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managed to say. He shut his eyes and the pain flooded over him, radiating out from the spot where the beam had touched him.
    “What you’re saying,” the young police official said, “constitutes in itself a felony and we could book you on that, too. We could even turn you over to the Political Control Bureau as an enemy of the working class, engaged in a conspiracy to advocate agitation against the people and the servants of the people, such as ourselves. But your record heretofore—” He studied Joe with professional intensity. “A sane man doesn’t start handing coins out to total strangers.” The police official examined a document which had come unreeling itself out of a slot of his desk. “Obviously you acted without deliberation.”
    “Yes,” Joe said. “Without deliberation.” He felt nothing in the way of emotions; he experienced only bodily discomfort, acute and still growing. It had preempted any feeling, any mental activity.
    “However, we’re going to impound your remaining coins. For the present at least. And you’ll be on probation for a year, during which time you will report here, once a week, and give us an account, a full account, of your activities.”
    “Without a trial?” Joe said.
    “Do you want to be tried?” the police official eyed him keenly.
    “No,” Joe said. He went on rubbing his head. The QCA material apparently hasn’t been fed to their computers yet, he decided. But eventually it’ll all be combined. They’ll put it all together, my tipping the cop, my finding notes in the water closet of my toilet. I’m a nut, he said to himself. I’ve gone mad from inactivity; the last seven months have destroyed me. And now, when I made my move, when I took my coins to Mr. Job—I
couldn’t do it
.
    “Wait a minute,” another cop said. “Here’s something on him from OCA. It just rolled down the circuit from their computer bank central.”
    Turning, Joe ran toward the door of the police station. Toward the mass of people outside. As if to bury himself among them; to cease to be a finite part.
    Two cops appeared ahead of him and they lunged toward him as he ran; they came closer unnaturally rapidly, as if on video tape speeded up. And then, suddenly, they were under water; they, like slender silver fish, gaped at him and rhythmically maneuvered themselves among—good god! coral and seaweed. And yet he himself felt nothing, no water; but here was a tank of water, instead of the police station, all the furniture like sunken wrecks, half-buried in sand. And the police twisted and streaked by him, lovely in their glittering gliding movements. But they could not touch him, because he, although standing in the center, was not in the tank. And he heard no sound. Their mouths moved, but only silence reached him.
    Bobbing and undulating, a squid swept past him; it was, he thought, like the soul of the sea. The squid all at once ejected clouds of darkness, as if meant to efface everything. He saw no police officers, now; the darkness propagated itself until it filled up the panorama and then it became more intense, as if it were not opaque enough before. But I canbreathe, Joe said. “Hey,” he said aloud—and heard his own voice. I’m just not in the water, he realized, like they are. I can identify myself; I’m split off, a separate entity. But why?
    What if I try to move? he wondered. He took one step, another, and then clunk; he rebounded off a wall-like surface. Another way, he said; he turned and took a step to his right. Clunk. In panic he thought, I’m in a box like a coffin! Did they kill me? he asked himself. When I tried to run for the door. He reached his arms out, into the darkness, groping…and something was placed in his right hand. Small, square. With two disklike knobs.
    A transistor radio.
    He turned it on.
    “Hi there, folks!” a happy, tinny voice sounded in the darkness. “This is Cavorting Cary Karns here with six phones sitting in front of me and twenty