Deckard reached over and grabbed the quivering man’s thin wrist, pulling him closer. “How long have I been here?”
“Huh?” The yellow eyes stared at him. Stringy muscles jumped beneath the man’s hollow cheeks. “What’re you talkin’ about?”
His temper flared higher as he yanked the man right into his own face. “How long have I been lying here in this alley?”
“Huh-how should I know? C’mon, fella-uh!” The pawlike hands shoved futilely at Deckard’s chest. “I don’t—”
“When did you first see me here? How long ago?”
“Maybe . . . maybe yesterday. Yeah—” The man gave a nod vigorous enough to rattle his whole body. “Yeah, there was a pile of stuff here when I went by, and that was yesterday, and then I came back to check it out . . . and it was you. Okay? So that’s how long you been here. Since yesterday. Let go of me, willya?”
Deckard released him with a hard thrust of his arm. “Take a hike.” The man scurried out toward the street, twitching slightly less from the input to his nervous system.
A day at least, lying in this alley—Deckard shook his head, trying to clear out the last of the fog. Even without having been unconscious, his time sense was screwed up, an aftereffect of being in Sebastian’s private universe. That was one of the well-known problems with getting involved with any of that dehydrated deity stuff: a true Rip van Winkle syndrome, only in reverse. He had probably spent less than an hour of perceived time in there, and years could’ve gone by out here in the real world; no way of telling how much time had elapsed before he’d fallen into the alley’s muck and trash.
The rest of his memories coalesced, sharper than the indistinct images and forms left by dreams. He could recall everything that had happened, from the moment he’d found himself walking along Sebastian’s re-created L.A. street, with the Million Dollar Theater’s neon glimmering off the rain-soaked pavement, all through the seismic fragility of the toy-stocked hideaway at the top of the Bradbury Building. I lied to the poor bastard, thought Deckard. He was in no condition to start feeling guilty about it. All he’d been trying to do was buy a little more of that false world’s time, enough for Sebastian to tell him the big secrets. So he’d conned the genetic engineer turned small-scale god, handed him that line about Pris’s being somewhere else at the fringes of that patched-together L.A., waiting for Sebastian to come find her.
What a shuck-maybe it was just as well that he’d dropped out of the pocket universe and back into this larger one before Sebastian had found out he’d been given the shaft again. The guy might have really gone to pieces, worse than just the building shaking into plaster atoms.
Something else had been there, that Deckard remembered: the little box, battered white metal with a red cross on the lid. Sebastian had forced it into Deckard’s hands, pressing it on him, excitedly going on about how important it was .
Deckard looked down at the object in his hands, the exact same one as he’d seen and held in the dehydrated deity’s pocket universe. Makes no sense, he thought. The box looked like the container for some sort of regulation first aid kit; it even had clips on the back for mounting on a wall or in a cabinet-ordinary enough, but it didn’t belong here. It’d been part of that other, smaller universe, the one that the transmogrified Sebastian had pulled together from the contents of his head. Everything Deckard had perceived there, from the snakelike glow of the theater marquee’s neon shimmering on the empty wet sidewalk to the maniacal laughter of the clown mannequin, had its existence in that world, not this one. Even the feel of the box’s lid, both enamel smooth and rougher where the rusted metal was exposed; by rights, it should have stayed back there in Sebastian’s illusory hideout. Deckard knew he should have woken up with hands empty, no matter what some tiny withered god had tried to put in them.
The temptation to throw the metal box away—just another encumbrance, when Deckard had enough on his mind already-rose in him. He could just pitch it onto the rest of the trash and junk that formed the alley’s bottom strata, and not miss it. The box, first aid kit or whatever it was, or had been, felt virtually weightless—he gave it an experimental shake and heard some even smaller objects rattling around inside. Prying the lid open, Deckard found a couple of small brown vials, antiseptic liquids that had dried up despite their seals; a plastic bottle of aspirin with nothing but white dust inside; a few once-sterile bandages, now suspiciously stained with age. A paper label had been inexpertly glued to the inside of the lid; if it had had instructions or words of medical advice, they had long since faded away.
I should’ve let the guy have it, thought Deckard. Instead of getting into a hassle with the twitchy stim-deprived case who’d been trying to lift the little metal box from him. Then it would have been his problem, about what to do with it.
Deckard cocked his wrist, preparing to flip the ancient first aid kit into the farther reaches of the alley, then hesitated. For some reason, Sebastian had wanted him to have it, had hurried to shove it into his hands when the pocket universe had started to fade away. And the box had come with him when Deckard had fallen back into this world. If nothing else, it made for a strange, sad remembrance of the age-wrinkled figure and his retinue of somber toys.
He tucked the box into his jacket pocket and stood up. The empty vials rattled against the metal, an erratic, hollow rhythm as Deckard headed for the colony’s streets that had people in them. Cop instincts shifting to criminaclass="underline" if anybody was looking for him, it would be easier to hide in a crowd than out in the open.
The door of the hovel was unlocked; the knob turned in his hand without resistance. It had taken him another half hour, pushing and shoving his way, head down, through the thickest part of the milling pack, to get to the Niemand residence; the last dozen or so yards, where there had been no one about except for a few total burnouts rooting blindly through the accumulated debris, had been the most nervous-making for him. He knew that if any kind of trap had been laid, it would be right here on his own front step. The old instincts, hard to root out as the sinews along his bones, had again moved his fingers under his jacket, searching for the gun he’d carried in his other life; his hand came out as empty as it had on the neon-lit street of Sebastian’s private universe.
Darkness inside; he pushed the door open, enough to reach in and flip the switch on the wall. In the hovel’s cramped spaces, everything looked as it had before he’d left, minus himself sitting at the table, slumped unconscious. The briefcase was still there, handle turned toward the door; he could see his initials on the small metal plate beneath. And the various paraphernalia, the graduated beaker and glass rod, the packet torn open with a few granules of the white powder spilled out, the spoon from the kitchen area . . . a tableau that might have been of more interest to a drug enforcement agency, if any had stuck their heads inside the hovel.
He shut the door behind himself. As soon as he had, he knew there was someone else there with him; he could sense the minute disturbance in the trapped air, different from the leakage through the ceilings’ and walls’ multiple patches and caulking. Deckard halted, listening, hearing nothing; then stepped quickly around the table, taking the couple of paces to the bedroom door and shoving it open.