“You’ve won ten dollars,” Noyes said. “Glorious! I want to play again!”

“There’s much else to see,” he reminded her. They moved on. At a fortune-telling booth a spectral hooded figure predicted long life for them both, and numerous children. Then, looking Noyes over cunningly, the prophet added, “You will have many rebirths.” Noyes tapped the plate and added a dollar to the soothsayer’s credit balance.

“How did he know we were recorded?” Elena asked. “He guessed. He saw how well-dressed we were and figured we were wealthy, and if we were wealthy we must be on file with the Scheffing people. In any case, it’s flattery to wish us rebirths, even if we’re not in the class that lives again.”

“Perhaps he recognized us,” Elena suggested. “I doubt it.”

“I’d like a mask, in any case.”

“Many of the fairgoers were masked, particularly the women. Girls bare to the hips tripped along, cloaked only by striped dominoes. At Elena’s insistence Noyes took her to a masking booth and purchased a concealment for her: a dark band of pseudoliving glass that took possession of her face in a kind of caress, slipping snakelike into place from ear to ear. They laughed. She pulled him close and kissed him fleetingly on the lips. “Buy a mask yourself,” she said.

He did. Hidden now from the stares of the curious, they moved through the gallery, taking a dropshaft to the one below on a sudden whim. Noyes felt buoyant, relaxed. Within him Kravchenko was dormant for once, and Elena, warm and exciting on his arm, seemed to promise eventual ecstasies. The evening was going well after a poor start. The giddiness of Jubilisle had broken through his habitual melancholy. Yet there was always the memento mori not far below the surface; they paused in a closed arcade to embrace, and Noyes drew Elena so tightly against him that the soft mound of her left breast felt the impress of the flask of lethal carniphage that he carried always with him. When they separated, she touched the bruised place tenderly and said, “You hurt me. Something in your pocket—”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d feel it.”

“What do you have there, a gravity bomb?”

“Just a flask of carniphage,” he told her pleasantly, “In case a suicidal mood hits me.”

Of course she did not believe that, and so she showered a silvery cascade of laughter over him. A flamboyant sign declared: WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF HALF-LIFE.

“What’s this?” she asked. “More radioactive games?”

“I have no idea. Shall we go in?” They entered. A fee of a dollar fissionable was extracted from each of them. Swiftly they discovered that the House of HalfLife, despite its name, did not traffic in neutrons and alpha particles; the half-life offered here was biological, hybrid creatures raised from fused cell nuclei. Behind an electrified barrier stunted beings shuffled around, while a pre-programed speaker recited their identities. “Here we have mouse and cat, folks, one of the most popular hybrids. And this is dog and tiger, believe it if you can! Next you see snake and frog.”

The hybrid animals bore little resemblance to any of their supposed ancestors. They tended to be neutral, unspecialized in form, evolutionary prototypes lacking in clear characteristics. Most were less than two feet in length, moving about on small uncertain legs. The dog-tiger had patches of gray fur. The snakefrog was squat and glistening, with pulsating pouches of flesh. “Man and mouse, ladies and gentlemen, man and mouse!” came the disembodied voice. “You think the Scheffing people work miracles? What of this? Infect them with the Sendai virus, blend the nuclei in a centrifuge, toss in a dash of nucleic acid, yes, yes, man and mouse!” A dozen distorted things, neither mouse nor man, moved into the arena. Their eyes were pink and beady, their hands were claws, they could not walk erect. Elena stared in rigid attention.

A shill sidled up to them, proffering a handful of explosive darts. He said silkily. “You look like expensive folk out for a night’s fun. Would you like to kill some of the hybrids? A hundred bucks fish a dart.”

“Sorry,” Noyes said. “No, thanks.”

“Try your aim. Some folk your class come back often. We’ve got a room in back, lots of hybrids to throw at. They aren’t rare, really.”

“Shall we?” Elena asked him. Noyes looked at her in amazement. Her eyes were gleaming. Kravchenko awakened and offered a warning: — Don’t refuse her anything if you’re smart. Sighing, Noyes gave in. They went to the back room. He lowered his credit balance by five hundred dollars fissionable and Elena took a cluster of darts in her delicate hand. On a platform before them, half a dozen pitiful bluish things, half squirrel, half otter, moved in ragged circles. They were slow, awkward animals with lengthy hairless tails and large flippered feet.

Elena aimed and threw. Her breasts quivered beneath the covering of green scales; her arm moved jerkily, a stiff throw from the elbow. To Noyes’ relief, she missed, and missed also on the second and third casts, the darts landing and igniting in quick incandescent puffs. But on the fourth she struck one of the hapless hybrids at the base of its twisted spine, and the odor of singed fur drifted toward them. When the smoke cleared Noyes saw the remnants of the creature. Elena looked exhilarated; a deep crimson flush appeared beneath her dark, tawny skin, making her appear disturbingly more sensual than before. She handed him the remaining dart. He thrust it back at her.

“Go on,” she cried. “Throw it! It’s fun!”

“To kill?”

“Those things come out of test tubes. They’re not really alive. They’re better off dead.” She joggled his arm. The nearness of her perspiring flesh maddened him. “Throw it!”

Desperately Noyes hurled the dart. It cleared the platform by ten feet and smashed harmlessly against the backdrop. Then he seized her by the hand and pulled her through a side exit lip ahead, a cocktail lounge could be seen, and they entered it.

“Don’t you care for hunting?” Elena asked him. “Not really. But hunting is sport. There’s nothing sporting about throwing darts at mutated monstrosities.”

She laughed. The tip of her tongue flicked out. “There was a grand hunt in Italy six years ago. We chased partridges across the campana south of Rome. You must have a memory of it.”

“I?”

“Jim Kravchenko was there. If he’s truly your persona, you have the memory.”

Kravchenko promptly thrust the memory up into view. A misty October morning; the shattered remains of a Roman aqueduct gaunt against the gray sky; handsomely dressed young men and women, riding power carts, pursuing the terrified birds across the rolling plain. Laughter, the occasional burst of needlefire, the squawk of the prey, the autumn fragrances. Elena beside him, looking a trifle slimmer, chastely garbed in hunting attire, wielding her needlegun to deadly effect and hissing with delight each time she registered a kill. Then, afterward, the tang of iced champagne, the pleasure of spicy foods imported from the outworlds, the easy flow of light conversation in a palazzo at the edge of the city. And Elena in his arms, still clad in her hunting clothes, the pleated skirt pulled up, the white thighs exposed, the hips thrusting, thrusting …

“Yes,” Noyes gasped. “I remember now.”

“You must have many interesting memories. Jim and I were quite fond of one another.”

“I haven’t done much checking,” said Noyes. “Somehow it seems unfair. It overbalances our relationship, Elena. I mean, I carry intimate recollections of you, so you have few secrets from me, but you have no such insight into me.”

She looked startled. “Why do we take on personae if not to gain advantage? I don’t understand you, Charles. If in your mind you hold Jim’s memories of me, why not enjoy them?”

—Because you’re a damned masochist, Kravchenko suggested. Noyes winced. To Elena he said, “You’re right. I’m being foolish.”