The nightmares started in Beirut. Stan's apartment was a modern one, just a block from the American University. He had opened the wood-slat Venetian blinds and had gone to bed, feeling dead tired. It was late August and things had not gone too well. Agents had disappeared. Fusion packages had disappeared from their hiding places.
But worries could not compete with physical exhaustion. He was asleep as soon as he hit the pillow.
The nightmares were terrifying. He was no longer Stanley Martin, patriotic agent for the planet Thusca. He was 17 years old once more, playing in the city streets of Chicago and fighting in a pillow fight with his older brother and running errands for his mother or watching her while she made meat loaf and took loaves of freshly baked bread from the ovens.
And then there was the smell of printing ink on freshly printed papers and reporters yelling "Copy boy!" at him and the twice weekly trips to the stockyards to pick up the live-stock reports.
The stockyards. He had stopped by an alley one morning and three men had jumped him, slugging him in the stomach and kidneys and hitting ... hitting ... hitting....
He woke up, shaking. His pajamas and the bed sheets were soaked with perspiration. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his head in his hands.
He had dreamt that he was an ape.
He got up and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. He didn't go back to sleep.
The nightmare the next night was different. Once again he saw two small French boys playing in the street. One moment, thin, bandy-legged kids in short pants and berets ... the next, two blazing torches that crumpled silently to the asphalt.
And then there was the hideous, horribly shrill screaming of Reynolds when Tanner had played the heat gun over him. The terrible screaming that Stan knew would haunt him for years....