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immobilized, borne
down, still shadows among the half-guessed shadow walls. Were we there?
    The lantern-creatures showed no
awareness of us. They passed before us, among us, perhaps even through us
— it was impossible to be sure. They were not
afraid, or curious.
    Once something a little larger than a hand came crawling
near, and for a moment we saw quite distinctly the clean angle where the foot
of a wall rose from the pavement, in the glow cast by the crawling creature,
which was covered with a foliage of plumes, each plume dotted with many tiny,
bluish points of light. We saw the pavement beneath the creature and the wall
beside it, heartbreaking in its exact, clear linearity, its opposition to all
that was fluid, random, vast, and void. We saw the creature’s claws, slowly
reaching out and retracting like small stiff fingers, touch the wall. Its
plumage of light quivering, it dragged itself along and vanished behind the
corner of the wall.
    So we knew that the wall was there; and that it was an
outer wall, a housefront, perhaps, or the side of one of the towers of the
city.
    We remembered the towers. We remembered the city. We had
forgotten it. We had forgotten who we were; but we remembered the city, now.
    ~
    When I got home, the FBI had already been there. The computer
at the police precinct where I registered Simon’s address must have flashed it
right over to the computer at the FBI building. They had questioned Simon for
about an hour, mostly about what he had been doing during the twelve days it
took him to get from the Camp to Portland. I suppose they thought he had flown
to Peking or something. Having a police record in Walla Walla for hitchhiking
helped him establish his story. He told me that one of them had gone to the
bathroom. Sure enough I found a bug stuck on the top of the bathroom door
frame. I left it, as we figured it’s really better to leave it when you know
you have one, than to take it off and then never be sure they haven’t planted
another one you don’t know about. As Simon said, if we felt we had to say
something unpatriotic we could always flush the toilet at the same time.
    I have a battery radio — there are so many work stoppages
because of power failures, and days the water has to be boiled, and so on, that
you really have to have a radio to save wasting time and dying of typhoid — and
he turned it on while I was making supper on the Primus. The six o’clock
All-American Broadcasting Company news announcer announced that peace was at
hand in Uruguay, the president’s confidential aide having been seen to smile at
a passing blonde as he left the 613th day of the secret negotiations in a villa
outside Katmandu. The war in Liberia was going well; the enemy said they had
shot down seventeen American planes but the Pentagon said we had shot down
twenty-two enemy planes, and the capital city — I forget its name, but it hasn’t
been habitable for seven years anyway — was on the verge of being recaptured
by the forces of freedom. The police action in Arizona was also successful. The
Neo-Birch insurgents in Phoenix could not hold out much longer against the
massed might of the American army and air force, since their underground supply
of small tactical nukes from the Weathermen in Los Angeles had been cut off.
Then there was an advertisement for Ped-Cred cards, and a commercial for the
Supreme Court: “Take your legal troubles to the Nine Wise Men!” Then there was
something about why tariffs had gone up, and a report from the stock market,
which had just closed at over two thousand, and a commercial for U.S. Government
canned water, with a catchy little tune: “Don’t be sorry when you drink/It’s
not as healthy as you think/Don’t you think you really ought to/Drink coo-ool,
puu-uure U.S.G. water?” — with
three sopranos in close harmony on the last line. Then, just as the battery
began to give out and his voice was dying away into a faraway tiny whisper, the
announcer