She was registering no rapid eye movements at the moment, but by the depth of her breathing and the super relaxed look of the muscles of her lightly lined face, he knew she was asleep. Sleeping without REMing. Sleeping without dreaming.

He slithered from the bed like a damp snake, scarcely creasing the single light thermal coverlet. She did not stir. Her breath did not change. The severely cut dark hair bit into the white of the bed like a high contrast photograph. Her deep brown body, supple as a dancer's, gleamed through the transparent coverlet with the phosphorescence of her expensive body make-up.

He wanted her again. But he did not know her well enough to dare wake her now. He could not know how she would react, joined to him only by a couple of dozen hours, half of which they had spent in bed. He was too good a psychologist to subject a child of the city to such a startling experience as a sudden awakening in only vaguely familiar surroundings.

And anyway, it must be nearly time now. He glanced at the constant-readout holo clock set in the bedhead. Two thirty-five. Yes, nearly time. He stretched cramped muscles as he walked naked to the giant picture window.

Suddenly, a multicoloured blob of light burst on the window, sending shock waves of prism hues scudding out from a central point like pretty dies on a microscope slide. Another hit. And another.

He yawned defiantly, then moved back into the shadows as a fourth burst of colour painted the window.

The snipers were still there. And they would stay there until they found a way to penetrate the flexiglas window and kill him. He wasn't a top target by any means, but there would be a lot of kudos for the sniper who finally broke the ring around him and murdered such an eminent and well protected man. And in these vast over-populated cities, he reflected, death by sniper fire went down on the exit dockets as natural causes - and was the biggest single cause of death among the professional classes.

But he was feeling relaxed now. Gone was the nerve-bending paranoia of being a target risk. Just for now, he was a human being again. Just for now, he was the creature some of his ancestors must have been: safe, secure, rested. He was even feeling quite serene, in his high tower above the death-filled streets.

Just before the last hit, he had noticed a street-car on fire down below. He wondered which fool had forgotten to have the flexiglas screen re-coated. That was how the snipers got through. The only vulnerable part of the armoured electric street car. And he made a mental note that his own car was going to be due for treatment again shortly. The price of forgetfulness was too high.

He looked down at his naked body. The feeling of relaxation and detachment hadn't lasted long. He could see the muscles and feel the ligaments tightening again. Most of all, he could feel it in his head: the effects of the adrenaline returning like an inevitable dawn.
Just as well, he thought. He had to go out.

He turned suddenly with a feeling that something was not quite right - and immediately knew what it was. His jungle senses had picked up an alteration in the girl's breathing. Almost too late.

She was sitting erect in the bed now, her dark hair ruffled and her full, rich brown breasts rising and falling like a spring tide on a faraway baked beach. Her deep brown eyes held the key. The blasts against the window had awakened her. Her eyes were electric arcs of fear stabbing at his body, at the furniture, at the window. It was deeper than terror.

In her softly sculpted right hand was a multi-faceted knife that glinted in the glow from her body as she coiled herself into a position from which to spring. Her lined face was beautiful with a staggering paranoia that seemed to ooze from every delicate pore.

She had undergone a total change from the last time he had seen her, only moments ago. Now she looked like a rogue animal from one of the vid shows: terrified, terrifying. And quite lovely. She was a killing machine, but that perhaps alarmingly only enhanced the fascination she held for him, somehow.

Then she sprang, an ear-splitting scream on her lips, and the crystal knife carved a path towards his head at eye level. With a calm born of vast street fighting experience, he twitched slightly sideways so the knife just nicked his ear. Then he wrenched with all his strength and the hand came around, the blade performing a neat loop and embedding itself deep in the girl's stomach.

She was going to take a few minutes to die, but he knew he couldn't save her. She couldn't afford it anyway. Much as he might have regretted having to do what he did, he couldn't have done anything different, Quant thought. She was fast and athletic - and in that confused moment, utterly lethal. He was lucky to be alive. He couldn't be sure, either that she didn't sleep with him simply for a pop at killing him.

As the girl was safely immobilised, he quietly showered and dressed, to the sound of her dying moans.

As he pulled on the chameleon jump-suit, he wondered how the knife had got past the screens in the elevator. A nasty slip, that. And it might have been the last one he need have made, if not for that deep instinct that made him turn around when he did.

Was it instinct, or was it experience? Or perhaps his subconscious had swiftly worked out for him what the girl would do if suddenly awakened, and added the extra factor of the sniper fire lighting up the room, then telegraphed to his conscious mind an urgent prediction of what was most likely to happen.

An interesting thought. He would have to pursue it further ... if he ever got the chance. His task tonight tended to preclude any thoughts of the future.

He finished dressing and wandered back to the bedroom. She had stopped dying. It was all over. Not even a flicker of a motor response remained in the rich heap of brown and black and red on the carpet.

He kissed her once more on the still-warm lips, as he heaved the knife from its deep seat in her belly and turned it around to examine it in the glow from her body make-up.

The long blade was octagonal with eight very sharp cutting edges like fins, broken here and there with wicked barbs. It was a cruel crystal, an instrument for the unprofessional who had to be sure of a kill with the first blow. Very much a weapon for close-range self-defence, it had probably seen service before.

Luckily, it hadn't been treated with toxins, or he would have been dead by now from the nick on his ear. He smiled sadly and ironically to himself, She had felt safe with him.

But how did it get past the screens? He twisted the handle this way and that, and suddenly it came apart, a micro-chip on two hairline wires dropping out. A continuation circuit designed to blind the screens. And a sophisticated one, too. This lady had a fairly expensive taste in weapons. Still, she had reached around 30 with her beautiful body intact, so her choice must have been good.

He walked to the bedhead and pressed a stud. The floor opened up and engulfed the body. A new carpet panel slid into place and he watched the bristles of the fibre subtly change colour until it matched the wear on the rest of the floor covering, and he could no longer tell where she had died. He took the blood-stained knife over to the wall, touched another stud and a panel slid open. The knife dropped into the hole with a clunk, and he heard the whirr of the cleaner starting up as the panel slid shut again.

Three a.m. Time to go. He would have to register the death later.

He crossed the room to two large walk-in panels which drew back as he put out a hand. He selected a toxin-coated long knife that slid easily into a special pocket in his suit, then picked up a small blaster from the well-stocked armoury before him. He clicked the blaster on to charge and a tiny neon blinked. Good. The blaster went into another pocket. He turned for the door, and the panels slid shut behind him.

The private elevator swallowed him with a gulp of rushing air and the room disappeared, waiting to exist again when he returned to give it reality with his mind.

The elevator delivered him up to the hard seat of his street car, and he punched out a course, then set drive. Might as well go the front way. There were snipers out the back, too, so it was pointless trying to avoid them that way. Anyhow, he knew just where most of them were in the buildings that surrounded the front door. That was a big advantage.

With a lurch, the street car was in motion, now gathering speed phenomenally across the long garage floor strip, plunging towards the still-closed huge double doors. Then suddenly it was spewed like a bullet into the naked streets amid a vast lake of vivid swirling colours.

The car went into a pre-programmed weave pattern, which was changed every time it went out, on a random basis. Even so, one sniper found the screen and a great wash of rainbows pulsed out from the epicentre of the hit, where a residual tiny white patch of chemical decay was left on the screen. Better get that treatment soon, he thought.

The firing grew more and more sporadic as the car coursed on along the streets towards the poorer quarters. There were no more direct hits on the screen. A couple of headaches taking pot luck scored harmlessly against the armoured side panels and he saw just the edges of their coloured shockwaves on the flexiglas. But he did notice that the car had developed a slight wobble. That would be fixed by the automechs at 1472. As soon as the car stopped, the auto-diagnostic equipment would plug itself in to seek out the fault, then it would be corrected and his account at Central Bank debited directly for the cost of the repair.

He wished they had got flexiglas coating on to automech, but realised that it would be a long time before they did. The treatment was a new innovation following the invention of sniper weapons that could penetrate the astonishingly tough flexiglass screens, and as technicians had to work under cover these days, it would take a while to fit out automechs all over the city with treatment plants. They would probably be obsolete before installation was complete. It wouldn't take the snipers long to come up with an answer. It never did.

Another pair of massive double doors glinted ahead as the whirling switchback ride neared its end. The car twitched sideways and at the last minute the doors opened and gulped it into a numbered deceleration lane. He grimaced as the car grew hot with the stench of burning brake pads, and the restraining harness clenched his flesh through the rough chameleon suit. Then, incredibly it seemed, the car had stopped, just before a thick buffer. His straps were gone and he was being sucked up into another private air elevator.

Quant was flung into the well-lit room in a military crouch, blaster in hand. There were four targets: three men and a girl. All of them, apart from one of the men, were standing. The last man was seated on a hard chair in a corner of the room. The newcomer's tenseness loosened as he recognised each of the room's occupants in turn. Finally satisfied, he straightened and slipped the blaster back in its pocket.

"You're three minutes late, Quant. What happened to your ear?"

The voice belonged to the girl, Mucha. It was devoid of concern, the question framed more as a matter of simple curiosity.

Quant touched the lobe and his finger encountered a blob of dried blood where a tiny portion of his ear should have been. A small nick of flesh was missing and Quant was mildly surprised that the cold shower had stopped the bleeding so rapidly. He marvelled at the healing properties of his body, and not for the first time.

"Picked up a para bedmate with a con circuit in her blade. Let's get on. All ready?"

Mucha had already lost interest in the fresh wound, her attention now focused on the seated man.

"Devine?"

"Yeah, OK. Just get on, will you?"

Devine was nervous. No more than Quant expected. He knew his patients. And he knew it wouldn't be long before Devine became classically paranoid if something wasn't done quickly. Quant glanced briefly at the other two faces. They were hand-picked nurses, selected for their stability and their ability to deal swiftly and effectively with people who suddenly turned para. Cline and Gore were really a couple of apes, but they had brain enough to realise that what Quant the psychologist and Mucha the politician had got together to do was the only chance of salvation left for this teeming madness-world.

Quant briefly and instinctively checked their eyes. It was always there that the first signs of the para showed up. The eyes of both were still, expectant. None of the electric ripples he had seen in his bedmate's eyes earlier. Devine's eyes, however, showed a nervous sparkle, difficult to detect, but one of the classic first symptoms. Mucha was a cold store, a frozen waste. A painfully thin girl, older than she looked, pretty but not beautiful, spoiled by the harsh, bitter snow in her eyes.

Quant went over to where Devine was sitting.

"You know what to do. You've had regression before. Just take it easy, relax; let's see if we can get back to Sir Michael Smith-Ward again, shall we? Cline, give us the 30 p.s."

Quant adjusted Devine's chair to give him a little more comfort and make sure he was facing the light that flashed red at 30 cycles per second across the dim room. In some people that light could induce epilepsy or fainting. In Devine, it made for a receptive mind, one of the more minor reasons he was chosen. The all-important deciding factor was that he was once, in some former life hypnotic regression had found indexed on his mind, Sir Michael Smith-Ward, the pompous old buffoon who held the key to the whole eco-mess of the population disaster.

Devine's face grew still, his eyes quiet and mono directional. Now he couldn't move from the light, held as if cast in concrete.

A massive wash of dazzling colour spread over the room as a sniper's beam splashed the window. Devine twitched.

"For chrissake, Gore. Get away from that window," Quant hissed.

Gore sank sullenly back into the shadows. The red light strobed on. Devine's twitching subsided. His body relaxed again.

Quant searched the staring face for the perfect moment. He saw it in the bags beneath the fixed eyes, in the subtle lengthening of the jawbone.

"Now Philip. There is peace. Tranquility. Beauty. Stillness. You are close to sleep. A wonderful relaxed sleep. But you will not sleep because it is beautiful to hover where you are, on the edge of dreams.

"The light is pleasant. Easy on the eyes. It is wonderful to be here. You are here because it is beautiful to be here. And you have reasoned that it is the only correct thing to do.

"You are feeling really relaxed now. You are floating above your body. There are no physical sensations now, except the ones of being suspended and of feeling tranquility.

"You can hear only my voice, see only the light, because that is what you want to do."

Quant paused to run his tongue over the dry inside of his mouth.

"Floating. Tranquility. Peace. One pleasant voice, one pleasant light. Floating, tranquility and peace."

He paused again. Time for phase two. Lower the voice a bit.

"It is easy to do exactly as I say. That is what you want to do, Philip. You want to please me, because that brings peace and tranquility. Harmony, Philip. That is what you want. To erase conflict and doubt. Replace it with harmony.

"You are floating. All is beautiful, Philip. Keep the harmony. You can hear it. You can see it. You can feel it."

Quant raised his right arm towards Cline. The nurse silently pressed another button on the lighting console. Patterns danced in the flickering light.

"You are ready, Philip. Do not make any effort, now. Just start to float back. It's easy. Natural. Float. Go back. Back.

"John David is just ahead now. You are John David. Remember. Tell me, John, how was it?"

Devine's lips started to move. Quant could see his hot breath in the flicker of the light. Mucha, Cline and Gore existed but had no substance, excluded by Quant's stony concentration. But the man John David was back from the dead. Here in this room in tower 1472. The seated man spoke in a voice clearly not his own.

"One more bend ... then safe back at 186 Ceti block ... car wobbling ... blasted snipers ... screen won't take much more ... have to fix ..."

Suddenly, Devine's body twisted and lunged up out of the seat, then fell back, writhing involuntarily.

"Light ... colours ... all around ... burning ...aarrhh ... pain ... oh, the pain ... burning ... dying ..."

Quant cut in as he saw the sweat forming on Devine's contorted face.

"Float, John David. Float ... Go back. Back. Back. Tranquility. Stillness. Peace, now. Go back." The figure in the chair settled.

"Go back to Atholl Weiss. Atholl Weiss. You are Atholl Weiss."

"I am ... Atholl Weiss," croaked Devine's voice, changed again now.

Then suddenly he was spluttering broken sentences in German - one of the few languages Philip Devine did not speak. And just as suddenly it was all over and the body in the chair had gone limp again.

One more base to home, thought Quant. But a tricky one. Quant motioned to Cline and Gore. The flashing light became deeper red, the patterns more pronounced. Gore entered Quant's peripheral vision on feet remarkably silent for a man of his stature.

The last of Philip Devine's list of sub personalities before Sir Michael was one of the original paras, a lunatic South American peasant known only as Jose. All Quant had been able to glean about Jose's personality through Devine led him to believe that "visiting" Jose in this way could finally send Devine over the edge. Quant hoped fervently that this would be the last time he would have to invoke this particular personality.

Jose had been brought up by the State after being left at a farm worker's door as a baby. He went completely crazy at the age of 18 and went on the rampage with a blaster, killing or maiming 21 people before the City Police finally caught up with him. Jose was burned to dust in a tower block from which he had been taking pot shots at anything that moved down below.

That was in the days when life seemed to matter, Quant reflected sadly. Now there was so much of humanity that killing had become a national, even international pastime and life as cheap as a shoestring.

Although murder was still officially against the law, there was no hope of enforcement. There were simply too many people. Too many paras.

Quant waved his arm again and Gore moved swiftly up behind Devine's paralysed body.

"Float, Atholl Weiss. Float. Go back now. Back. Back. Tranquility. Stillness. Go back. Back.

"Jose is near now. You see him. You sense him. Your senses are his. You are Jose."

Gore leaped forward as Devine's body lurched heavily. The nurse's huge hands shoved Devine back into his chair with some difficulty, but doggedly pinned him there.

A torrent of Portuguese flooded from the racked little body and Mucha, who understood every archaic obscenity, actually flushed a little for the first time in her life. Cline stepped up the intensity of the light and Gore was able to relax his grip a little.

"That's right, Jose, Tell me ..."

The tremors went on for some minutes and built to a crescendo.

Quant understood contemporary Portuguese well, but had some trouble with the old forms. However, he could read the language of a body in regression like a street map. He knew Jose was about to die again. He could almost hear the clatter of the City Police squad's boots outside the door, see the blaster-burned furniture all around the room, feel the bolt of scorching, searing light as it hit the taut young body ...

"Float, Jose. You are at peace now. Float. Go back. Back."

Devine's body sank calmly back into a comfortable heap on the chair and was still.

"Tranquility. Stillness. Go back."

Gore flitted noiselessly away to his corner. Now for Sir Michael. And the big test.

All experiments so far had indicated that what they were about to do could work, but it was still no more than laboratory hypothesis. And so much depended on the mental state of Devine, a man on the brink of joining the legions of the paras, and of course the unpredictable mind of the very late Sir Michael Smith-Ward, an influential idiot and a drunk Quant new so very little about.

* * *

The bright sun over Geneva greeted Sir Michael Smith-Ward as he flung the window wide, inhaled deeply, then underwent a momentary coughing fit. He went back to the bedside cabinet and poured himself a stiff drink from an anonymous bottle, then downed it in one gulp. Fortified, he made his way to the shower and ran the water until it was pleasantly warm. The dressing gown fell from his ample figure to the floor and he stepped under the gentle rain.

The big day. Today he was going to see that ass Grundel, so-called bloody First Minister. Now what was it that was so important? Oh yes, that damned Bill of his. Outlawing all forms of contraception, for heaven's sake. More people to populate the newly-conquered territories in space. What piffle! Even that idiot Grundel ought to know by now, people wouldn't leave old Mother Earth for good just like that.

Massive incentives to people to have huge families, eh? Sheer stupidity! Couldn't that stiff-neck see that hardly anybody was going to agree to go out there, leaving families and friends forever, never to see Earth again? All that would happen would be a massive overpopulation of Earth and a financial burden on the State that would cripple the economy and rule out these damnable odysseys to a new dawn, purely from a cash standpoint.

The trouble was, so many people were taken in by that silver-tongued fool's Golden Age ranting. But he would still have only the slenderest of majorities in the House, even if his nonsense got through at all.

Sir Michael was working himself up nicely into his most blimpish, obstinate frame of mind. As the shower water died in the throat of the hidden pipes in the wall, he grabbed a towel and wandered off in search of another fortifier.

"Any fool knows," he murmured to himself, "when you put more and more rats in a small cage, eventually they start killing each other.

"Damned golden dawner. First Minister, eh?"

* * *

The corridors of power were clean and clinical. They were also crawling with Members of the Federated Parliament for today's opening session. Sir Michael carried his too-ample weight on steady, thin legs towards the door at the end of the corridor. He was lucky to get this appointment, the silly little secretary had told him. What was she anyway? A bloody human answering service.

No, Grundel would see him on this or any other day because Sir Michael Smith-Ward was an extremely important member of the delegation from what was still one of the world's great powers. And Grundel obviously at least had the wit to perceive this simple truth.

The door was there, before his face. Clinical and cold white like the rest of this inhuman antiseptic place, with the name C.R. Grundel, First Minister, picked out in flowery gold lettering.

The place reminded him of a psychiatric unit he had once visited to see a deranged but rather well-heeled constituent. The name-plate looked like the one on the consultant's door.

"First Minister, my eye!" thought Sir Michael. Grundel was nothing more than a keeper in a select asylum. And he was as nuts as the rest of them.

The door opened easily on a huge room with one desk in the centre, back to the window. Behind the white plastic desk sat the secretary, a birdlike creature with rapid movements, a plain face and unattractive figure.

"Just as I imagined," Sir Michael thought. "Just a bloody answering machine. Not even any good in bed, I'd wager."

"Ah, Sir Michael," the creature chirped in a reasonable imitation of English. "There you are. Come in. I'll just see if the First Minister is ready for you now."

He complied sullenly as she pressed a hidden button on the desk.

"The First Minister will see you," she beamed sickeningly.

Sir Michael walked to the big door to her right, which slid open as he approached to reveal the lush and heavily-polished interior of the First Minister's office.

And there was C.R. Grundel, a wrinkled old fool, squatting amid the opulence like a mongrel at a dog show and grinning out a plastic, empty welcome.

The device was very small and had been easy to smuggle in. Sir Michael couldn't quite remember where he got it or why, or even what it was, come to that. But that didn't seem important now. There was a job to be done, and somehow he knew it involved the little device in his trouser pocket.

He fingered the thin trigger-like mechanism on top of the three-inch cylinder (why did he think of it as a trigger?), then as he beheld the smug smile of the officious-looking little Swiss at the desk, his finger tensed with a sudden flicker of anger that might have been his own, but equally might have come from somewhere else.

Then Sir Michael Smith-Ward had the greatest moment of satisfaction of his life as he watched ghastly realisation spread across the idiotic features of the First Minister, as the rip tide of a massive explosion grew within a micro-second on is right hip.

And he fancied he could see that birdlike woman in the outer office being blown atom from atom into a tiny pocket of dust to be distributed across sunny Geneva by the prevailing breeze.

Then there was nothing.

* * *

Quant sat behind the large moulded plastic desk writing. He had given Devine a sedative and the man was sleeping now on the couch against the wall farthest from the open window.

It was obvious the little farmer was no longer in his right mind. He had spent too long alone on that massive spread of his and the loneliness had affected the way he reacted to people. Quant had seen a great deal of this - unsurprisingly, as it was his specialist subject. That was why Devine had been delivered to him by the City Police after being found with a laser rifle on the roof opposite the apartments of Senator Mucha. What had Quant beat was Devine's reasoning in blaming the current underpopulation crisis on Senator Mucha. She had had hardly anything to do with policy matters surrounding the new colonies, being a fanatical Mother Earther.

He broke from writing on the amber slip to glance at the now quiet man's lined face. There was pain there, mental torture such as Quant had never before seen, even in the many similar cases he had come across in his years of practice.

And it was self inflicted. Devine had chosen the solitude of the farm, with only a few automatons for company, over the comparative companionship of the city. You could meet people in the city, if you looked for them hard enough. It was possible sometimes to find friends with whom to share still, empty hours. True you had to search pretty hard in the mainly-deserted warrens of the streets now to find anyone. But there were people out there beyond the window. It was only a question of looking.

As if to underline the loneliness and give the lie to Quant's hopeful reflections, the hiss of another silver shuttle craft's escape motors drifted in through the window. Another cargo of rarer and rarer humanity being shipped off to seek its place among the stars. Quant sighed and as the shuttle dwindled to a speck in the blue sky, he turned back to the amber card.

"Pronounced symptoms of acute paranoid delusions incurred by protracted loneliness. Illness has progressed to state where subject can no longer be held to be in control of his own actions.

"Recommend partial mind wipe and remedial detention in closely populated wards ..."

It will have to be Tower Forty, thought Quant. There were at least five people there, including the director, and Devine would get some sort of companionship. In most of the other places across this continent, there were only one or two to a whole institution.

And what Devine needed was company.

"Period indefinite," he finished. Then he added his signature with a flourish and dropped the amber slip into a slot on the desk. There was a soft whirr as the card travelled off to be duplicated: one copy for the court, one for Tower Forty and one for Quant's own files.

He turned heavily around and stood up. He wandered to the window and looked out. Litter was blowing around the empty and forgotten streets. The watery afternoon sun peeped down on an Earth largely deserted by her sons and daughters. Deserted for the new colonies in space. Vast, empty, lonely space. How much better it was to be one of the Earth huggers, one of the remnants.

The meek had, after all, inherited the Earth.

Quant was too much of a home bird to go soaring off across the vast seas of emptiness to some lonely third-rate, second-hand planet where the gravity was different, the air was different, the plants were different and the climate had none of the sweet inevitability of his ancestral home zone on old Mother Earth. The new colonisers, the pioneers, the frontiersmen would have to manage without him.

Suddenly a flicker of movement caught his eye across the way, in a tall building opposite. Then another. He hadn't imagined it. There was definitely someone there.

Quant craned forward out of the open window to get a better view of the building where he had noticed the movement. The old skyscraper had been empty for some time now and its flexiglas windows had mostly fallen through to sockets that no longer reflected the golden harvest of the sunset.

Quant was on tiptoe now. He had found a delicate balance, but still could not properly make out the figure at the window opposite.

It looked like a girl. A big bronzed girl with severely-cut dark hair. He had an impression of athleticism, statuesque beauty. An odd feeling of familiarity. But he couldn't be sure.

He was about to call out when he heard the shuffling noise behind him and turned his head just enough to catch a glimpse of the staring paranoid eyes, the outstretched arms, hands palms outward, approaching, nearly touching him.

And suddenly he was falling through empty air.

Floating ... floating ...

Copyright © Maurice Paul Bower, 2001. All rights reserved.
E-mail: bower@agored.demon.co.uk