“Come with me,” Kathy said, suddenly; she slid from her work stool and beckoned him toward a wooden door at the right of her bench. “I want your signature five times, each a little different from the others so they can’t be superimposed. That’s where so many documenters”—she smiled as she opened the door—“that’s what we call ourselves—that’s where so many of us fuck it up. They take one signature and transfer it to all the documents. See?”

“Yes,” he said, entering the musty little closetlike room after her.

Kathy shut the door, paused a moment, then said, “Eddy is a police fink.”

Staring at her he said, “Why?”

“‘Why?’ Why what? Why is he a police fink? For money. For the same reason I am.”

Jason said, “God damn you.” He grabbed her by the right wrist, tugged her toward him; she grimaced as his fingers tightened. “And he’s already—”

“Eddy hasn’t done anything yet,” she grated, trying to free her wrist. “That hurts. Look; calm down and I’ll show you. Okay?”

Reluctantly, his heart hammering in fear, he let her go. Kathy turned on a bright, small light, laid three forged documents in the circle of its glare. “A purple dot on the margin of each,” she said, indicating the almost invisible circle of color. “A microtransmitter, so you’ll emit a bleep every five seconds as you move around. They’re after conspiracies; they want the people you’re with.”

Jason said harshly, “I’m not with anyone.”

“But they don’t know that.” She massaged her wrist, frowning in a girlish, sullen way. “You TV celebrities no one’s ever heard of sure have quick reactions,” she murmured.

“Why did you tell me?” Jason asked. “After doing all the forging, all the—”

“I want you to get away,” she said, simply.

“Why?” He still did not understand.

“Because hell, you’ve got some sort of magnetic quality about you; I noticed it as soon as you came into the room. You’re”—she groped for the word—“sexy. Even at your age.”

“My presence,” he said.

“Yes.” Kathy nodded. “I’ve seen it before in public people, from a distance, but never up close like this. I can see why you imagine you’re a TV personality; you really seem like you are.”

He said, “How do I get away? Are you going to tell me that? Or does that cost a little more?”

“God, you’re so cynical.”

He laughed, and again took hold of her by the wrist. “I guess I don’t blame you,” Kathy said, shaking her head and making a masklike face. “Well, first of all, you can buy Eddy off. Another five hundred should do it. Me you don’t have to buy off—if, and only if, and I mean it, if you stay with me awhile. You have … allure, like a good perfume. I respond to you and I just never do that with men.”

“With women, then?” he said tartly.

It passed her without registering. “Will you?” she said.

“Hell,” he said, “I’ll just leave.” Reaching, he opened the door behind her, shoved past her and out into her workroom. She followed, rapidly.

Among the dim, empty shadows of the abandoned restaurant she caught up with him; she confronted him in the gloom. Panting, she said, “You’ve already got a transmitter planted on you.”

“I doubt it,” he answered.

“It’s true. Eddy planted it on you.”

“Bullshit,” he said, and moved away from her toward the light of the restaurant’s sagging, broken front door.

Pursuing him like a deft-footed herbivore, Kathy gasped, “But suppose it’s true. It could be.” At the half-available doorway she interposed herself between him and freedom; standing there, her hands lifted as if to ward off a physical blow, she said swiftly, “Stay with me one night. Go to bed with me. Okay? That’s enough. I promise. Will you do it, for just one night?”

He thought, Something of my abilities, my alleged and well-known properties, have come with me, to this strange place I now live in. This place where I do not exist except on forged cards manufactured by a pol fink. Eerie, he thought, and he shuddered. Cards with microtransmitters built into them, to betray me and everyone with me to the pols. I haven’t done very well here. Except that, as she says, I’ve got allure. Jesus, he thought. And that’s all that stands between me and a forced-labor camp.

“Okay,” he said, then. It seemed the wiser choice—by far. “Go pay Eddy,” she said. “Get that over with and him out of here.”

“I wondered why he’s still hanging around,” Jason said. “Did he scent more money?”

“I guess so,” Kathy said.

“You do this all the time,” Jason said as he got out his money. SOP: standard operating procedure. And he had tumbled for it.

Kathy said blithely, “Eddy is psionic.”

Two city blocks away, upstairs in an unpainted but once white wooden building, Kathy had a single room with a hotcompart in which to fix one-person meals.

He looked around him. A girl’s room: the cotlike bed had a handmade spread covering it, tiny green balls of textile fibers in row after row. Like a graveyard for soldiers, he thought morbidly as he moved about, feeling compressed by the smallness of the room.

On a wicker table a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

“How far’d you get into it?” he asked her.

“To Within a Budding Grove.” Kathy double-locked the door after them and set into operation some kind of electronic gadget; he did not recognize it.

“That’s not very far,” Jason said.

Taking off her plastic coat, Kathy asked, “How far did you get into it?” She hung her coat in a tiny closet, taking his, too.

“I never read it,” Jason said. “But on my program we did a dramatic rendering of a scene … I don’t know which. We got a lot of good mail about it, but we never tried it again. Those out things, you have to be careful and not dole out too much. If you do it kills it dead for everybody, all networks, for the rest of the year.” He prowled, crampedly, about the room, examining a book here, a cassette tape, a micromag. She even had a talking toy. Like a kid, he thought; she’s not really an adult.

With curiosity, he turned on the talking toy.

“Hi!” it declared. “I’m Cheerful Charley and I’m definitely tuned in on your wavelength.”

“Nobody named Cheerful Charley is tuned in on my wavelength,” Jason said. He started to shut it off, but it protested. “Sorry,” Jason told it, “but I’m tuning you out, you creepy little bugger.”

“But I love you!” Cheerful Charley complained tinnily.

He paused, thumb on off button. “Prove it,” he said. On his show he had done commercials for junk like this. He hated it and them. Equally. “Give me some money,” he told it.

“I know how you can get back your name, fame, and game,” Cheerful Charley informed him. “Will that do for openers?”

“Sure,” he said.

Cheerful Charley bleated, “Go look up your girl friend.”

“Who do you mean?” he said guardedly.

“Heather Hart,” Cheerful Charley bleeped.

“Hard by,” Jason said, pressing his tongue against his upper incisors. He nodded. “Any more advice?”

“I’ve heard of Heather Hart,” Kathy said as she brought a bottle of orange juice out of the cold-cupboard of the room’s wall. The bottle had already become three-fourths empty; she shook it up, poured foamy instant ersatz orange juice into two jelly glasses. “She’s beautiful. She has all that long red hair. Is she really your girl friend? Is Charley right?”

“Everybody knows,” he said, “that Cheerful Charley is always right.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true.” Kathy poured bad gin (Mountbatten’s Privy Seal Finest) into the orange juice. “Screwdrivers,” she said, proudly.

“No, thanks,” he said. “Not at this hour of the day.” Not even B & L scotch bottled in Scotland, he thought. This damn little room … isn’t she making anything out of pol finking and card-forging, whichever it is she does? Is she really a police informer, as she says? he wondered. Strange. Maybe she’s both. Maybe neither.