where he was supposed to go.

'You mean you don't know where you live, sir?' the cab asked.

'Take me to Tijuana,' he told it suddenly. 'Yes sir,' the cab said and turned south at great speed.

FOURTEEN

Nighttime in Tijuana.

He walked aimlessly, scuffing the pavement, passing one after another the neon signs of the narrow boothlike shops, listening to the clamor of the Mexican hucksters and enjoying as he always did the steady motion and ceaseless, nervous honking of wheels and autonomic cabs and old-time turbine surface cars made in the USA, which somehow, in their last decrepitude, had been brought across the border.

'Girl, mister?' A boy no older than eleven seized Eric by the sleeve and hung on, dragging him to a stop. 'My sister, only seven, and never lay with a man in her life; I guarantee before God, you be assuredly first.'

'How much?' Eric asked.

'Ten dollars plus the cost of the room; there must be in name of God a room. The sidewalk makes love into something sordid; you cannot do it here and respect yourself after.'

'There's wisdom in that,' Eric agreed. But he continued on anyhow.

At night the robant peddlars and their enormous, useless, machine-made rugs and baskets, their carts of tamales, customarily vanished; the daytime people of Tijuana disappeared along with the middle-aged American tourists to make way for the night people. Men, hurrying, pushed past him; a girl wearing a crushingly tight skirt and sweater squeezed past him, pressing momentarily against him ... as if, he thought, we had some durable relationship penetrating our two lives and this sudden heat exchange through body contact expressed the deepest possible understanding between the two of us. The girl went on, disappeared. Small tough Mexicans, youths wearing open-throated fur shirts, strode directly at him, their mouths agape as if they were strangling. He carefully stepped from their path.

In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood. Placed among your blocks and toys, with all your universe within grasp. The price for license is high: it consists of a forfeit of adulthood. And yet he loved it here. The noise and stirrings represented authentic life. Some people found all this evil; he did not. People who thought that were wrong. The restless, roving banks of males who sought God knew what — they themselves didn't know: their striving was the genuine primal under-urge of protoplasmic material itself. This irritable ceaseless motion had once carried life right out of the sea and onto land; creatures of the land now, they still roamed on, up one street and down another. And he went along with them.

Ahead, a tattoo parlor, modern and efficient, lit by a wall of glowing energy, the proprietor inside with his electric needle that did not touch the skin, only brushed near it as it wove a cat's cradle of design. How about that? Eric asked himself. What could I have etched on me, what motto or picture which would give me comfort in these unusual times of duress? In times when we wait for the 'Starmen to appear and take over. Helpless and frightened, all of us become essentially unmanly.

Entering the tattoo parlor, he seated himself and said, 'Can you write on my chest something like—' He pondered. The proprietor continued with his previous customer, a beefy UN soldier who stared sightlessly ahead. 'I want a picture,' Eric decided.

'Look through the book.' Huge sample-caselike ledger passed to him; he opened at random. Woman with four breasts; each spoke a complete sentence. Not quite it; he turned the page. Rocketship with puffs belching from its tail. No. Reminded him of his 2056 self whom he had failed. I am for the reegs, he decided. Tattoo that on me so the 'Star MPs can find it. And I won't have to make further decisions.