by Harlan Ellison

That’s a federal offense you’re suggesting, Mr. Auld. It’s not just my job, it’s the whole franchise. The auditors come in, they fall over it-because I don’t know how to cover it- and the people who own this Bank lose everything they sank into it.” The young woman stared at Jerry Auld till he looked away. She wasn’t trying to be kind, despite the look of desperation on his face. She was telling him in as flat and forthright a manner as she could summon-just in case he was a field investigator for the regulatory agency looking for bootleg Banks-possibly wired for gathering evidence- so he would understand that this Memory Bank was run strictly along the lines of the federal directives.

“Is that what you want, Mr. Auld? To get us in the most serious kind of trouble?”

He was pale and thin, holding his clasped hands in his lap, rubbing one thumb over the other till the skin was raw. His eyes had desperation brimming in them. “No… no, of course not. I just thought…”

She waited.

“I just thought there might be some way you could make an exception in this case. I really… have to get rid of this one last, pretty awful memory. I know you’ve gone as far as you can by the usual standards; but I felt if you just looked in the regulations, maybe you’d find some legitimate way to…

“Let me stop you,” she said. “I’ve monitored your myelin sheathing, and the depletion level is absolutely at maximum. There is no way on earth, short of a federal guideline being relaxed, that we can leach one more memory out of your brain.” She let a mildly officious-some might say nasty-smile cross her lips. “Simply put, Mr. Auld, you are overdrawn at the Memory Bank.”

He straightened in the formfit and his voice went cold. “Lady, I’m about as miserable as a human being can be. I’ve got a head full of stuff that makes sex with spiders and other small, furry things seem like a happy alternative, and I don’t need you to make me feel like a fool.”

He stood up. “I’m sorry I asked you to do something you can’t do. I just hope you don’t come to where I am some day and need someone to help.”

She started to reply, but he was already walking toward the iris. As it dilated, he turned to look at her once more. ‘“You don’t look anything like her. I was wrong.”

Then he was gone.

It took her some time to unravel the meaning of his last words, but she decided she had not time to feel sorry for him. She wondered who “her” was; then she forgot it.

The little man with the long nose and the cerise caftan spotted Auld as he left the Memory Bank. He had been sitting on a bench in the mall, sipping at a bulb of Flashpoint Soda, watching the Bank. He recognized Auld’s distressed look at once, and he punctiliously deposited the bulb in a nearby incinerator box and followed him.

When Jerry Auld wandered into a showroom displaying this year’s models of the Ford hoverpak, the little man sauntered around the block once, strolled into the showroom, and sidled up to him. They stood side by side, looking at the pak.

“They say it’s the same design the aircops use, just less juice.” the little man said, not looking at Auld.

Jerry looked down at him, aware of him for the first time. “That so? Interesting.”

“You look to me,” the little man said, in the same tone of voice he had used to comment on the Ford pak, casual, light, “like a man with some bad memories.”

Jerry’s eyes narrowed. “Something I can do for you, chum?”

The little man shrugged and acted nonchalant. “For me? Hell, no. I’m fuzz-free and frilly, friend. What I thought, I might be able to do something upright for you.”

“Like what?”

“Like get you to a clean, precise Bank that could leach off some bad stains.”

Jerry looked around. The showroom grifters were busy with live customers. He turned to face the little man.

“Why me?”

The little man smiled. “Saw you hobble out of the Franchise Bank in the mall. You looked rocky, friend. Mighty rocky. Carrying a freightload of old movies in your skull. Figured they turned you down for one reason or another. Figured you could use a friendly steer.”

Jerry had been expecting something like this. The Bank in the mall had not been his first stop. There had been the Memory Bank in the Corporate Tower and the Bank in the Longacre Shopping Center and the Bank at Mount Sinai. They had all turned him down, and from recent articles he’d read on bootleg memory operations, he’d suspected that maintaining a visible image would put the steerers on to him.

“You got a name, chum?”

“Do I gotta have a name?”

“Just in case I go around a dark corner with you and get a sap upside my head. I want to be able to remember a tag to go with the face.”

The little man grinned nastily. “Remember the nose. My friends call me Pinocchio.”

“Let’s go see the man,” Jerry Auld said.

“Woman,” Pinocchio said.

“Woman,” Jerry Auld said. “Let’s go see the woman.”

The bootleg Bank was on an air-cushion yacht anchored beyond the twelve-mile limit. They reached it, using hoverpaks, and by the time the strung lights of the vessel materialized out of the mist, it was night. They put down on the forecastle pad and racked their units. Pinocchio kept up a line of useless chatter, intended to allay Auld’s fears. It served to draw him up tighter than he’d been before the little man had braced him.

Jerry saw guards with weapons on the flying bridge.

Pinocchio caught his glance and said, “Precautions.”

“Sure.”

Pinocchio didn’t move. Jerry said, “Are we doing something here or just taking the night air?” He didn’t like being under the guns.

Pinocchio kept his eyes on the flying bridge as he said, “‘They’re making us, reporting. It’ll only be a minute.”

“What kind of trouble do these people get?” Jerry asked.

“Hijackers sometimes. You know: pirates. The market’s lively right now. A lot of jockeying for territory, getting good product to push…” One of the armed guards motioned with his weapon, and Pinocchio said, “Come on.”

They went belowdecks. The yacht was handsomely appointed. Flocked-velvet wallpaper in the companionways, burnished metal banisters, thick carpets. Pinocchio knocked at an inlaid teak door. The door was opened by an unexceptional-looking woman. She smiled, pro forma, and walked back into the cabin, permitting Auld and the little man to enter.

The room was a spacious saloon, fitted to the walls with the memory-leaching devices Auld recognized from his many trips to legitimate Banks in the city.

“Ms. Keogh, I’d like to introduce Mr. Jerry Auld. Met him in the city, thought we could do a little business…”

She waved him to silence. “Do you have your own transportation, Mr. Auld? Or did you come with Mr. Timiachi?”

Auld said, “I have my own pak.”

“Then you can go, Mr. Timiachi,” she said to the little man. “Stop by the office and get a check.”

Obsequious, Pinocchio bobbed his head and smiled a goodbye at Jerry. Then, sans forelock-tugging, he bowed himself out of the saloon. Ms. Keogh waved at a formfit. Jerry sat down.

“How close are you to maximum depletion?” she said.

He decided not to fence. He was in too much pain. They were both here for the same thing. “I’m at the limit.”

She walked around the saloon, thinking. Then she came and sat down beside him in the other formfit. Through the open porthole Auld heard the mournful sound of something calling to its mate across the night water. “Let me tell you several things,” she said.

“I want, to get rid of some bad stains,” Auld said. “I know what I need to know.”

She raised a hand to silence him. “Probably. Nonetheless, this is not a bucket shop. Bootleg, yes; but not a crash-and-burn operation.”

He indicated he’d listen.

“The ‘holographic’ memory model postulates that a memory is stored in a manner analogous to a hologram- not sited in any specific area, but stored all over the brain. To remove one certain memory, it is always necessary to break molecules of myelin all over the brain… from the densely packed myelin of the corpus callosum-”

“The white matter,” Auld said. She nodded. “I’ve heard all this before.”

“-from the white matter right down the spinal cord, perhaps even down into the peripheral nerves.” She finished on a tone of dogged determination.

“Now tell me about the weak point in the long-chain myelin molecule. The A-l link. Tell me how easily the molecule breaks there. The point at which muscular dystrophy and other neurodegenerative diseases attack the molecule. Tell me how I might become a head of lettuce if I go past the max. I’ve heard it all before. I’m surprised you’re trying to discourage me. I’m also annoyed, lady.”

She looked at him with resignation. “We don’t push anyone, and we don’t lie. It’s bad enough we’re outside the law. I don’t want anyone’s life on my hands. Your choice, fully informed.”

He stood up. “Put me in the drain and let’s get this over with.”

“It must be nasty.”

“I pity the poor sonofabitch you sell these stains to.”

“Would you like to meet the head that will be receiving what you’ll be losing?”

“Not much.”

“He’s a wry old man whose life has been bland beyond the telling. He wants action, danger, adventure, romance. He wants to settle into his twilight years, with a head filled with wonder and experience.”

“I’m touched.” He made his fists. “Godammit, lady, get this shit out of my head!”

She waved him to the leaching unit on the wall. He followed her as she opened out the wings. She folded down the formfit with its probe helmet, and he sat without waiting for instructions. He had been in that seat before. Perhaps too many times.

“This won’t hurt,” Ms. Keogh said.

“That’s not true,” he replied.

“You’re right. It’s not true,” she said, and the helmet dropped and the probes fastened to his skull and she turned on the power. The universe became a whirlpool.

* * * *

Lucy spat blood and he touched her chin with the moist cloth. “Jerry, please.”

”No. Forget it.”

“I’m in terrible pain, Jerry.”

“I’ll call the medic.”

“You know it won’t do any good. You know what you have to do.”

He turned away. “I can’t, kid. I just can’t.”

“I trust you, Jerry. If you do it, I won’t be afraid. I know, it’ll be okay.”

It wasn’t going to be okay, no matter how it happened. For a moment he hated her for wanting to share it with him, for needing that last terrible measure of love no one should be asked to give.

“Don’t let them put me in the ground, Jerry. Nobody can talk to worms. Send me to the fire. I wouldn’t mind that, not if you were with me…”

She was rambling. He understood about her fear of the dark; down there forever in the cold; with things moving toward her. Yes, he could guarantee the clean fire would have what remained… after. But she was rambling, talking about things she was seeing on the other side-

“I know they’re over there, past the crossover, Jerry. They were there before, when I thought I was going. Don’t let me die alone. Be there to keep them at bay till I can run, honey. Please.”

She coughed blood again, and her eyes closed. He held the moist cloth and reached down and lifted her head from the pillow and placed it over her face. “I love you, kiddo.”

After a very long time he took the pillow away. It was heavily stained.

Ms. Keogh called two deckhands to help him onto the forecastle. They strapped his pak on him. The mist was heavier now, had slipped into fog. If there were stars somewhere beyond the yacht, they could not be seen.

“Can you travel?” she said. He was looking off to starboard. She took his head in her hands. “Can you travel?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m fine.” He looked away again.

“Set the auto for the city,” she said to one of the deckhands. She spoke softly. “Do you remember Lucy?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the fire?”

“What fire?”

“Lucy.”

“Yes. She smiled at me.”

They sent him aloft and he hovered for a moment. Then the autopilot cut in and he moved slowly off into the fog.

She watched for a time, but there were no stars visible.

Then she went belowdecks to purify the stain that had been stored in the unit.

Later that night an old man sat in the unit’s formfit, and the balance of pain in the universe was restored.

* * * *

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Dottie Amlin. Diane Duane, Mark Valenti, and David Gerrold in the creation of this piece of fiction.