"It has to be," he argued. "Look--the same name, and so close together
in time and place, and we were attracted instantly--"
"Go away," she said, and the gun didn't waver. It was not a threat
that he could ignore. He left.
She was wrong in making him leave, completely wrong. He couldn't say
how he knew, but he was certain. But he couldn't prove it, and she
wasn't likely to accept his unsubstantiated word.
He leaned weakly against the door. It was like that. Retrogression had
left him with an adult body and sharper receptiveness. And after that
followed an urge to live fully. He had a lot of knowledge, but it
didn't extend to this sphere of human behavior.
Inside he could hear her moving around faintly, an emotional
anticlimax. It wasn't just frustrated sex desire, though that played a
part. They had known each other previously--the instant attraction
they'd had for each other was proof, leaving aside the names. Lord,
he'd trade his unknown identity to have her. He should have taken
another name--any other name would have been all right.
It wasn't because she was the first woman he'd seen, or the woman he
had first re-seen. There had been nurses, some of them beautiful, and
he'd paid no attention to them. But Luise Obispo was part of his
former life--and he didn't know what part. The reactions were there,
but until he could find out why, he was denied access to the
satisfactions.
From a very narrow angle, and only from that angle, he could see that
there was still a light inside. It was dim, and if a person didn't
know, he might pass by and not notice it.
His former observation about the Shelters was incorrect. Every
dwelling might be occupied and he couldn't tell unless he examined
them individually.
He stirred. The woman was a clue to his problem, but the clue itself
was a far more urgent problem. Though his identity was important, he
could build another life without it and the new life might not be
worse than the one from which he had been forcibly removed.
Perhaps he was over-reacting, but he didn't think so: _his new life
had to include this woman_.
He wasn't equipped to handle the emotion. He stumbled away from the
door and found an unoccupied dwelling and went in without turning on
the lights and lay down on the bed.
In the morning, he knew he had been here before. In the darkness he
had chosen unknowingly but also unerringly. This was the place in
which he had been retrogressed.
It was here that the police had picked him up.
* * * * *
The counselor looked sleepily out of the screen. "I wish you people
didn't have so much energy," he complained. Then he looked again and
the sleepiness vanished. "I see you found it the first time."
Luis knew it himself, because there was a difference from the dwelling
Luise lived in--not much, but perceptible to him. The counselor,
however, must have a phenomenal memory to distinguish it from hundreds
of others almost like it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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