For example, he realized, with all this money I have on me I can get myself down to Watts and buy phony ID cards. A whole walletful of them. There must be a hundred little operators scratching away at that, from what I’ve heard. But I never thought I’d be using one of them. Not Jason Taverner.

Not a public entertainer with an audience of thirty million. Among all those thirty million people, he asked himself, isn’t there one who remembers me? If “remember” is the right word. I’m talking as if a lot of time has passed, that I’m an old man now, a has-been, feeding off former glories. And that’s not what’s going on.

Returning to the phone, he looked up the number of the birth-registration control center in Iowa; with several gold coins he managed to reach them at last, after much delay.

“My name is Jason Taverner,” he told the clerk. “I was born in Chicago at Memorial Hospital on December 16, 1946. Would you please confirm and release a copy of my certificate of birth? I need it for a job I’m applying for.”

“Yes, sir.” The clerk put the line on hold; Jason waited.

The clerk clicked back on. “Mr. Jason Taverner, born in Cook County on December 16, 1946.”

“Yes,” Jason said.

“We have no birth registration form for such a person at that time and place. Are you absolutely sure of the facts, sir?”

“You mean do I know my name and when and where I was born?” His voice again managed to escape his control, but this time he let it; panic flooded him. “Thanks,” he said and hung up, shaking violently, now. Shaking in his body and in his mind.

I don’t exist, he said to himself. There is no Jason Taverner. There never was and there never will be. The hell with my career; I just want to live. If someone or something wants to eradicate my career, okay; do it. But aren’t I going to be allowed to exist at all? Wasn’t I even born?

Something stirred in his chest. With terror he thought, They didn’t get the feed tubes out entirely; some of them are still growing and feeding inside of me. That goddamn tramp of a no-talent girl. I hope she winds up walking the streets for two bits a try.

After what I did for her: getting her those two auditions for A and R people. But hell—I did get to lay her a lot. I suppose it comes out even.

Returning to his hotel room, he took a good long look at himself in the flyspecked vanity mirror. His appearance hadn’t changed, except that he needed a shave. No older. No more lines, no gray hair visible. The good shoulders and biceps. The fat-free waist that let him wear the current formfitting men’s clothing.

And that’s important to your image, he said to himself. What kind of suits you can wear, especially those tucked-in waist numbers. I must have fifty of them, he thought. Or did have. Where are they now? he asked himself. The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing? Or however that goes. Something from the past, out of his days at school. Forgotten until this moment. Strange, he thought, what drifts up into your mind when you’re in an unfamiliar and ominous situation. Sometimes the most trivial stuff imaginable.

If wishes were horses then beggars might fly. Stuff like that. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

He wondered how many pol and nat check stations there were between this miserable hotel and the closest ID forger in Watts? Ten? Thirteen? Two? For me, he thought, all it takes is one. One random check by a mobile vehicle and crew of three. With their damn radio gear connecting them to pol-nat data central in Kansas City. Where they keep the dossiers.

He rolled back his sleeve and examined his forearm. Yes, there it was: his tattooed ident number. His somatic license plate, to be carried by him throughout his life, buried at last with him in his longed-for grave.

Well, the pols and nats at the mobile check station would read off the ident number to Kansas City and then—what then? Was his dossier still there or was it gone, too, like his birth certificate? And if it wasn’t there, what would the pol-nat bureaucrats think it meant?

A clerical error. Somebody misfiled the microfilm packet that made up the dossier. It’ll turn up. Someday, when it doesn’t matter, when I’ve spent ten years of my life in a quarry on Luna using a manual pickax. If the dossier isn’t there, he mused, they’ll assume I’m an escaped student, because it’s only students who don’t have pol-nat dossiers, and even some of them, the important ones, the leaders—they’re in there, too.

I am at the bottom of life, he realized. And I can’t even climb my way up to mere physical existence. Me, a man who yesterday had an audience of thirty million. Someday, somehow, I will grope my way back to them. But not now. There are other things that come first. The bare bones of existence that every man is born with: I don’t even have that. But I will get it; a six is not an ordinary. No ordinary could have physically or psychologically survived what’s happened to me—especially the uncertainty—as I have.

A six, no matter what the external circumstances, will always prevail. Because that’s the way they genetically defined us.

He left his hotel room once more, walked downstairs and up to the desk. A middle-aged man with a thin mustache was reading a copy of Box magazine; he did not look up but said, “Yes, sir.”

Jason brought out his packet of government bills, laid a five-hundred-dollar note on the counter before the clerk. The clerk glanced at it, glanced again, this time with wide-opened eyes. Then he cautiously looked up into Jason’s face, questioningly.

“My ident cards were stolen,” Jason said. “That five-hundred-dollar bill is yours if you can get me to someone who can replace them. If you’re going to do it, do it right now; I’m not going to wait.” Wait to be picked up by a pol or a nat, he thought. Caught here in this rundown dingy hotel.

“Or caught on the sidewalk in front of the entrance,” the clerk said. “I’m a telepath of sorts. I know this hotel isn’t much, but we have no bugs. Once we had Martian sand fleas, but no more.” He picked up the five-hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll get you to someone who can help you,” he said. Studying Jason’s face intently, he paused, then said, “You think you’re world-famous. Well, we get all kinds.”

“Let’s go,” Jason said harshly. “Now.”

“Right now,” the clerk said, and reached for his shiny plastic coat.

As the clerk drove his old-time quibble slowly and noisily down the street he said casually to Jason, seated beside him, “I’m picking up a lot of odd material in your mind.”

“Get out of my mind,” Jason said brusquely, with aversion. He had always disliked the prying, curiosity-driven telepaths, and this time was no exception. “Get out of my mind,” he said, “and get me to the person who’s going to help me. And don’t run into any pol-nat barricades. If you expect to live through this.”

The clerk said mildly, “You don’t have to tell me that; I know what would happen to you if we got stopped. I’ve done this before, many times. For students. But you’re not a student. You’re a famous man and you’re rich. But at the same time you aren’t. At the same time you’re a nobody. You don’t even exist, legally speaking.” He laughed a thin, effete laugh, his eyes fixed on the traffic ahead of him. He drove like an old woman, Jason noted. Both hands fixedly hanging on to the steering wheel.

Now they had entered the slums of Watts proper. Tiny dark stores on each side of the cluttered streets, overflowing ashcans, the pavement littered with pieces of broken bottles, drab painted signs that advertised Coca-Cola in big letters and the name of the store in small. At an intersection an elderly black man haltingly crossed, feeling his way along as if blind with age. Seeing him, Jason felt an odd emotion. There were so few blacks alive, now, because of Tidman’s notorious sterilization bill passed by Congress back in the terrible days of the Insurrection. The clerk carefully slowed his rattly quibble to a stop so as not to harass the elderly black man in his rumpled, seam-torn brown suit. Obviously he felt it, too.