I was shaking with excitement, anticipation, and fear. In spite of well-established new habits I tried to zip my clothes instead of sticking the seams together and made a botch of getting dressed. But a few minutes later I was down in the hail where the phone booth was-I didn't have an instrument in my room or I would have used it; I was simply a supplementary listing for the house phone. Then I had to run back up again when I found that I had forgotten my phone credit ID card-I was really disorganized.

Then, when I had it, I was trembling so that I could hardly fit it into the slot. But I did and signaled "Service."

"Circuit desired?"

"Uh, I want the Riverside Sanctuary. That's in Riverside Borough."

"Searching...olding... circuit free. We are signaling."

The screen lighted up at last and a man looked grumpily at me. "You must have the wrong phasing. This is the sanctuary. We're closed for the night."

I said, "Hang on, please. If this is the Riverside Sanctuary, you're just who I want."

"Well, what do you want? At this hour?"

"You have a client there, F. V. Heinicke, a new withdrawal. I want to know-"

He shook his head. "We don't give out information about clients over the phone. And certainly not in the middle of the night. You'd better call after ten o'clock. Better yet, come here."

"I will, I will. But I want to know just one thing. What do the initials `F. V.' stand for?"

"I told you that--"

"Will you listen, please? I'm not just butting in; I'm a Sleeper myself. Sawtelle. Withdrawn just lately. So I know all about the `confidential relationship' and what's proper. Now you've already published this client's name in the paper. You and I both know that the sanctuaries always give the papers the full names of clients withdrawn and committed... but the papers trim the given names to initials to save space. Isn't that true?"

He thought about it. "Could be."

"Then what possible harm is there in telling me what the initials P. V.' stand for?"

He hesitated still longer. "None, I guess, if that's all you want. It's all you're going to get. Hold on."

He passed out of the screen, was gone for what seemed like an hour, came back holding a card. "The light's poor," he said, peering at it. " `Frances'-no, `Frederica.' `Frederica Virginia?"

My ears roared and I almost fainted. "Thank God!"

"You all right?"

"Yes. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Yes, I'm all right."

"Hmm. I guess there's no harm in telling you one more thing. It might save you a trip. She's already checked out."

CHAPTER 9

I could have saved time by hiring a cab to jump me to Riverside, but I was handicapped by lack of cash. I was living in West Hollywood; the nearest twenty-four-hour bank was downtown at the Grand Circle of the Ways. So first I rode the Ways downtown and went to the bank for cash. One real improvement I had not appreciated up to then was the universal checkbook system; with a single cybernet as clearinghouse for the whole city and radioactive coding on my checkbook, I got cash laid in my palm as quickly there as I could have gotten it at my home bank across from Hired Girl, Inc.

Then I caught the express Way for Riverside. When I reached the sanctuary it was lust daylight.

There was nobody there but the night technician I had talked to and his wife, the night nurse. I'm afraid I didn't make a good impression. I had a day's beard, I was wild-eyed, I probably had a beer breath, and I had not worked out a consistent framework of lies.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Larrigan, the night nurse, was sympathetic and helpful. She got a photograph out of a file and said, "Is this your cousin, Mr. Davis?"

It was Ricky. There was no doubt about it, it was Ricky! Oh, not the Ricky I had known, for this was not a little girl but a mature young woman, twentyish or older, with a grown-up hairdo and a grown-up and very beautiful face. She was smiling.

But her eyes were unchanged and the ageless pixie quality of her face that had made her so delightful a child was still there. It was the same face, matured, filled out, grown beautiful, but unmistakable.

The stereo blurred, my eyes had filled with tears, "Yes," I managed to choke. "Yes. That's Ricky."

Mr. Larrigan said, "Nancy, you shouldn't have showed him that."

"Pooh, Hank, what harm is there in showing a photograph?"

"You know the rules." He turned to me. "Mister, as I told you on the phone, we don't give out information about clients. You come back here at ten o'clock when the administration office opens."

"Or you could come back at eight," his wife added. "Dr. Bernstein will be here then."

"Now, Nancy, you just keep quiet. If he wants information, the man to see is the director. Bernstein hasn't any more business answering questions than we have. Besides, she wasn't even Bernstein's patient."

"Hank, you're being fussy. You men like rules just for the sake of rules. If he's in a hurry to see her, he could be in Brawley by ten o'clock." She turned to me. "You come back at eight. That's best. My husband and I can't really tell you anything anyhow."

"What's this about Brawley? Did she go to Brawley?"

If her husband had not been there I think she would have told me more. She hesitated and he looked stern. She answered, "You see Dr. Bernstein. If you haven't had breakfast, there's a real nice place lust down the street."

So I went to the "real nice place" (it was) and ate and used their washroom and bought a tube of Beardgo from a dispenser in the washroom and a shirt from another dispenser and threw away the one I had been wearing. By the time I returned I was fairly respectable.

But Larrigan must have bent Dr. Bernstein's ear about me. He was a young man, resident in training, and he took a very stiff line. "Mr. Davis, you claim to be a Sleeper yourself. You must certainly know that there are criminals who make a regular business of preying on the gullibility and lack of orientation of a newly awakened Sleeper. Most Sleepers have considerable assets, all of them are unworldly in the world in which they find themselves, they are usually lonely and a bit scared-a perfect setup for confidence men."

"But all I want to know is where she went~ I'm her cousin. But I took the Sleep before she did, so I didn't know she was going to."

"They usually claim to be relatives." He looked at me closely. "Haven't I seen you before?"

"I strongly doubt it. Unless you just happened to pass me on the Ways, downtown." People are always thinking they've seen me before; I've got one of the Twelve Standard Faces, as lacking in uniqueness as one peanut in a sackful. "Doctor, how about phoning Dr. Albrecht at Sawtelle Sanctuary and checking on me?"

He looked judicial. "You come back and see the director. He can call the Sawtelle Sanctuary... or the police, whichever he sees fit."

So I left. Then I may have made a mistake. Instead of coming back to see the director and very possibly getting the exact information I needed (with the aid of Albrecht's vouching for me), I hired a jumpcab and went straight to Brawley.

It took three days to pick up her trail in Brawley. Oh, she had lived there and so had her grandmother; I found that out quickly. But the grandmother had died twenty years earlier and Ricky had taken the Sleep. Brawley is a mere hundred thousand compared with the seven million of Great Los Angeles; the twenty-year-old records were not hard to find. It was the trail less than a week old that I had trouble with.

Part of the trouble was that she was with someone; I had been looking for a young woman traveling alone. When I found out she had a man with her I thought anxiously about the crooks preying on Sleepers that Bernstein had lectured me about and got busier than ever.