FURTHER DEPONENT SAYETH NOT

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1977.

My name is Maria Stabile, I am twenty-seven years old, I live at 34 Ruskin Place, Venice, California, in the County of Los Angeles, and I work as a court reporter, specializing in taking P.I.—Personal Injury—depositions.

Though this whole thing came to a head for me on the afternoon of May 1, 1979, it must have been at the back of my mind for a long time before that. But it came to the fore on that afternoon while I was taking down the pretrial testimony of a man by the name of Leo Urbanczyk…

Maria Stabile listened to the questions and answers without listening. Her fingers listened for her. They played and plied the keys of the stenotype machine as if Rubinsteins’s were dancing the Minute Waltz. While the defendant’s words went in one ear and out her fingers, Maria sat away from herself in another part of her mind and thought a strange thought.

She didn’t like to think it, because she liked to think of herself as being wholly without prejudice. Still, she couldn’t help but notice that a very large percentage of the Personal Injury depositions she took—automobile accident testimony preliminary to trial—had a plaintiff or a defendant who was, like this Leo Urbanczyk, foreign-born.

What drove it home to her now was that this was not the first deposition she had taken down from him in the past year. It was not the second. It was the third. And she was not the only court reporter around, and so the chances were good that Leo Urbanczyk had been the defendant in even more automobile accident cases.

And what heightened her awareness and added to her feeling of wrongness was that on the previous occasions Leo Urbanczyk had groped for the right words; yet this time his statement came out less haltingly, though still in his strong accent. It was as though he had gone over the same ground a number of times, in the same grooves of his mind. He might have been a benumbed actor far into a long-run play.

“…and I am passing the interchange and I see now I will have to go soon right away into the off-ramp—yes?—and I make so with my hand and with the light on my car to show I mean to cross into the right-hand lane. But I guess this man in the car behind me doesn’t see my hand or the light and he…”

She had heard that same string of words before. She felt sure Leo Urbanczyk had spoken them before and she had taken them down before.

Her fingers flew, seeming to know on their own what he was going to say before he said it.

And he began to watch her fingers as if they hypnotized him. He grew more and more tense and spoke faster and faster. Then all at once he broke off and pointed to her.

“Excuse me,” he blurted out, “but she’s going so fast I can’t keep up with her.”

Even the plaintiffs attorney had to laugh at that, and Maria herself smiled.

But she felt ashamed somehow.

Had she conveyed by frown or headshake her feeling of wrongness? Was that what had shaken Urbanczyk out of his rote performance? Had she been that unprofessional? She made her face a mask and her figure motionless but for the flying fingers. And without further ado or undo Leo Urbanczyk finished his deposition, and the session broke up.

That should have been the end of it for her but it was not. And because it was not, because she found herself wondering about the guilt or innocence of Leo Urbanczyk as she watched him limp out, her shame arose anew. She was not there to weigh or to question, she was there only to take down testimony. She was an impersonal instrument of the law.

True, till they totally mechanized or robotized the procedure, this instrument was flesh and brain cells and could not keep from having its own thoughts and second guesses. But that didn’t mean she had to be the one to pass judgment on the man.

If, on the one hand, he had more than his share of traffic accidents, where was the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in all this? Were the public watchdogs sleeping?

Why hadn’t they lifted his license?

But the scales of justice had another pan. Leo Urbanczyk was a traveling salesman—a drug manufacturer’s detail man—and his livelihood depended on his having a driver’s license. Was it likely he would deliberately court accidents? Was it the man’s fault he had a run of bad luck?

She watched him hobble out and winced sympathetically. (“After other car hit me, back was aching me, neck was bothering me, and I was having headaches. And my ankle was swelling, I had a swelling on the ankle.”) She felt her face burn at the thought that his thick accent (“Well, I learned a little, my English, in my country. Since I come here, my language better now.”) had led her to think her first strange thought about the reason for his accidents and for those the other foreign-borns found themselves in. She determined to drive the strange thought from her mind.

It was the half of his smile that showed as he turned left just outside the door to go down the hall that did it, that undid her feelings of shame and sympathy and deepened and quickened her interest in the reason for the accidents.

It had to be more than a matter of ineptness or carelessness. Urbanczyk struck her as being a quite capable man with a strong drive to succeed. If it came to that, foreign-borns took more care in most things that native-borns because they tried hard to make up, to be part. Foreign-borns were generally more law-abiding, more flag-waving, than native-borns. Native-borns took liberty and justice for all too much for granted. Even to get a driver’s license would have been harder for Urbanczyk; he would have had to prove himself to a skeptical or even a biased inspector.

So it went deeper than competence. It went deep into the mystical nature of man.

The idea had been kicking around in her for a long time, but it was a hard birth because it meant she would have to bring out into the light the concept of extrasensory perception.

All right, this was California, and she should have been used to the craze in the air that matched the craze in the earth. Out here you breathed nutty notions all day long. But it made her queasy to think there might be such a thing as ESP.

She felt a need to keep her own mind inviolate. Not that she had nastier thoughts than everyone else. If you laid her inner landscape open to the light of day, it would not show itself any more of a garbage dump than the run of human wishes, fears, hates, greeds, and vanities. But it was hers, and its place was the dark oubliette of her mind.

Still, if there was such a thing as ESP, and if it explained this uncanniness she felt about Urbanczyk and the other foreign-borns, then she had to face it, especially when the pattern forced itself on her.

…seemed to see a pattern. The key to it is that a very large number—a mathematician would probably say a significant number—of the depositions I take have a plaintiff or a defendant who is foreign-born, whose first language is not American English. Even those who do not require an interpreter during the taking of their testimony would, all the same, be people who think in another language.

Freeway traffic in California is, to begin with, so fraught with perils in lane changing, sudden slowing, and so on, that the mathematical odds (I’m guessing, but feel sure this is true) say that there should be many, many more accidents than there are in actuality.

Why don’t these mathematically probable accidents occur?

Because, unknowingly, we all use ESP. Driver tunes in to driver. We take more than mere kinesic cues from each other. On some underpass of the mind there’s a free interchange.

But if you’re thinking in another language, you’re not communicating, not sending or receiving clearly or quickly enough. You would respond too late to the other driver, or the other driver would fail to catch your intention in time. Result: questions and answers in deposition form.

Which brings me back to Leo Urbanczyk…

His case cried out for looking into.

But, being a court reporter, I could not myself look into the matter…

His smile hung in the air before her. It was not a malicious smile. It might even have been a sad smile.

But it was a knowing smile. It said to her that Leo Urbanczyk knew more than he had yielded up under the plaintiffs attorney’s questioning.

Yet she felt guilty even to be thinking of investigating. The law strictly forbade a court reporter to investigate.

What she needed was someone else to pick it up and look into it.

Almost as if her need had materialized him, Joe Fiveash appeared. Joe covered the criminal courts for the Los Angeles Dispatch. He covered the field for Joe Fiveash.

“Maria! I was just thinking about you.”

“What were you thinking?”

Her face felt hot, and though she held her smile, she cursed her tongue for giving him that opening.

“As though you didn’t know.” He looked her up and down. “I was thinking of your shining intellect.”

“Those are my boots shining down there.”

“A shining mind in a shining body.”

She shook her head but the smile stayed in place. She liked everything about him but the fact that the whole was less than the sum of the parts. He lacked an overall seriousness. Of attitude, of purpose.

They had played a one-night stand, but that had been the beginning and the end of it. She was old-fashioned enough to want a one-woman man. But she knew him to be a good investigative reporter. Right now that was what she stood in need of.

She dropped the smile. “Joe, would you be free to follow up a lead? There may be something in it, there may not.”

He grinned but looked suddenly sharp. “Lead thou me on.”

“Give me a lift home; I’ll fill you in on the way.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Getting a ring job.”

He took her hand. “Come with me while I get my car. I sure don’t want to lose you now.”

They sped along the freeway. She found it a white-knuckled ride because Joe kept his eyes on her more than on the rushing road. The scratches and dents she had seen on his car on getting in hadn’t helped unfurrow her brow, though, as far as she knew, Joe had never been in a serious accident. She tried to distract him toward the traffic flow.

“That’s the sort of thing I’m referring to: notice how everyone’s doing his own number and yet how all are doing one big number?”

He smiled into her eyes and nodded and smoothly swerved to save his fender from a car that cut into their lane.

She invited him up for a drink that turned into a potluck dinner and would have turned into more if she hadn’t worked at turning him off.

“Joe, be serious.”

“I’m serious. I’m blooming serious. I’m night-blooming serious.”

“Not that way. I mean, here I am, trying to talk to you person-to-person, and there you are, making a man-and-sex-object thing out of it. Have you even been listening to my theory and to what I’ve told you about Mr. Urbanczyk?”

He reached out a hand to her and slapped it away with his other hand. “Of course. See how I’m behaving myself?”

“And you’re going to look into it?”

“Of course. And, scout’s honor, I won’t be counting on any thanks from you because I’ll only be doing my job.” He spoiled it by crossing his scout’s fingers and winking.

She let out a sigh and handed him a slip of paper.

“Here, I’ve put down his name and address and his license tag. You will let me know what you find out?”

“Oh, I’ll keep in touch, all right. You can bet your life on that.”

…and Mr. Fiveash did keep me informed as he had promised…

He stopped by the following evening.

“I had a few chores to take care of that ate into my lunch hour. But then I got on the horn to a very friendly woman I know in the Division of Motor Vehicles—very friendly, not stand-offish like someone I could name—and got her to pull the record on this Urbanczyk and to read it to me.” He shot a look at Maria. “There was nothing to read.”

She started to speak but he put up his hand. “Are you sure you got the name right?”

“Am I sure?” She stared at him. “Sure I’m sure. What do you mean there was nothing to read?”

“Just that. If this is your Leo Urbanczyk—and that must be the case because it’s the one and only Leo Urbanczyk—there isn’t one violation, not even a standing violation, to blot his record.”

“That can’t be.”

“Maybe it can’t be, but it is. Only thing I can think of is that the computer that’s supposed to post Leo’s violations slipped up. Funny, though, that it should fail to record all three—that how many you said?—accidents.”

“At least three. Yes, funny. What’re you going to do now?”

“Keep digging. Just thought I’d check with you before following up computer angle.”

He checked with her again the next evening. Her eagerness turned to worry as he plopped down. She sensed what was coming.

“Rang up my friend at the DMV.” He huddled against an arctic wind. “She’s all at once not very friendly. Icicles dripped from the receiver. I asked about the computer, and she said there was absolutely nothing wrong with the software or the hardware and if I wanted any more info I’d have to go through channels and she was awfully sorry but she was terribly busy now—and, I gathered, into the foreseeable future—and she had to hang up.”

He gave a half smile. “There was a double click on the line. That kind of gave me the notion someone—her supervisor?—had monitored the call. I turned to one of my police contacts. Police have a direct patch to all DMV computer info. The computer does give Leo a clean bill.” He shrugged and picked up his drink.

She looked him in the glass. “So you’re dropping the story?”

He waited longer than it took him to swallow before he answered. “I’m sorry we never really got into the person-person bit. But if you know anything about investigative reporters, you know that was the wrong way for the DMV to get me to drop the story.”

“I’m sorry, Joe.”

“Yes, we’re a sorry pair. How about gladdening up at a discotheque?”

The discotheque proved three hours of pleasure, and her body and mind still hummed, but she staved off the good-night kiss for a moment of business.

“How are you going to follow up the story?”

“Only way to follow it is to hang onto friend Leo’s rear bumper.”

She didn’t know why but, her lips still buzzing with the kiss, she called out after him silently: Be careful, Joe.

…Mr. Fiveash’s findings, as far as they went, disappointed me…

“I spoke to a girl at his insurance company and got the name of the body shop they like to do business with. I went there and found out there’s no record that Leo’s car’s been in for repair a great number of times in the past few months. The boss came in while I was trying to get a mechanic to talk. He threw me out. Said I was interfering with work. I guess I was.”

Something was wrong. Joe’s gaze was too fixed, he was trying too hard not to look away from her, trying to meet her gaze frankly. But behind his gaze was a curious reluctance, a holding back, a leaning toward doubt.

“Joe, I wish I could show you carbons of the deposition transcripts. But you know that’s somewhat privileged information. You’ll just have to take my word against the computer’s and the body shop’s. There are three accidents I know of. So something’s fishy.”

Joe seemed barely to listen. “Yes, well. I only wanted you to know I haven’t just been spinning my wheels. I have to find out things my own way. I found out a few other things. All Leo does all day long—with time out for meals, rest rooms, and depositions—is drive on the freeway.”

“But his job—”

“A neighbor told me Leo confided he’s on a leave of absence from his firm. It seems the company doctor diagnosed a nervous condition and the therapy is to forget business and get out in the open air.”

“Open air? The freeway’s a sea of exhaust fumes.”

“So he’s a gas head. You want the carnage knowledge, don’t you? Then hear me out.” She made a gesture of surrender and he went on, his eyes daring her to interrupt him again. “I tailed him for better than three hours, looping the loop on the freeway, and I tell you Leo is one crazy driver. I hung a couple of cars back and wished there was more distance between his and mine. To watch him in action is enough to make you believe the Neanderthals are still among us.”

He shook his head. “It isn’t that Leo breaks the law in any way you can pinpoint. It’s that he’s quick to change his mind and slow to signal the change. Dozens of times I saw near misses and a few times actual scrapes and bangs. Leo blue-blazes a trail of curses and horns.”

“There.”

“Yes, but where is there? Does that bring us anywhere nearer the truth? Look, suppose he is involved in a lot of accidents. What does that prove? That a difference in culture, in mindset, blocks ESP? Interferes with reception? All it proves to me is that Leo’s a lousy driver.”

Joe’s tone changed. He was trying to sell her something. What and why? And though he didn’t look away from her as he spoke she felt his gaze shift focus. If he was telling her the truth, why should he be ashamed to face her?

“Maria, did you stop to think that maybe the guy’s simply accident prone, that maybe he has a strong death wish? No question about it, they should lift his license. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything more to the story.”

“What about the computer’s failure to post Urbanczyk’s accidents, and what about the stonewalling at the motor vehicle bureau?”

He shrugged. “Usual bureaucratic foul-up and cover-up.”

“What it comes down to is, you think my ESP notion is crazy.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You thought it.”

“How do you know I thought it? ESP?” He laughed a forced laugh. “Woman bites newshound. Way you snap at me makes it clear you’re taking this whole thing altogether too seriously.”

She didn’t laugh. “Joe, I hate to say this, but I don’t believe you’re telling me the real reason you’re dropping the story. You have something else on your mind.”

His lids went up and his lips went down. “I’m only trying to tell you—”

“You’re trying to tell me this is as far as you’ll take it.”

He sighed. “Even if I wanted to take it all the way, saw any hope some good would come of taking it all the way, this is as far as I can take it. At least for the time being.” He leaned nearer. “It’s supposed to be hush-hush, but I see I have to let you in on it. My publisher’s sending me on a Defense Department junket that’s just come up. A round-the-world tour of our overseas bases. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I can’t pass it up.”

“A city hall reporter on a world junket?”

His cheek twitched. “You mean you think I’m only good enough to cover local news?”

“I know you can handle any assignment, Joe. I mean it just looks funny for this to be coming up now out of the wild blue yonder. I mean, doesn’t it, honestly?”

“Speaking of funny, isn’t it pretty far-fetched to tie the Pentagon in with this Urbanczyk thing? Do you really believe they’d go that far to get me off the Great Freeway Conspiracy?”

“Don’t you? I’m beginning to think the biggest story is right here at home.”

“Come on, Maria. Forget about this mysterious They and Their sinister motives. There is no They. There’s only Us.”

“You’re the one who first said They.”

“I was only saying what was in your mind. I don’t believe in a conspiracy theory of history. That story has more miles on it than the one about the wife who pulls away unaware she’s left her husband standing in his underwear after he’s stepped down out of their trailer to ask why the sudden stop.”

She didn’t smile. Someone had scared him off or bought him off.

She had never thought she would ever think that of Joe. She remembered with a flush that she had worried for him. Be careful, Joe. She pressed her lips together.

…so when Mr. Fiveash had to drop the story to cover a bigger one, I thought I would have to resign myself to forgetting about it…

Whenever she remembered it, and that was more often than not, in the night and day that followed, she conjured up Leo Urbanczyk’s nebulous nebbish face and the sinister conspiracy faded. But when the face faded, in turn the half smile—malicious, no; sad, maybe; knowing, yes—lingered on the air or on the retina.

It didn’t take much—a colleague’s casually concerned “You look like you need rest”—to make her take not sick but sick leave.

Bright and early the next day, but feeling foolish and sluggish, she found herself driving toward Leo Urbanczyk’s neighborhood. For some reason it did not surprise her that she had timed it right. As she neared his apartment building, he pulled out of the basement garage.

It was Urbanczyk she recognized and not his car, but one glance at the car made it a cinch to spot again. It had a new right-rear fender that had not yet got its coat of matching paint over the raw red prime coat.

She was not investigating. It was sheerest coincidence that she found herself going the same way as Mr. Urbanczyk and getting on the freeway at the same time and place. And why shouldn’t she be taking the freeway? After all, the freeway was open to all comers and goers. She told herself that and told herself to believe that.

And if she followed the lead of Mr. Urbanczyk in pursuit of her own course of open-air therapy, it was only that it seemed the path of least resistance. She kept a few cars—and, frighteningly but helpfully, a trucker’s monster double rig—between them.

If anything, Joe’s description of the man’s driving style had been on the kind side. And in Urbanczyk’s case practice made imperfection perfect. He repeated the same mistake again and again.

Unvaryingly, he sped along in a left-hand lane, and at the last minute he would suddenly opt for the right-hand lane reserved for the airport turnoff. Each time—and she had to marvel at herself that she had not lost him; she was grateful that the ring job seemed to have made a big difference: it was a more smoothly responsive car than it had ever been—each time, as he cut sharply across and slowed abruptly, the gunmetal-blue photochemical smog grew a deeper, more sulfuric blue, and the background hum and whine gave way to a crescendo of screeches and bumps.

And it happened always at the same spot. The San Diego, Santa Monica, Harbor, Santa Ana, Hollywood, and Golden State Freeways form loops oceanward of Dodger Stadium. Urbanczyk drove these loops, making his involuted way back to his last-minute exit down the same off-ramp.

Something else forced itself on her notice as a fixture at the same spot. Off on the shoulder the same stalled car gasped for air with its hood. And the same man, a noticeably nondescript person sat at the wheel. A CHP tag fluttered from the whip antenna to show that the Chippies had properly responded. By now, surely, the repair truck should have come to fix the car or tow it away.

Maria grew cold enough to switch off the air conditioning. Joe, you should be here.

But he wasn’t here. She was all alone. In the great stream of traffic, of human life, with the car radio’s music and commercials and news and Sig-Alert interruptions telling of Freeway troubles, she was all alone. She had to smile at herself, boxed in as she was at the moment by a couple of double rigs, but it was an uneasy, uncertain smile.

One more time around, to make sure the pattern held, then she would break off and go home and sit down and try to make sense out of what she had seen. They were rolling along the San Diego Freeway now, coming up on the LAX turnoff. Maybe it would not happen this time. Maybe it had never happened. Maybe she had been dreaming. It was all too unreal. She felt numb, off-balance, dazed. Maybe it was the freeway divider posts flashing past: quite often that pulsing could set off a minor storm—environmental epilepsy—even in non-epileptics.

If it was real, if it was really happening, in another second Urbanczyk should make his move, cut across the slower lanes toward the turnoff. She had put only one car between them now, the better to watch. Urbanczyk made his move.

The woman driving the Chevy in the far right lane had failed to notice Urbanczyk’s belatedly blinking tail light. He swung in front. They were too close. His sudden slowing would catch the woman short. It would be the stuff of depositions—if they remained alive to depose.

Maria shrieked a silent Stop! at the woman.

The Chevy braked sharply, with a springy nosing down and rearing up, and a long strip of beads slid down to that knot. Maria swept on past the point of pileup, not trying for the turnoff though the way was now clear to follow Urbanczyk down the off-ramp. That was enough of Urbanczyk for one day. This last had taken something out of her, and she could imagine how drained the woman at the wheel of the Chevy, a Chinese-looking woman, must be feeling. Maria’s rearview mirror showed her the man with the stalled car on the shoulder dwindling but not to meaninglessness. But that was enough of him too for one day.

It made the papers:

Just can’t go on, stops on freeway

Lisa Wu’s woes suddenly grew too much for her. She stopped her car right where she was.

A thousand other cars stopped too—because Ms. Wu had halted at an exit ramp of the San Diego Freeway.

Police said she was sitting behind the wheel, her five senses shut off, oblivious to the honking horns of a long line of cars jammed up in yesterday’s rush-hour traffic. Rubbernecking slowed traffic flow in the other lanes as well, creating monumental tie-ups.

Ms. Wu, 29, explained at Hollywood Receiving Hospital that woe had piled on woe till all at once she felt she just couldn’t go on. All she remembers about yesterday’s episode is that an inner voice told her she must stop and she obeyed it. She said that in addition to the difficulty of adjusting to American ways after living her life till recently in her native Taiwan, she worried about the rent hike on her curio shop and about falling behind in her car payments.

A doctor said that Ms. Wu had an “anxiety reaction”—like combat fatigue.

When I came across that item in the morning paper, it really hit me hard. In a way it argued for me, and in a way it argued against me…

Maria read it over toast and eggs and orange juice and a vitamin pill and smiled wryly. The Stabile theory would seem to have held up—up to but not including the last second. Three-way cultural interference—Polish and Chinese figures on an American ground—blocked what Maria would call natural ESP and nearly did an untuned-to-an-Urbanczyk’s-wave-length Ms. Wu in. Yet the inner voice was there, and at the last second it had been strong enough to override the interference and save her—though after the fact, rationalizing it with the doctor’s help, she had of course misinterpreted it.

Was there such a thing as cultural interference? If you looked at it hard, would it fall apart? Was what had seemed a pattern ruling out the foreign-born exceptions merely a chance run of statistics? That could wait working out.

And it still didn’t tell her what Urbanczyk’s deadly game was. The death wish Joe had put forward?

Maybe it was as simple as that, and she was simple to try to make something complex out of it. She shook her head at herself.

Whatever it was, it was not a matter for her but for the authorities. It was up to them, not her, to catch on to and up with Urbanczyk and to deal with him.

What of the man with the stalled car? No doubt there was a simple and logical, if not innocent, explanation for him too.

Same would likely hold true of Joe’s junket.

A strange run of coincidences, though.

She smiled wryly again. Keeping on with that line of thought could bring on an anxiety reaction like Lisa Wu’s. It had been a sleepless night for her, and a great weariness weighed her down, and she was in no shape to follow her thoughts. She would certainly not follow Urbanczyk again today. She would not get dressed and go out. She would finish breakfast and go back to bed. Best thing for her to do was sleep it off.

The skyline had the loose jagged pattern of sleep spindles on a graph. Her hands gripped the wheel of a car. A cyclorama of Los Angeles burning in the sun rolled past. She felt fear. She had made the mistake of tailgating Leo Urbanczyk’s car—the form hunched over the wheel told her the driver was Urbanczyk. She and Urbanczyk were two holes moving through a semiconductor, and neither of them now could stop the memory of what would happen.

A sign passed, unread. The familiar exit ramp was coming up. Urbanczyk would cut in and out of lanes, would slow suddenly, would flash his turn signal as an afterthought, would…

Here was the exit ramp—but a road crew had blocked it off for repairs. He sees he has to change his mind. He’s going to cut back across lanes for the next interchange on the left. Don’t wait for his signal. You‘re going to hit. Spin the wheel hard left, then hard right. Stand on the brakes. The wheel throbbed as the car answered. The car slewed, scraped, fish tailed, skidded into the guardrail. The horn stuck in a blare as the world blanked out.

She sat up to match her sitting up in the dream and awoke. She had been at the wheel not of her own car but of Joe Fiveash’s.

Without thinking, without having to think, she swung out of bed, threw a robe on over her pajamas, stabbed her feet into slippers, grabbed her car keys, and slammed out. Deaf to the startled hello of her curlered neighbor carrying a wet-bottomed bag to the hall incinerator chute, she ran to the stairway because the elevator wasn’t standing by. She tripled down the stairs and out to her parking space. She revved up and torqued out of there.

It was blazing day as in her dream. She did not have to think where she was heading. Her car seemed to drive itself to intersect the San Diego Freeway at Urbanczyk’s favorite exit ramp. She parked any which way in the street at the nearest point to it and climbed up the embankment to the freeway.

There was the exit ramp, blocked off as in her dream, and there was the road crew standing around watching the cops, the firemen, and the ambulance attendants. Urbanczyk was not there; he had roared on oblivious to the carnage behind him. But there off on the shoulder was the man with the stalled car. He stared at her.

She looked at him briefly, then past him to the flashing red light, the black skid marks, the shattered glass, the spill a fireman was hosing away. She forgot him: gratitude swelled: very great gratitude—Joe was alive.

The ambulance attendants were easing Joe onto a stretcher beside the crumple of his car. She ran along the guardrail to where he lay. She leaned over.

“Joe.”

Joe opened his eyes a flicker before she said it. “Had a feeling you were here.” He smiled. “Maybe I should’ve gone on the junket after all.”

“What happened to it?”

“You happened to it. You made me feel so guilty…about letting you down…that I pulled out of the junket at…the last minute. Played sick.” Sweat glazed his smile.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Keep you out of it…in case…anything to it…conspiracy-wise. Silly, huh? Just damn lousy freeway drivers…including me.” He grimaced, then hurried to reassure her. “I’m all right. Knocked wind out me…more than anything else.”

She felt his pain. Cracked a couple of ribs, more likely.

“Look, lady, you can talk to him later at the hospital.”

“Yes.”

She watched the ambulance take him away but not out of her life. She turned. The man of the stalled car was coming toward her. He smiled at her and gestured a wish to speak. She moved as if to meet him, then broke and ran past, losing her slippers in her run down the embankment to her car.

…I hurried straight home. Once here, the very first thing I did was to start putting it all down…

She stopped typing to listen. The door was solid, but from the other side a presence seemed to throw its shadow through. She tore the paper from the typewriter and slid it under a cushion.

She got up to answer the ring.

The doorbell rang.

She opened the door.

It was the man of the stalled car. He did not seem too surprised at her readiness. He held her slippers out to her.

“Cinderella, I presume?”

“How did you find me? Oh, of course. My license tag. You’re Pentagram, aren’t you?” Slip of the tongue. Was it because she all at once felt like a witch? “Pentagon, I mean.”

He nodded. He set the slippers down to get out a small leather folder. She barely glanced at his ID.

“That’s what you were doing at the exit ramp, wasn’t it? Spotting the tags of those drivers who could anticipate the moves of the…accident provokers.”

He nodded again. “We need a few people with the rarest combination of qualities—not merely with ESP that can override cultural differences but with magnificent reflexes, with a feel for mechanical devices, and with nerve, judgment, and stamina. People who may not even know they’re people like that. People like you.”

She saw that coming, but she could not pull back from the shock of it. She shook her head, not because she did not believe it but because she was not sure she wanted to believe it.

He paid no mind to that but eyed her puzzledly. “I know I’ve seen you before today. Subliminally.” He snapped his fingers. “Got it. You’ve been tailing Urbanczyk.”

Her turn to nod. No need to tell him he had got it because she had thought it at him. Her nod turned to a shake.

“Poor Urbanczyk. I suppose you appealed to his patriotism.”

“Of course.”

“Doesn’t it bother you? Not that, but the reckless endangerment?”

He looked honestly surprised. “It’s the old tale of ends and means. We’re playing for high stakes.”

“It isn’t a game. It’s life and death.”

“Still a game. The universe runs by chance. Probability. The uncertainty principle. I don’t want to be flip, but it’s all a tossup. Only way to beat it is to better the odds. ESP may just be the answer. God knows we need some saving grace.”

She listened to him with part of her mind. Another part of her mind ranged ahead, getting over the newness, realizing the strangeness she would have to live with from now on. Her feelings about Joe had not changed. Her feelings about her feelings had changed. Funny, because it had been Joe’s peril that had triggered her latent talent. She was different from Joe. Not man-woman different. Sense different. She would see him, be with him from time to time. But they could never be one. Not when one of the two would always feel and know something the other could never feel and know. Funny, too, now it was she who was the one who could not conform. Poor Joe.

The man was waiting for her answer. She suddenly saw his question: scooped-out mushroom cloud, fuzzy question mark. And she saw a projection of the globe and on it a stippling of ICBM sites. She understood there was a vital need to know the targeting and launching intentions of foreign missile men. She could feel her mind already reaching out, beginning to learn to probe those intentions.

Maria Stabile slowly moved to retrieve her deposition from under the cushion. She tore it up. She watched herself from a distance. There was a numbness she dully felt grateful for because it blocked a guilt. To tear up a deposition—even an unfinished one of her own and one that she had meant for her own eyes only as a way of getting her thoughts straight—was to tear the fabric of her conscience.

It seemed a near sacrilege to tear up a deposition—no matter that it was full of typing errors; the stenotype keyboard is completely different from the typewriter, and increasing skill at the stenotype had tended to make her a poor typist.

But by tearing it up she was no longer a court reporter. She was no longer even an ordinary human. She was something else. Just what she was and would become—and whether increasing skill at it would make her a poor human—she would have to learn.