“Maybe if I, like, kicked in a couple bucks, I could get a new needle?”

“It is against regulations.”

Mark sighed. “Look. You got a scalpel anywhere? I can draw my own blood with that. I’m not afraid to cut myself.”

The orderly looked mulish. Or I could bounce your jug-eared head off the counter a few times, you crummy little jackboot quack, a voice said at the back of Mark’s head.

J. J.! he thought, shocked and appalled. Since Starshine died, he had noticed it was harder to keep down the Flash’s antisocial impulses. The two seemed to have counteracted one another.

The orderly was staring at Mark’s face His own was the color of wood ash. “Very sorry,” he said. “Of course I will find a scalpel at once. Of course.”

“Why, thanks, man,” Mark said, thinking, See, J. J.? Give peace a chance.

For some reason J. J. Flash just laughed.

He left the bureau with a piece of official paper announcing his status as a provisional ace and wild card refugee – on his own recognizance, so to speak, pending the test results; a booklet of ration coupons with pictures of sainted Ho printed on them in blue; and another form assigning his quarters in Cholon, the district of Ho Chi Mirth City set aside for wild cards, with instructions on how to get there scrawled on the back.

Walking into daylight was like walking into a wall, a phenomenon he was getting used to in South Asia. He paused a moment, letting his eyes adjust.

When he started across the yard a whistling scream drew his eyes up into the dazzling pale-blue sky. An airplane was passing over with its flaps and gear down, heading for a landing at Tan Son Nhut, a fighter, lean and predatory with delta wings and twin tail fins. He felt a weird sense of sideways nostalgia, of adventitious dйjа vu: his father had often flown fighters into that very base, more than twenty years ago. Despite his years of professed pacifism, Mark easily recognized the airplane as a MiG-29, one of the latest generation of Soviet military aircraft – he had always harbored a secret, guilty fascination for warplanes.

As he left the compound, some skinny brown kids in shorts threw stones at him, shouted obvious insults at him, and ran off, their tire-soled Ho Chi Minh slippers clacking against their feet like motorized novelty-store dentures.

Fortunately their aim was bad. Watching them go, Mark shook his head sadly. “They sure must still hate Americans around here,” he said. Not that he could blame them.

Some of Cholon looked pretty good – more prosperous than the rest of what Mark had seen of Ho Chi Minh City, and more lively. The wild cards quarter wasn’t in that part.

He felt self-conscious sitting in the shade of the little fringed awning on top of the cyclo bicycle cab, resting while the driver pedaled his heart out in the sun. It didn’t seem consistent with socialist equality. All the same a lot of putatively good socialist Vietnamese seemed to be riding around in the things, so who knew?

Mark wasn’t really a socialist, when it all came down to it, and actually didn’t know vast amounts about the doctrine, though people who spoke in Capital Letters had frequently tried to explain it to him – or at least lectured about it. He just knew in a vague Summer of Love way that it was a Good Thing.

Besides, the shade gave relief from the pile-driving force of the sun, and their wind of passage even kicked up a bit of a breeze.

The stucco began to flake off the faзades and trash to pile up in the gutters, and Cholon began to look more like the rest of Ho Chi Minh City. He gathered he was getting closer to his destination.

The cyclo stopped abruptly, bang in the middle of a block and the street. A little decaying orangish Trabant screeched its brakes and veered around them with a fart of exhaust and a trail of what Mark was fairly sure were Vietnamese obscenities.

“This it, man?” he asked dubiously.

“This far as I go,” the driver said. For all his exertion he wasn’t breathing heavily. Cyclo-driving must be great aerobic exercise. “This place Number Ten.”

“Oh.” He paid the guy off in a fistful of the flimsy dong they’d given him at the Wild Cards Affairs office, hesitated, and handed him a buck for a tip. “You might be tempted to head into Commie-land at some point,” his buddy Freewheelin’ Frank had explained when he paid Mark off. “Good old greenbacks are good as gold there, and a whole lot easier to carry.”

He must have been right. The cyclo driver cranked his eyes left and right, snatched the dollar out of Mark’s fingers, and instantly made it disappear – a good trick, since the sleeves of his black Harley Davidson T-shirt only came halfway down his skinny biceps. Then he whipped his cab around and went pumping off the way he had come. Mark shrugged and continued afoot.

About the first thing he saw was a joker child with the body of a big green-black beetle and the face of a four-year-old girl. He smiled and nodded at her. She clutched her rag-doll to her chitin with the upper two pairs of legs and stirred her wing-cases with a noise that reminded Mark of his childhood trick of fixing a playing card to the frame of his bicycle so the spokes would snap it as he rode, and stared at Mark as if he were the most terrifying thing she had ever seen in her life.

“But look here,” Mark said, sticking his sheaf of official papers under the woman’s nose. “My Ho Khau form is all in order. See? It says I have a room here.”

He pointed to the number over the doorway, then pointed to the form. It was fortuitous that the building had a street number. Few buildings he’d passed did. For that matter, few of the places on this block deserved the name “building”; they mostly ran to shanties slapped together out of plywood and corrugated tin.

Mark’s assigned domicile was whitewashed brick, which he gathered meant it was a survival from French Colonial days. The stocky concierge, or whatever she was, obviously had no intention of letting him into it. She stood there expostulating in no language he knew and waving her little pudgy fists and turning red until her face looked like a beet with a bandanna tied on it.

Culture shock was starting to set in, and some good old down-home paranoia. Mark was a stranger in the strangest land yet – okay, maybe it wasn’t stranger than Takis, but as far as Earth went, it was pretty alien – and he had been given to believe things worked a certain way, and here they weren’t working at all. The smiling woman at the Wild Cards office had handed him his papers and permits and said everything was taken care of, and he just naturally expected things to proceed with smooth scientific-socialist efficiency. And here was this woman yelling at him in a street full of jokers, refusing to let him into the living quarters assigned him.

He was tired and beginning to feel that traveler’s panic of not knowing where he was going to stay. And maybe some of his socialization had died with Starshine. Because, much to his own surprise, he shouldered abruptly past the noisy woman, went stilting down a dark hallway that stank of urine and less nameable aromas on his great gangly Western legs, clutching his papers in his fist and peering at the faded numbers painted on the doors.

His papers matched one on the second floor. He knocked. He prepared a speech in his mind: Look, I’m sorry. There’s been some kind of misunderstanding. The government assigned this room to me.

The door opened. A tiny woman dressed in black peasant pajamas stood there, so gaunt her cheeks looked like collapsing tents and her arms and legs like sticks. Her eyes were huge, and they widened in terror when they saw what was standing at her door.

At least a half-dozen children and a couple of ancient women sat on the floor behind her, staring at Mark with fear in their dull eyes. One tiny stick-figure child – a boy, he thought in a horrified flash – staggered against one of the old women, who wrapped him in her meatless arms. He had a bandage wrapped completely around his head, brown with old dried blood.