The gin bottle shattered on the floor. "The LC-111," the professor moaned.
"It's me, Mom," came a familiar flat voice from inside the cube.
The professor reeled forward. "I think I'm going to be sick," she said, staggering into the corridor. From the ladies' room she emitted a Tarzanlike yell, then returned to the lab to face Mr. Gordons, who had resumed the form of Ralph Dickey. She leaned in the doorway, her face green and stricken. "There's a naked body in there," she said with hushed urgency. "It looks just like you."
"It is your assistant, I'm afraid," he said. "The man in the T-shirt who was here earlier is of some danger to me. I cannot know what that danger is until my memory banks are repaired, but the probability is high that your assistant jeopardized my survival by speaking with him. Undoubtedly they spoke of me. For that reason, I was forced to abandon my former persona of the garbageman and adopt Mr. Dickey's."
The professor raised a trembling hand to her forehead. "Let me get this straight. You killed Dickey—and then changed your face so that you look like him?"
"That is correct."
"Did you do the same thing to that garbageman?"
"Yes. It was necessary for my survival."
"And you're still the LC-111?"
"Among other programming devices, yes."
Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Gordons," she sighed. "The garbageman was ugly enough. I
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don't know if I can stand my son looking like Ralph Dickey."
"Beauty is only skin deep," he said.
"What if the cops come for you?"
"I'll kill them too, Mom," Mr. Gordons said reassuringly.
Dr. Frances Payton-Holmes wept in her son's mechanical arms. It was heartbreaking to be a mother.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich was not the sort of man who enjoyed getting his hands dirty. The son of two prominent Party officials, he had been reared in an atmosphere of relative luxury, enjoying the company of the astute políticos who surrounded his father in the big Moscow apartment, and honing his mind on Lenin and chess at the family dacha on the Black Sea in the summers. When he was at university, he was recruited, as he had expected to be, into the ranks of the Moscow Center intelligence network.
He was groomed from the first to become one of the Soviet Union's growing legion of cold-war master spies. Istoropovich came well prepared for the Center's grueling three-year training program. His English and Cantonese were as fluent as any American's or Chinese's. He had made it a point to excel in engineering and physics, his chosen fields at school, because he knew that these sub-
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jects would be of value to the Party and, consequently, to his future. His father had tutored him in foreign affairs and economics from a young age, so that by the time the Center recruited him, he was fully conversant not only with the issues of the day, but with the full background of most of them as well. He flew through the Center's program with honors, and his young career was not hurt by the fact that he was handsome, healthy, and ambitious.
His one flaw, if it could be called a flaw, was that he hated women. He hated their softness, their cloying sexuality. But again, his aversion for females did not affect his work for the worse. On the contrary, a spy not tempted by the spell of swelling bosoms and undulating hips was a rare and sought-after commodity in Moscow Center.
He was perfect for his job. Mikhail Andreyev Istoropovich was born to be a star blazing under deep cover on foreign soil.
He had not, unfortunately, expected the foreign soil to belong to the Hollywood Disposal Service. Nor had he intended his highly skilled hands to be burrowing into half an acre of damp, stinking garbage dotted with broken glass and the decomposing remains of deceased household animals.
As he cut himself for the fifth time on the edge of a crushed can of Mallow-Fluff, he roundly cursed America and all it stood for, most particularly its undisciplined garbagemen, who picked up a university's trash whenever they felt like it. In Russia, picking up the garbage an hour early was grounds for dismissal; missing the schedule by an entire day would require punishment be-
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ginning with flogging and leading to more memorable disciplinary action.
He was not a happy man. Compounding his misery was his observation, after slipping on a mackerel of indeterminate age, that the Hollywood Disposal Service was being overrun by local citizens stepping gingerly over the rubble and exclaiming to one another as they displayed broken bits of trash with what seemed to be great pride.
"Eek!" shrieked a young woman as she waved a swatch of gray cloth over her head. "It's Dustin Hoffman's jockey shorts! I found them! Oh, I can't believe it." One of her hands flew to her chest as the girl simulated orgasmic ecstasy. The other held the torn underpants aloft.
Another young woman snatched the treasure away from its discoverer, examining the block printing inside the waistband. "Hey, this don't say Dustin Hoffman."
"It says Hoffman, don't it?" the girl yelled in defense of the garment.
"Aah, lots of guys are named Hoffman. And that's just the laundry's writing, anyway. It's in magic marker. No monogram, nothing." With disdain, she shunted the unauthenticated shorts back to the girl who had found them.
"They're his, all right," the girl pouted.
She was dressed mostly in makeup. Thick black and red lines outlined her eyes like a Hollywood version of Nefertiti, and her lips were slashed bright purple. Her hair was dyed a bizarre shade of electric blue, and was cropped into a USMC-style crew cut. Below the neck the girl sported a black leatherette vest, a grimy white plastic mini-
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skirt that, Istoropovich noted, had gone out of style even in Russia, and a pair of scuffed red ankle-length boots. To Istoropovich's horror, she regained her composure and was walking straight toward him.
He tried to right himself, but as soon as he got his footing in the mire, he slipped again and went sprawling on his face.
"Hi," the girl said breathily. "Checking out the garbage of the stars? It's really incredible, isn't it?"
"What's incredible?" Istoropovich asked crank-
«y-
She smiled vacantly. "This. Everything. Life." She extended a hand to him. "My name's Helen. Helen Wheels."
"Get away," Istoropovich said. "Don't come near me." He skidded and lumbered to his feet, noticing that the side of his trousers was covered with slime and fish scales.
"You don't have to be uptight, mister," the girl said. "This is California. Home of the free. Here, I'll even let you hold Dustin Hoffman's skivvies."
"My dear child," Istoropovich said acidly, "that is the last thing I am about to hold. Now, go away."
"I got some other incredible stuff over at my place. Want to come look it over?"
"Hardly," he said.
"Feel like getting high? I got a couple of incredible 'ludes."