Could someone have gotten to me? Bone cancer wasn't the trademark of anyone I knew.

Did it matter? I was done for, no matter how it had come about. So what if someone saw me living it up here and there? A garroting cord around the neck in a stinking LA alley would only save me the trouble of having to cash it in myself when the pain became too great.

I'd made up my mind.

The next morning I woke up with a thousand overweight pixies tap-dancing on my skull. Dragging my head off the desk, I stumbled through a personal kaleidoscope of light and pain toward the hall bathroom.

Bennie the Dipso lay sprawled there, one elbow in the urinal, snoring merrily. I moved him to a more dignified position and used the convenience for its intended purpose. L.A. smog drifted in through the vent shafts. I was glad I hadn't developed any lung diseases.

I finished up and returned to my office for a breakfast glass of dog hair. I needed a shave and a bath. Or just a quick swim through carbolic acid. Instead, I tucked the .45 Colt Lightweight Commander into my waistband holster and headed for the stairs.

I could feel it this time. Maybe I was anticipating it. A sort of dull agony spread all through me by the time I got to the lobby. I sat down for a moment. It made no difference. At least I finally knew what all those little aches and pains over the past few months had been. I almost felt relieved. It wasn't as if I was getting old-I was merely dying.

I surveyed the ground floor. The lobby served as a repository for all the old, degenerating losers in the Arco slum area. They sat or lay or piled themselves in dirty heaps of gin and old clothing, waiting for that ultimate assassin to fire his fatal round. Men and women left behind by the spirit of uncaring time.

And I was one of them.

I felt like an old sick dog and knew it. I adjusted my foulard-the hottest design ten years ago, as was most of my ensemble-and pulled myself up to my full five-ten to step over the other derelicts.

I beelined to my nearest bank, over on Seventh. This one contained about five hundred thousand Panamerican dollars from a job I did on a senator who'd opposed private ownership of solar power satellites. He'd been one of those quirks you sometimes run across in politics. He wouldn't stay bought.

I'd decided to be poetic on that guy. He was driving up to his cabin in Vermont one summer day. Secluded country road. Lovely.

I was waiting along the way with a dazzlingly polished parabolic reflector. At a sharp bend in the road.

Easy money. Getting it out of the account turned out to be a lot tougher.

The line at the bank stretched almost the length of the building. The tellers had been shut off-a bad sign. Human substitutes had taken their place at tables set up at the far end of the floor. Guards with neural interruptors and backup revolvers formed a threatening line between the customers and their savings.

Even with a staggering hangover, I figured something was slightly amiss. Pulling my newsplaque with yesterday's Times from my pocket, I punched up page one, column one. Since I usually started at the comics, then went to the obituaries, followed by sports and finally the news, this minor item had escaped my attention.

There'd been another devaluation.

The lady with the wheelbarrow full of cash should have tipped me off.I sighed and pulled out my passcard-a slip of plastic with the bank's logo on it. I'd been through this before. The feds always called it a "revaluation." That's a fancy term meaning "the shaft" for anyone on a fixed income.

My foggy brain couldn't remember the date of the last deposit. `94? `95? I ignored the babble of impatient customers and the jostle of spectators while waiting my turn.

"Next," the man behind the table said. Someone leaned too far over the counter, causing him to shout, "Come on, everyone! Calm down. We're converting all currency. There's no shortage."

"That's the problem," someone whispered. "Too damned much of the stuff!"

I dropped my card onto the table. A gangly youngster in a red jumpsuit took it and popped it into the aluminum box beside his elbow. Yawning, he pulled the card out to hand back to me.

"Any deposit or withdrawal?" he asked.

"All of it," I said as cordially as possible. "Now."

"Cash or debit card?"

"Cash."

He looked at me as if I'd asked for beads and bearskins. From a drawer under the table he pulled out a packet of orange scrap paper with pretty swirls engraved on it surrounding a drawing of some stranger in clothes more out of date than mine. He counted out ten of them.

"Four hundred, four-fifty, five hundred." He reached into a sack by his other elbow to pull out some clear plastic poker chips with squiggly colored strands sealed inside them. They fell into my hand with a dull, sad clack. "And fifty-eight cents."

I stared at the Monopoly money in my hand, then eyed the weasel behind the table.

"I had half a million Panamerican dollars in there!"

"Which you deposited in April of `92 There's been seven revaluations since then. You now have five hundred Panpacific dollars and fifty-eight Panpacific cents. Next." His gaze darted to one of the guards.

A sudden feeling of porcine enclosure coursed through me. I nudged past the tightening circle of federal bank police and didn't look back.

Great. That deposit had been one of my more recent ones. A quick mental calculation gave me a revised estimate of my total worth.

Between seven and ten thousand Panpacific scraps of paper. Sic transit pecunia. The rest of my savings had already been wiped out in the Great Gold Seizure of `93.

Oh well, die and learn.

The walk back seemed longer and hurt more. Overhead thundered the sonic clap of a Phoenix spacecraft returning to Earth. The sound of it lifted my gaze up from the trash-clogged sidewalks. Arco Plaza commanded my attention.

I remembered when both towers stood tall and black like a pair of stone idols against the blue. Now the sky was slightly brown all the time. And only one tower stood, if you could call it standing.

A few years back, the Red Twelfth of November Revolutionary People's Brigade for the Liberation of the Third through Sixth Worlds had detonated a small fizzle fission explosion in the women's restroom on the twenty-sixth floor of the South Tower.

The whole southern structure had collapsed, taking with it a good portion of the North Tower and blowing out most of the facing windows for a few blocks around with secondary projectiles.

Instant property depreciation. The ultimate in block busting.

None of the survivors cared to risk living or working near the radioactive mess, so-in spite of superior decontamination efforts-Old Downtown became an instant slum. It promptly filled up with the ignored scum of life. It made a perfect hiding place.

Solutions, Inc. served as my legit front. I even did some minor detective work-recovering stolen property, finding lost daughters, and the like. No divorce work, though. It made a good cover. A cover I no longer cared much about blowing.

I found a phone booth and slammed a callcard into the slot. When it verified, I punched up the number of a fellow tradesman. The line buzzed three times.

"Yeah?" demanded a bullhorn voice.

"Pete-check your stash. The lobby scheme's inoperative. Pass it on." I rang off.

Several people in the same line of work as mine were saving up some of their money to push for a statute granting a blanket amnesty for all political crimes committed in the twentieth century. We'd even gotten to the point of killing the major legislators standing in our way. We'd hired a hotshot lawyer to figure out the tricky wording and were all set with the bribes. Only now, most of us were out of money.