He didn't even know what time it was. In this perpetual mock daylight, there was no change; there were no variations of seasons in this sterilized, irradiated, humidified, filtered, deodorized, oxygenated, constantly circulating seventy-five degrees. He remembered when streets used to have names, when you needed a street guide instead of a course in geometry to find your way around the city. He remembered when a city was many buildings, not one immense pyramid, when you wore dark glasses against the sun's glare on the pavements, when a Santa Ana blew dust over everything or smog stung your eyes, when people drove their cars into the downtown congestion instead of leaving them on the outskirts, when they said to each other, "There hasn't been enough rain this year," because there was no weather control and water for the lawns came all the way from the Colorado instead of from the nearby Pacific.
That was the trouble—his mind slipped back to the old days, his memories got out of sequence, and he wandered away from Recidivist Gardens, the only place he felt comfortable and at home. Dr. Tyson said it was because he had been in the field so long that time, twenty years ago.
A young man was staring at him, and Slick looked down at himself. No wonder the young man was staring! To his shame, Slick saw that he was wearing some kind of clothes, and worst of all, he was wearing them inside the city! Where had he found them? The only possible explanation was that he had drawn them out on his museum card. These scrambled-sequence attacks were becoming more embarrassing each time!
"Don't act so flustered, Pop," the young man said. "Nobody saw you but me. Take 'em off and I'll put 'em in the lost-and-found chute for you. Or are you on your way to a costume ball?"
Slick looked over the railing of the balcony. There were several people waiting for elevators and radial cars on the level below, all decently naked, of course, but the young man was right. Nobody else had seen Slick's shame. Hurriedly, he stepped out of the uncomfortable clothes and rolled them into a bundle. The young man took it from him.
"You're very kind—thank you so much," Slick said.
"Think nothing of it," the young man said. "What address should I put on this stuff?"
"Just Recidivist Gardens. They'll take care of it in the office. I hope you don't think all of us at the Gardens do peculiar things like this. It's just that—well, it's a long story, but they didn't start my conditioning until I'd been in the blank five years. I'm not capable of anything really anti-social, you understand, but I get what they call sequence scrambles. Sometimes I act as if I were living in the past. I'm not crazy, though. The doctors at the Gardens assure me I'm not crazy."
"Of course you're not," the young man said soothingly. "But that's a long blank—five years."