The ad for him which the hotel people had been running during the past three weeks did not seem to be on the page anywhere. He thought groggily, maybe it’s been moved to another page. He thereupon combed that section of the paper thoroughly. Ad after ad for entertainers but no mention of him. And his face had been on the entertainment page of some newspaper or another for ten years. Without an ellipsis.

I’ll make one more try, he decided. I’ll try Mory Mann.

Fishing out his wallet, he searched for the slip on which he had written Mory’s number.

His wallet was very thin.

All his identification cards were gone. Cards that made it possible for him to stay alive. Cards that got him through pol and nat barricades without being shot or thrown into a forcedlabor camp.

I can’t live two hours without my ID, he said to himself. I don’t even dare walk out of the lobby of this rundown hotel and onto the public sidewalk. They’ll assume I’m a student or teacher escaped from one of the campuses. I’ll spend the rest of my life as a slave doing heavy manual labor. I am what they call an unperson.

So my first job, he thought, is to stay alive. The hell with Jason Taverner as a public entertainer; I can worry about that later.

He could feel within his brain the powerful six-determined constituents moving already into focus. I am not like other men, he told himself. I will get out of this, whatever it is. Somehow.

For example, he realized, with all this money I have on me I can get myself down to Watts and buy phony ID cards. A whole walletful of them. There must be a hundred little operators scratching away at that, from what I’ve heard. But I never thought I’d be using one of them. Not Jason Taverner.

Not a public entertainer with an audience of thirty million. Among all those thirty million people, he asked himself, isn’t there one who remembers me? If “remember” is the right word. I’m talking as if a lot of time has passed, that I’m an old man now, a has-been, feeding off former glories. And that’s not what’s going on.