V
Someone jabbed him in the ribs, and he awoke with a jerk, blinking in the gloom. His mouth tasted like sweaty leather; he knew he had been sleeping. "What's the matter?"
"Wake up!" The girl was standing over him, her voice a harsh whisper.
He was alert in an instant. "The records—"
She thrust a packet into his hands, "We've got to go," she said. "There isn't much time. They were late."
"Just relax a minute." He ripped open the packet. A roll of photostats fell out into his lap, still damp. He threw them on the dressing table, and snapped on a dirty yellow light.
"You can't read them now—"
He didn't even hear her. He stared at the names on the papers before him. Names he had never seen before. Not all new, though. Bob Whittaker had kept his old name. But the others—changed, just as their faces had changed. He read the entries under Whittaker's name. Job after job on Earth, months of drifting, observing, then drifting again. A run on the Mars-Earth line as a crew-hand. Imagine Whittaker a crew-hand on a space liner! Work in the mines on Mars. Back to Earth, and married to a girl he had never heard of.
And then, at the end of the page, a number, and a letter, and a date, and the words: CHECKED THROUGH.
There was nothing else.