He did not have to be told he was ready, because if he had had to be told, then he would not have been ready. He could not feel he was ready because the knowledge was beyond feeling. It was a knowing so quiet, so beyond far and yet so close at the same time, that when it was there one knew it.

It came to him, not during nerve-chilling exercises and not during his balance tests as he hovered twenty stories above the street on a narrow hotel ledge. It came to him in his sleep in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado. He opened his eyes and said:

"Wow. I'm ready."

He went into the bathroom and turned on the light. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror behind the door. It was more than a decade now since he had started, and if anything, he had lost ten or fifteen pounds since then. Thinner. Definitely thinner. But he still had the thick wrists. They had been nature's gift; everything else he had been taught.

He dressed. Black socks, tan slip-on shoes of Italian leather, gray slacks, and blue shirt. He had dark eyes and high cheekbones, the flesh drawn taut under them. There hadn't been any more operations to change his face recently, and in the last few years he had learned, if need be, to change it himself. It wasn't that hard, and anyone could do it. It was just a matter of tiny changes, muscle manipulations within the mouth, a tensing of the scalp around the hairline, a change in the cast of the eyes. When most people tried it, they looked as though they were making a funny face, because they forgot and did one thing at a time instead of making all the changes simultaneously.

The hotel hallway was silent when he slipped out, and Remo Williams did not bother to lock his room. What would anyone take, anyhow? Underwear? Slacks? So what? And if they should take money, so what again? What could he spend it on? He'd never be able to buy a home, at least not one to live in. A car? He could buy all the cars he wanted. So what?