mesner looked down on the shanty town from a high bluff above the river. the river rats' shanties were built half in, half out of the water, some of them on stilts, some of them actually consisting of dilapidated houseboats.

mesner said river rats were worse rebs even than hillbillies. they drifted up and down the rivers. you staged a raid and they dissolved away into the river like rodents. many of them skipped quarterly brain-checks, but no one knew how many. birth and death records weren't kept by river rats.

i walked ahead of mesner down a winding gravel path into rotting reeds by the river, then we followed another muddy path toward the shanties. frogs and insects hummed. a path of moonlight moved across the water. a ribby hound dog slunk away from me. a ragged kid looking wilder than the hound, ran across the path and slipped soundlessly into the muddy water.

mesner pointed out the blind man's shack. then he looked at me and smiled with that absurd little cupid bow mouth. "this isn't the time either, fred. if you think we're not covered, you're wrong. you couldn't run fifty feet before they burned you down."

we walked nearer the loosely boarded and sagging shack.

"you take the back, fred. just remember, better later than now. and be careful. when these river rats get stirred up, they can cause a hell of a row. the entire goon squad would have to move in and there would be a mass bipping spree."

mesner crept nearer, then whispered. "no light. you can't even tell if one of them's at home after dark. why do they need a light? go on, watch the back door, fred. and don't let this one slip by."

i heard the front door crash inward. a man wearing only tattered pants ran out. he was thin and ribby like the dog, and i could see the moonlight shining on the opaque whiteness of his eyes.

he ran directly at me. and i knew i wasn't going to try to stop him. but i didn't know why. then mesner came out and fired a small gun, smaller than the one under his coat. it wasn't the same. this was a nerve-gun and it curled the synaptic connections between neurons.

the blind man collapsed and lay like a corpse at my feet. i knelt down and felt of him. mesner whispered for me to drag the old man inside. i hooked my hands under his shoulders and pulled him into the shack. it didn't matter to me now, nor to the blind man, i thought.

he hardly weighed anything. his eyes were fixed in a white silence as mesner shone a small flashlight into them. then mesner shut both doors and pulled a ragged cloth across the single window.

he opened his case. he put the stroboscope on the blind man's head. the bluish light began to flicker over the staring opaque eyes. i saw the nerve-gun lying on the floor beside mesner's hand.

"you're too late," i said. "he's dead. i wouldn't have dragged him in here if i hadn't known he was dead."

mesner was breathing thickly. his fat round face was pale and shiny with sweat. "i know he's dead. he must have gulped a fast-action poison soon as i came in the door. maybe even the blind boys are deciding things are getting too hot."

mesner worked the stroboscope.

"but he's dead," i said.

"brain cells are the last to die," mesner said. "maybe i can pick up a little info yet."

it burst out of me then as from an abscess. the bottle cracked into a thousand fragments. i lunged at mesner. he seemed to roll away from me, and then he squatted there in the flickering light. he leveled the gun at me.

"so you're beginning to wake up, fred!"

probing a dead man. questioning the dead. even a corpse was sacred no longer. the vile and horrible bastards, all of them.

"i don't care what happens to me," i said.

"that's noble of you."

"i'm going to kill you."

"why?"

"you wouldn't understand."

"maybe i wouldn't agree, but i'll understand, fred. i know what you're thinking. what i'm doing now is just too much. right? the final indignity one human being could inflict on another, right? a human mind should be sacred, even if it's dumb. even if it's dead. especially if it's dead. right, fred?"

i started around the rickety table toward him.

"now it's set off, fred. you're fired up now. that's what i've been waiting for. you were planted to sabotage security itself, fred, and i always knew that. now we're going to find out all the rest of it. now it's squeezing out of your unconscious, and we can drain it, empty it all out. they put a lid on your mind, fred, and i've taken it off. put on the ethical pressure, put it heavy on your idealistic egghead morality, steam it up hot, blow the lid off. it's working, fred."

"is it?" i said. "i don't remember anything that would do you any good. i just know that it's wrong, the final horrible fraud. it isn't intelligence you guys want to wipe out, mesner. not your own, not the big wheels in power. it's only certain kinds of thinking, undesirable thoughts, attitudes you don't like. those are what you have to purge."

"right, fred. only the wrong kind of eggheads. me, hell i'm an egghead too. remember the prize pupil in your psych class at drake university, fred?" mesner laughed. "that was me."

"you can kill people," i said. "you can't burn a sense of what's right or wrong out of people. that old dead blind man there has preserved something you can't touch."

"too bad you won't be around to see how wrong you are, fred. we can make people whatever we damn well want them to be. your old ethical pals worked out the methods. we're using it for a different end."

the front door squeaked. i felt a moist draft on my face, and a whisper in my brain. a few words. i don't remember what they were. but they were a key that opened floodgates of self-understanding and awareness. i remembered a lot then, a lot of things and feelings that warmed me. i had a wonderful sense of wholeness and i was no longer afraid of being bipped, or afraid to die.

there was an expression of complete triumph on mesner's face, and he knew what had happened to me and he wanted it, all of it, sucked away into his briefcase. just the same, the whisper from the doorway distracted his attention and i went for him.

in that second of time, i saw the little blind girl who had whispered that triggering phrase for my release, and behind her, the seeing-eye dog. she was utterly unafraid and smiling at me. courage she was saying. and i could share it with her.

she had sealed her own death in order to make me whole again.

i smashed the flashlight off the table into the wall and my weight drove mesner onto the floor. i managed to grab his arm and we lay there in the dark straining for the nerve-gun. i began to hear the whir of heliocars. i twisted mesner's arm up and around and released the nerve-gun's full charge directly into his face. a stammering scream came out of him. it was the scream of something not human. a full charge of that into the brain, it must have curled up the intricate connections and short circuited his brain into an irreparable hash.

i took the blind girl's hand and we ran toward the river. the sky was crossed with search beams. and in the deep darkness by the river i was suddenly as blind as the girl who held my hand. we kept running and stumbling through the reeds. i felt her hand slip from mine. then something hit me.

it wasn't a localized impact, but something seemed to have hit me all over and moved through me as though my blood suddenly turned to lead.

i tried to find the girl. i tried to crawl to the river, into the river. and near me i heard the girl say softly, "goodbye now, mr. fredricks. don't worry, because you'll be brave."

"thanks," i said. "little girl, what's your name?"

she didn't answer. i tried to call out to her again in the darkness, but i couldn't move my lips. paralysis gripped me, and after that blackness, with the lights sometime later beginning to flicker against my tearing eyes, and then the horror.