I kissed her on the forehead. “Shall I look?”
“Would you, please?”
I got out her handbag and looked inside; there were not the usual two passports, US Government in Exile plus Kingdom of New Zealand. There were four. I pulled them all out. The two expected ones were there, as was one from the Free Republic. “One from Diego,” I said, and handed it to her.
“When I was growing up we called it Free Deejy,” she said, absently, sitting up in bed to look through it. “But the flag was different from this, and the capital was on board a beached aircraft carrier, not in some place called New Washington.”
“Could they have built it since you left?”
“I don’t know where. It’s a pretty small place.” She flipped to the back, where the visa stamps go. “Oh, look. I’ve been to the Free Republic of Hawaii, Korea—which doesn’t seem as if it is part of Japan—and a dozen or so times to the Indonesian Soviet Socialist Commonwealth, wherever that might be. What’s the fourth passport?”
I looked down at it and sighed. “It’s the only one that isn’t for Helen Perdita, and it’s a spare Enzy one. With an 015 code.”
“What’s an 015?”
“I guess you really were just a clerk in the Navy, love.” I sighed and sat down on the floor. “I was an officer and had to learn that anyone with an 015 gets absolutely everything he or she asks for, right now. It’s a code stamped in the upper right corner that indicates that you’re a high-level secret agent, a spy or maybe an assassin. At least now we know where you got the gun training.”
“What does it all mean?” she asked.
“It means we’re right out of any possibility of figuring it out tonight,” I said, “and it means I believe, absolutely, everything you’ve told me. Every damned word, my love. Now let’s get under the covers, turn out the light, hold each other, and see what we can learn in the morning. I love you very much, and I am so sorry that you were separated from your mother so suddenly.”
I’m not sure if that was a right or wrong thing to say; she burst into tears and cried for a good half hour before she could finally get to sleep. When I was sure she was sound asleep, I slipped out of bed, sat down on the floor, and had a good cry, myself.
The next morning we had just gotten up and had room service breakfast in. We had ordered a pot of coffee and a cup for McMoore’s man outside the door, which I figured was a wise investment, and I noted with some amusement that no one from the hotel found it even slightly unusual; the Royal Saigon probably dealt with bodyguards all the time. We were dressed and wondering what to do; not having been guarded before, we weren’t sure what it was ethical to ask people to do in the way of guarding us out on the street; could we just go out like any tourists, did we need to consult? This was outside both our usual experiences.
We had settled on the plan of having the man at the door call his supervisor in for a conference, when the phone rang. I picked it up. “Mr. Lyle Peripart, I’m afraid I have very bad news concerning your house.” It was the voice of my house-sitting company, which monitors the house’s brain, and that was already bad news—because they only call you if the brain can’t. At the least it means a couple of months’ pay to replace a damaged brain. And usually if the brain is damaged, the house is too.
“How bad is it?”
The robot’s voice was implacable; it’s not supposed to get emotionally involved. “Mr. Peripart, the house was a complete loss, sir. I have recordings up to three minutes before the alarm was turned in to the police. That usually indicates a brain that was killed instantly. The building itself was destroyed, sir.”
I sighed. Well, this is what one keeps insurance current for; it was going to be a nuisance, and I would probably come out of it poorer than I went into it, but there wasn’t much else to do. I had never been one, really, to get attached to things, and the house had always seemed to be simply my personal machine for living. Now I would need a new machine.
“Is there anything else you need to know at this time, sir?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Have a more pleasant day, then, sir.”
I hung up and sat down heavily on the bed. “My house is dead. Brain killed and the building totaled,” I explained to Helen. “I suppose we can call and get the police report on our way home. We’ll have to cut this trip short.”
“Did they say whether anyone had broken in or it might have been teenagers joyriding your house?”
That was a common problem. There were groups of kids who were very adroit at killing the brain, holding a party, and then setting a fire before they left, just before the cops got there.
“No, they didn’t. I suppose I could have asked for the suspected cause. Couldn’t be joyriders, though, not with a recording going up to the last three minutes—the whole point of what they do is to stretch out the time between killing the brain and abandoning the house. I guess I could call them back and ask them now. The most likely thing, unfortunately, is that it will turn out to be something that makes no sense—based on what’s been happening in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Well, it sounds like we really do have to get back there. Was there much of sentimental value?”
“Some pictures of me when I was a boy. The family heirlooms, the photos of my ancestors and that stuff, everything of any sentimental value, was all in the safety deposit box at my bank. All my work materials were in the office at school. The house mostly just was a place to sleep and eat. And it was all insured, anyway. It’s not that big a deal, it’s just that I’m not looking forward to the volume of paperwork I know I’ll have to cope with, and I’m really not looking forward to dealing with that while I’m also coping with a new job where I commute out every week. And of course I’m kind of worried about what connection this might have with everything else that’s been happening. There are all sorts of things to worry about, of course, and I am worried about dealing with all of it, but I’m not really that upset. It’s not like I lost that Studebaker Skyjump—that, I would miss.”
McMoore himself was on the job—I don’t know if he didn’t sleep or had just taken over another shift—and as soon as we explained what the problem was, he was on top of it. He packed us up, put us in a limousine that seemed to have unusually thick oddly colored windows and reassuringly thick metal plates discreetly placed around the inside, drove us to the boat shed over in Cholon, and escorted us to the jump boat, not neglecting to search it thoroughly for people and devices and to hang around while I did readouts and made sure it had been on no further joyrides. Everything seemed to be on the up-and-up, so we shook hands with McMoore, cast off, pulled out of the boat shed, and told the Skyjump to take us home. I didn’t feel fit to fly.
What followed was something like a two-hour dream, as we called from the high part of the trajectory for the police report and were told that there was no official cause yet, came down outside Auckland harbor, got the cab, and eventually found ourselves standing and staring at the place where my driveway ended in a crater.
It was about eight or nine feet deep at the deepest point, perfectly circular, and my house would not have fitted within it; the four corners of the foundation looked at each other across that gulf. The sandy soil seemed to have fused in places, as if by tremendous heat, and all the facing neighbors’ windows were boarded up; there were char marks on their roofs where sparks or the flash had ignited shingles, and the aluminum siding on the two nearest neighbors’ houses had warped, the white paint turning brown in spots.