She started down the hall again.

“Heada, wait,” I said, and then was sorry, afraid her face would be full of hope when she turned around, that there would be tears in her eyes.

But this was Heada, who knows everything.

“What’s your name?” I said. “All I have is your access, and I’ve never called you anything but Heada.”

She smiled at me knowingly, ruefully. Emma Thompson in Remains of the Day. “I like Heada,” she said.

Camera whip-pans to medium-shot: LAIT station sign. Diamond screen, “Los Angeles Instransit” in hot pink caps, “Sunset Boulevard” in yellow.

I took the opdisk of Alis’s routines and went down to the skids. There was nobody on them except a huddle of tourates in mouse ears, a very splatted Marilyn, and Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, Mary Pickford, Harrison Ford, emerging one by one from ILMGM’s golden fog. I watched the signs, waiting for Sunset Boulevard and wondering what Alis was doing there. There was nothing down there but the old freeway.

The Marilyn wove unsteadily over to me. Her white halter dress was stained and splotched, and there was a red smear of lipstick by her ear.

“Want a pop?” she said, looking not at me but at Harrison Ford behind me on the screen.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Okay,” she said docilely. “How about you?” She didn’t wait for me, or Harrison, to answer. She wandered off and then came back. “Are you a studio exec?” she asked.

“No, sorry,” I said.

“I want to be in the movies,” she said, and wandered off again.

I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. It went silver for a second between promos, and I caught sight of myself looking clean and responsible and sober. Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. No wonder she’d thought I was a studio exec.

The station sign for Sunset Boulevard came up and I got off. The area hadn’t changed. There was still nothing down here, not even lights. The abandoned freeway loomed darkly in the starlight, and I could see a fire a long way off under one of the cloverleafs.

There was no way Alis was here. She must have spotted Heada and gotten off here to keep her from finding out where she was really going. Which was where?

There was another light now, a thin white beam wobbling this way. Ravers, probably, looking for victims. I got back on the skids.

The Marilyn was still there, sitting in the middle of the floor, her legs splayed out, fishing through an open palm full of pills for chooch, illy, klieg. The only equipment a freelancer needs, I thought, which at least means whatever Alis is doing it’s not freelancing, and realized I’d been relieved ever since Heada told me about seeing Alis with all that equipment, even though I didn’t know where she was. At least she hadn’t turned into a freelancer.

It was half past two. Heada had seen Alis at rush hour, which was still four hours away. If Alis went the same place every day. If she hadn’t been moving someplace, carrying her luggage. But Heada hadn’t said luggage, she’d said equipment. And it couldn’t be a comp and monitor because Heada would have recognized those, and anyway, they were light. Heada had said “lugging.” What then? A time machine?

The Marilyn had stood up, spilling capsules everywhere, and was heading over the yellow warning strip for the far wall, which was still extolling ILMGM’s cavalcade of stars.

“Don’t!” I said, and grabbed for her, a foot from the wall.

She looked up at me, her eyes completely dilated. “This is my stop. I have to get off.”

“Wrong way, Corrigan,” I said, turning her around to face the front. The sign read Beverly Hills, which didn’t seem very likely. “Where did you want to get off?”

She shrugged off my arm, and turned back to the screen.

“The way out’s that way,” I said, pointing to the front.

She shook her head and pointed at Fred Astaire emerging out of the fog. “Through there,” she said, and sank down to sitting, her white skirt in a circle. The screen went silver, reflecting her sitting there, fishing through her empty palm, and then to golden fog. The lead-in to the ILMGM promo.

I stared at the wall, which didn’t look like a wall, or a mirror. It looked like what it was, a fog of electrons, a veil over emptiness, and for a minute it all seemed possible. For a minute I thought, Alis didn’t get off at Sunset Boulevard. She didn’t get off the skids at all. She stepped through the screen, like Mia Farrow, like Buster Keaton, and into the past.

I could almost see her in her black skirt and green weskit and gloves, disappearing into the golden fog and emerging on a Hollywood Boulevard full of cars and palm trees and lined with rehearsal halls full of mirrors.

“Anything’s Possible,” the voice-over roared.

The Marilyn was on her feet again and weaving toward the back wall.

“Not that way,” I said, and sprinted after her.

It was a good thing she hadn’t been headed for the screens this time — I’d never have made it. By the time I got to her, she was banging on the wall with both fists.

“Let me off!” she shouted. “This is my stop!”

“The way off’s this way,” I said, trying to turn her, but she must have been doing rave. Her arm was like iron.

“I have to get off here,” she said, pounding with the flat of her hands. “Where’s the door?”

“The door’s that way,” I said, wondering if this was how I had been the night Alis brought me home from Burbank. “You can’t get off this way.”

“She did,” she said.

I looked at the back wall and then back at her. “Who did?”

“She did,” she said. “She went right through the door. I saw her,” and puked all over my feet.

MOVIE CLICHE #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious, and everybody gets the point.

SEE: The Wizard of Oz, Field of Dreams, Love Story, What’s New, Pussycat?

I got the Marilyn off at Wilshire and took her to rehab, by which time she’d pretty much pumped her own stomach, and waited to make sure she checked in.

“Are you sure you’ve got time to do this?” she said, looking less like Marilyn and more like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.

“I’m sure.” There was plenty of time, now that I knew where Alis was.

While she was filling out paperwork, I accessed Vincent. “I have a question,” I said without preamble. “What if you took a frame and substituted an identical frame? Could that get past the fibe-op ID-locks?”

“An identical frame? What would be the point of that?”

“Could it?”

“I guess,” he said. “Is this for Mayer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What if you substituted a new image that matched the original? Could the ID-locks tell the difference?”

“Matched?”

“A different image that’s the same.”

“You’re splatted,” he said, and signed off.

It didn’t matter. I already knew the ID-locks couldn’t tell the difference. It would take too much memory. And, as Vincent had said, what would be the point of changing an image to one exactly like it?

I waited till the Marilyn was in a bed and getting a ridigaine IV and then got back on the skids. After LaBrea there was nobody on them, but it took me till three-thirty to find the service door to the shut-off section and past five to get it open.

I was worried for a while that Alis had braced it shut, which she had, but not intentionally. One of the fibe-op feed cables was up against it, and when I finally got the door open a crack, all I had to do was push.

She was facing the far wall, looking at the screen that should have been blank in this shut-off section. It wasn’t. In the middle of it, Peter Lawford and June Allyson were demonstrating the Varsity Drag to a gymnasium full of college students in party dresses and tuxes. June was wearing a pink dress and pink heels with pompoms, and so was Alis, and their hair was curled under in identical blond pageboys.