CHAPTER 1

IT WAS SHORT, BUT IT WASN'T SWEET. I WOKE UP FEELING like I still needed the night's sleep I'd missed when Kornfeld took me in. They had me in a set of ugly pajamas in a room that was blank and square and white, a room a whole lot like the one I'd been in what felt only minutes ago, with the doctors who'd readied me for the freeze.

An orderly sat in a chair in the corner, looking at a magazine. I got off the table, peeved, about to squawk about the thing not even working. Then the guy noticed that I'd come around and handed me my street clothes, all clean and folded, and I realized with a jolt that I'd done my time. The funny taste in my mouth was six years old.

I got dressed, slowly. The orderly didn't rush me. After a while he asked me if I was ready, and I said yes, and we went out into the corridor and took the elevator up to ground level. Inside the elevator the orderly looked me over and smiled. I tried to smile back, but I was pretty confused. I wanted to feel intuitively that six years had passed, but the feeling wasn't there.

He led me to an office where an inquisitor sat tapping something idly into a desktop console. He kept going for a minute after we came in, then he stopped and folded the screen back into the desk and smiled. I sat in a chair and waited, and while the orderly and the inquisitor initialed some paperwork and mumbled something to each other, I looked out the window at the sun glinting off the glass of the building across the street.

It was probably just a function of my newly defrosted eyes, but I swear it looked all wrong to me, the colors too bright, the outlines blurred. Like a badly retouched photo. It occurred to me that I was about to walk out the doors of the Office into that badly retouched photo forever. This was my world now, and the rest was gone. I realized that I was still all wound up inside about the case, and I had to laugh. It was pretty goddamned funny. As if there was still something to call a case.

The orderly left, and the inquisitor opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a little metal locker about the size of a shoe box, and put it on the desk in front of me. Inside was the stuff they'd taken out of my pockets six years ago, all carefully tagged and wrapped in plastic. It wasn't much. The keys to my car and apartment, each of which had disappeared about five years and eleven months ago, when I stopped making the payments. The keys made a reassuring lump in my back pocket—I could use them to clean under my fingernails.

The rest was the ripped halves of six different hundred-dollar bills, and the anti-grav pen. I played with the money for a minute, trying to assemble something that looked like I could pass it through a bank teller's window, or at least across a counter in a darkened bar, but apparently I'd been in the habit of pocketing the same half of each bill. Until I ran into some other guy with the opposite habit, the paper was useless. I folded it and put it into my pocket anyway.

I was pulling the tags off the keys and the pen when I noticed the inquisitor leaning across the desk and staring at me, not a little intently. I looked at him, and he grinned. He was probably in his twenties, but I got the feeling he'd already seen a lot of karmic flotsam like myself coming and going out of the freeze, and that it made him feel smug to watch me struggling with my pathetic little array of possessions.

He got up suddenly and closed the door to the hallway. "I've been waiting for you."

"Oh, good," I said, bewildered.

"I'll give you fifty dollars for that pen," he said, moving around again to behind the desk. "That's the first of its kind." He spoke the way you spoke to children, back when there had been children. "It's a collector's item," he explained.

I had to smile. "That pen saved my life," I said.

He took it for a bargaining position. "Okay," he said. "A hundred."

"It's not for sale."

He looked at me funny. "I'm trying to do you a favor, old-timer. Your money doesn't look so good."

He had a point. "Hundred fifty," I said.

He leaned back in his chair and smiled without opening his mouth, then chuckled and took out his wallet. "I could have just taken it, you know."

"No, you couldn't," I said, a little miffed. "If you could have, you would have."

He opened his wallet, and there was music in the air, a little fanfare of horns that lasted until he gave me the money and put the wallet back in his pocket. It made my skin crawl. I hoped the music was in the wallet, not in the money.

He opened up another drawer in his desk and took out a little envelope, sealed with a plastic ripcord, and a fresh card with my name on it.

"Seventy-five points," he said. "Best of luck." He flashed me his idiot grin. My exit interview was over, apparently. When I pulled the little cord, the envelope turned out to be full of generic make. A touching gesture.

I put the stuff in my pockets. I had an urge to wipe that smile-colored stain off the lower part of his face, but I held it back. I flipped him his pen, and he made the adjustment in his calculation of its trajectory and grabbed it before it soared over his head. But only just. "So long," I said, and got up and went out.

I passed through the empty lobby and into the sun. I didn't have my next move figured out, but my feet knew enough to create some distance between myself and the Office, and they got right to it.

When I got to the corner, I felt someone come up behind me and tug on my arm. It was Surface. The ape looked small and hobbled over, but then six years had passed, and anyway I'd never seen him out of his bed before. He was wearing a dirty gray suit and a red tie with little embroidered polo ponies on it. He had a pretty nice pair of shoes, but they were buried under a couple of centuries' worth of scuff marks.

He looked up at me. The leather of his face was wrinkled like foil. His expression was surprisingly gentle. "I saw in the paper you were listed as coming out," he said. "I thought you might need somebody to buy you a drink."

I was touched. I wasn't sure I liked having someone who looked as bad as Surface feeling sorry for me, but I was still touched.

"Sure," I said. "Lead the way."

The old ape turned his rounded shoulders and walked up the block. I went after him. I didn't know what time it was, but the sun was high, and it occurred to me that Surface must have gotten out of bed early to catch me. It made me feel like a stray picked up at the pound, and it made me wonder if he thought maybe I needed more than just a drink to get me on my feet.

We went around the back of the building into the big parking lot. There were just a couple of people on the pavement, apart from the inquisitors coming in and going out to their black cars. When I tried to meet their eyes, the people turned to look at their watches, or the sky, or the gutter. My paranoia was functioning as usual; at the drop of a hat, it told me that my time in the freeze had left some mark, some indefinable tattoo on my aura, which would trigger recognition until I found a way to conceal it. Then I laughed at myself. What I needed was a drink, and a line of make.

I tapped Surface on the shoulder. "Where do I go to get my license?"

He looked at me and winced. I didn't think a face could get any more wrinkled than his already was, but it did. The wrinkles doubled in on themselves. His face practically collapsed.

"Hold off on the questions," he said through his teeth.