A bump came and I corrected the line but it wasn't too bad because they'd hit too close to the centre. Then they had another go and the impact was well to one side and very heavy and I did what I could but this time the strain dragged a tyre off and I watched the headlamp beam go spilling across the edge of the road and flooding down into woodland. The N.S.U. was airborne for a few seconds, floating strangely among light and shadows, then it struck rubble and began pitching and I saw the trees coming and turned the engine off before the night went wild.

The moon gleamed, set in shadows.

Shapes, but not of trees or smashed metal: I expected shapes of trees. The moon was glass-bright, translucid, shimmering, sometimes going dark and emerging again among the shadows.

'Wait a minute.'

The whole of the organism was prepared to arrange its survival if it could: run, fight, beat out flames, bind blood in with a tourniquet, free itself from wreckage. The components were immediately available: nerve, sinew, gas-interchange process, adrenalin supply. Intelligence alone was absent. The organism had to be told what to do, and nothing knew.

The moon, alive with light, held a globe of colour in its centre: blue. And in the centre of blue was another globe, totally black.

The shapes were fainter, touches of light on cloud, the cloud silver, curling, hanging near the moon, a line dividing its softness. A feather lying curved above the moon.

'Who are you?'

The moon darkened again and shone again and watched me. It was an eye watching me.

'Bitter There was pain in the organism but not enough to limit movement. I was on one elbow looking across at her face, recognizing it but not recalling it, knowing I had seen it before but not knowing where or when.

Information came flooding in so fast that the receptor areas couldn't cope with it but I saw now that there was light coming from behind her, from the street, and that something reflected it so that her eye shone. Then there was an implosion of random images and within a millisecond the whole scene was formed and took on significance: she was sitting hunched in a chair near the bed where I lay and tears had dried on her face.

'Who are you?' I said it in German this time.

She told me her name but paramnesia is odd: recognition is present but recall can't just be switched on like that. The name meant nothing when she said it.

A young face with amethyst eyes swollen from crying, a bewildered mouth. All her attention was on me. There were no trees or shattered glass, no flames to beat out. Sweat began trickling from my temples and I stopped making an effort, suddenly aware that the effort I had been making was enormous and very desperate because I was scared sick of seeing the lot go, the whole lot.

The only hope was in taking the pressure off, letting the neural traces show up under the hypo in their own good time. I didn't use English any more: the one word she had spoken had been in German.

'Is there any kind of head injury?'

My hands were moving about, the fingers hunting for blood. Quite a lot of the organism was coping well enough, doing its best to look after itself.

She said something but I wasn't interested: there was so much data coming in that I wanted to sort it out before anything new was presented. A window and the unlit lamp and of course her face and various colours and the tear stains.

'Oh yes,' I said and sat still for a bit. Traces were showing up: I had seen tears on her face before when she'd said she hated me and that I was impotent. 'So that's who you are.'

Memory, returning, can't present every detail because there are too many. Putting your clothes on you don't observe the pattern of the tweed or the style of the shoes: you simply know that these are your clothes. It's not a matter of Striker, shepherdess, Wagner, cheese-wire, Benedikt, ignition switch plus several million other images and their significance. It's a matter of finding yourself back in a. place composed of all the things you have ever known. Identity.

'Wait a minute.' I was sitting on the edge of her bed, head in my hands. It would need a minute to settle in. If you don't take it easy the whole thing can go blank again.

'Nitri,' she said again, frightened.

'Yes I know. Yes.'

Her scent. It had been inside the car. The N.S.U.

There was still an area of darkness and I was aware of it but it would have to be left alone. Some kind of inhibitory block, repression of unpleasant events.

'What time is it, Nitri?'

'Four.'

'Night?'

'Yes. But you — '

'When did I get here?'

'In the night.'

'Hours ago — this night? Come on — some hours ago?'

'You said you were coming.'

Blank. It didn't fit anywhere. She had sounded frightened. Perhaps I'd spoken too loudly. That was because I was frustrated: there might be a need for hurry and I couldn't 'Don't worry,' I told her.

I sat blanking my mind for as long as a minute and it worked and I got a completely lucid sequence: the telephone cold in my hand, the sweep of light as a car went by, the smell of the exhaust-gas. I'm coming to see you. Pain across the shoulders and chest What happened? A loose feeling in one shoe. I'll be there in an hour. A car slowing or seemingly slowing so that I dropped back into the shelter of the woodland.

'I was phoning from the autobahn. I just wanted to know if you'd be alone.'

'I'm always alone.'

She meant always without Franz.

Her body was milky under the nightgown and the light from the street shadowed her eyes. She asked me why I had come.

I couldn't tell her. They might already have found him on the floor and the number of the N.S.U. was in the reception-book and there was an N.S.U. with that number lying smashed in the trees near the autobahn. So I couldn't have gone back to the motel or checked in at any hotel in Linsdorf or Hanover or anywhere at all, looking like this. There was no safe-house because I was working with prescribed cover: Walter Martin attached to Accidents Investigation Branch temporary overseas location Weserbergland Federal Republic Germany. The A.I.B. was an official organization in the pursuit of lawful business in cooperation with a foreign government and if anything irregular happened to Walter Martin the A.I.B. must be protected from any consequences. The Bureau would want to take care of this situation before it could get out of hand so I had to tell Ferris as soon as I could. The trouble was that I'd blown my own cover and couldn't go near the Linsdorf base or the A.I.B. unit or Ferris himself. I'd had to find a bolt-hole and go to ground and this was the only place but I couldn't tell her that.

'I needed you,' I said.

'People don't need me.'

She meant Franz didn't 'I had an accident.'

She let herself laugh suddenly. 'Did you?'

The Special Uses sheepskin coat was ripped and one shoe was loose, split right across. I didn't know what my face looked like but the wound in my hand had been opened up and they were both caked with earth.

Another clear sequence began and I sat with it as if I watched a film: the trees coming up in a wave at great speed as the car lurched into a slow roll, still airborne and then hit rubble and plunged with the headlights turning the scene into an abstract kaleidoscope pattern of black and white, the trees winter-bare and resembling a gigantic stack of driftwood bursting and hurled against the windscreen, the percussion of wood on metal and glass and the white hail as the screen went, the scene revolving slowly at first until it was upside down and then jerking as the saplings bent under the onslaught and sent the car sideways and straight and sideways again-and pitching lower into the undergrowth while the momentum was broken against stripped white bark and I kept my knees jack-knifed and my feet on the crash-cushion, the reek of fuel from a torn pipe and sometimes the glow of the moon spinning through black branches and always the bite of the straps holding my body back while my head's own weight dragged at the neck and tried to break it. Everything suddenly still.