Counterfeit World by Daniel F. Galouye Page B

rooms, then went through the entire house once more, looking behind doors, in closets, under beds.
    “Jinx! Jinx!”
    I sprinted to the back door and felt its servo unit. Cold. It hadn’t been opened in the last half hour, at least.
    But Jinx was gone. It was as though I had only imagined seeing her enter the house.

9
    Again the equally untenable alternatives. Either Collingsworth was wrong in his conviction that cure of pseudoparanoia lay merely in its recognition. Or Jinx Fuller had vanished.
    Hours after my frantic search of her home, I parked the car in the garage, then lingered irresolutely in the sulking shadows outside my apartment building. Without even realizing I had stepped onto the low-speed pedistrip, I soon found myself belting through quiet, desolate sections of the city.
    Inadequately, I tried to cope with my dilemma. There had been disappearances. Jinx’s had proved that much. And that same impossible fate had befallen Morton Lynch, a sketch of Achilles and the tortoise, a trophy plaque bearing Lynch’s name, a stretch of road together with the countryside through which it ran.
    With Lynch and the drawing, it was still as though they had never existed. The road and the countryside had returned. What about Jinx? Would she be back—leaving me to wonder whether I had actually searched her house and failed to find her? Or would I soon begin learning that nobody else had ever heard of her?
    During early morning I left the pedistrip twice to call Jinx’s home. But each time there was no answer.
    Gliding again through deserted downtown sections, I could almost feel the dreadful presence of an Unknown Force closing in on me—a determined, malevolent Agency that lurked behind every shadow.
    Before dawn I had phoned three more times. And each futile call drove home the awful suspicion that I would never hear of her again. But why? Lynch’s disappearance was logical. He had been acting in defiance of the Unknown Force. Jinx, on the other hand, had insisted her father’s death was an accident.
    Yet now she was gone.
    Shortly after sunrise, I had coffee at an automat, then belted unhurriedly to Reactions. There I found an apprehensive group of ARM pickets huddling on the staticstrip and protected by riot squad members from scores of angry Siskin supporters.
    Someone raised a length of pipe to hurl it at the reaction monitors. But one of the officers leveled his laser gun. A cone of crimson light stabbed out and the man collapsed, temporarily paralyzed. The demonstrators retreated.
    In my office I spent the next hour wearing a path around the desk. Eventually, Dorothy Ford came in, drew back in surprise on seeing me there so early, then continued on over to the closet.
    “I’m having a hard time keeping tabs on you,” she said, delicately removing a small, pointed hat without disturbing the pageboy. “And that’s bad because the Great Little One probably figures that by now we ought to be nesting together.”
    She studded the closet door closed. “I tried to reach you during the night. You weren’t home.”
    “No explanations necessary. I wasn’t looking for you for myself. Siskin just wanted to make certain you’d be down early this morning.”
    “I’m down early,” I said flatly. “What’s on his mind?”
    “He doesn’t confide everything in me.” She headed back toward the reception room, but paused. “Doug, was it that Fuller girl?”
    Facing the window at the moment, I spun around. The very mention of Jinx’s name had had that effect. It had assured me that, thus far at least, Jinx wasn’t following in Lynch’s footsteps. As yet, the evidences of her existence weren’t being obliterated.
    Before I could answer, Siskin swept into the office, frowned up at me, and exclaimed, “You look like you spent the night ESB-ing!”
    Then he saw Dorothy and his expression softened. He stared back and forth between us. For me, his gaze, beneath slightly raised eyebrows, was calculative. For her, it