Jack L. Chalker - Identity Matrix

THE IDENTITY MATRIX

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resem-blance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Enterprises 260 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y.

First Baen printing, January 1986 ISBN: 0-671; 65547-

Cover art by Dawn Wilson

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by

SIMON & SCHUSTER

MASS MERCHANDISE SALES COMPANY

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y.

This one's for my technical advisors, Bill Hixon, Dave Weems, Ben

Yalow, Ron Bounds, and Mike Lalor, to whom all nasty cards and letters

should be sent.

This time the horror was an old woman.

She ambled down the little street that was like all slum back alleys in every

city in the world: garbage-littered, closed-in, filled with the cries of babies, the

yells of aimless adults, and smelling like too many people were cramped into

too little space, a fact further attested to by the long lines of frayed washing

hung from fire escape to fire escape.

She toddled along, dressed in a faded green and very baggy print dress

decorated with faded orange flowers, garb that seemed to accent rather than

hide, the effects of age and improper diet. The dress itself was rumpled, as if

she slept in it and removed it only for an occasional super-bleached washing.

She halted in the middle of the street as some wisps of wind broke the heat

of the day and rolled discarded trash from one side to the other and looked

cautiously around.

A lone young black male, barely fifteen, dressed in old, faded shorts that

had been cut off from a well-worn pair of blue jeans, and little else, was idly

humming an incompre-hensible tune as he tossed a little red rubber ball

against the wall and caught it.

She stopped to watch him for a moment, her kindly face breaking into a

satisfied smile as it squinted to observe the young man.

She liked them young, and he looked in excellent health.

The solitary ball player hadn't even noticed her; he didn't notice as she

positioned herself carefully behind him and took one last glance around.

After a few more seconds the kid threw the ball against the cracking brick

facade a little too hard and ran into her as he chased the flying red missile

that sailed overhead. She fell, then muttered something he couldn't hear under

her breath and started to pick herself up.

The kid was extremely apologetic, and she smiled a toothless smile at him.

"That's all right, boy," she told him kindly, "jest hep me back up to my old

feet."

She held out her hand, and he took it, pulling her up.

Suddenly, so quickly that he didn't even have time to think, he stiffened,

then shook himself and looked down at the old woman again.

She appeared to have fainted and lay collapsed in a heap in the middle of

the street. Carefully, he knelt down beside her and groped for something

strapped to her leg, a small case, held in place by an elastic band.

Carefully removing the case, he opened it and removed a hypodermic

needle. Taking her limp arm, he found a vein, then stuck the needle into it and

pushed the plunger slowly, injecting air.

Satisfied, he walked down the street to where it came to another, larger and

busier one, and dropped the syringe down the sewer so casually without

stopping that no one would have noticed that anything had been discarded.

A little farther down the street a young white woman waited tensely at the

wheel of a yellow Volkswagen, motor running.

Without a word, the young black man opened the pas-senger door, got in,

and settled down. Without even a glance, the woman started the car forward,

and, within a minute, was out of sight, lost in a sea of thousands of little cars

heading into and out of the inner city.

He walked into the old morgue with an air of confident authority. A police

sergeant greeted him just inside, and after exchanging a few words they made

their way down a long, echoey hall lined with ancient marble, their foot-steps

ghostly intrusions on the quiet.

They entered the main room and both shivered slightly, for it was a good

deal colder here than in the rest of the building and in extreme contrast to the

heat of the muggy August night.

One wall was filled with what looked like huge airport lockers of a dull

gray. The sergeant checked the names and numbers, then nodded and turned

the shiny aluminum handle on the third from the bottom.

The compartment slid out on well-greased rollers reveal-ing a body

wrapped in a clinical white sheet with the city's seal on it. Methodically, the

sergeant pulled back the cover to reveal the body of an elderly woman, Jane

Doe #8, wearing a faded green flowered dress.

The man nodded gravely then removed a small fingerprint kit from his suit

pocket and took her index finger's indentations carefully.

The sergeant recovered the body and slid it back into the refrigerated

compartment, while the man reached into his inside jacket pocket and took a

small card from a worn leather billfold.

He put the card next to the one on which the old wom-an's prints stood out

clearly, nodded to himself, and grunted, a sour expression on his face.

"It's her, all right," he said disappointedly. "That old bitch beat me again."

Chapter One

I should have known better than to go to a bar on a Friday night, even in

Whitehorse, Yukon territory.

Whitehorse has that aura of backwoods pioneer behind it, but about the only

evidence of roughing it left in, the now modern, metropolitan city are a few

multi-story apartments made of logs and the prices you have to pay for

everything. Long ago the old frontier gave way not just to traffic lights but traffic

jams, parking meters, and modern, plush motels and restaurants. The motel I

was in might as well have been in New York, or maybe Cedar Rapids, with its

neon, its prefabricated twin double beds and little bands reading "sanitized for

your protection" and several channels of cable televi-sion—in color, of course.

The bar, too, wasn't much different than anywhere else in North America

these days—dark, with a small band (one would think that any act reduced to

playing Whitehorse would find a better way to earn a living, but, what the hell,

they'd never dream of leaving show business) playing all the latest pop-rock

dance tunes pretty badly while lots of the young men and women dressed in

suits and designer jeans mingled, talked, and occasionally danced in the small

wooden area in front of the stage and barmaids continually looked for

poten-tially thirsty patrons at the tables. About the only rustic touches were the

stuffed and mounted moose, elk, and bear trophies over the bar (probably made

in Hong Kong) and a few plastic pictures of the Trail of '98 on the walls, all

impossible to see clearly in the deliber-ately dim light.

I sat there, alone, looking over the scene when the barmaid came over and

asked if I wanted another drink. I remember looking up at her and wondering

what fac-tory made motel barmaids for the world. The same one that made state

troopers and cab drivers, probably.

I did need a drink and ordered a bourbon and seven, which arrived promptly.

I sighed, sipped at it, and nib-bled a couple of pretzels, surveying the people in

the bar.

There were a few differences, of course. Some old people—I mean really

old people—were incongruously about, looking like retired salesmen from Des

Moines and haggard, elderly grandmothers of forty-four kids, which is probably

what they were. What they most certainly were were tourists, part of a group that

was one of thousands of geriatric groups that came to Alaska and the Yukon

every year on the big cruise liners and by fast jet and motor coach combinations.

Most of their party would be at one of the "authentic" old frontier bars down the

street, of course, all about as authentic as Disneyland; but these were the

leftovers, the ones whose arthritis was kicking up or who'd been on one too

many tours today and just didn't have any juice left. I re-flected that it was a

shame that most of those romantic-sounding cruises to exotic Alaska always

looked like floating nursing homes, but, I suppose, that age was the only one

where you had both the time and the money to do it right. Somebody once said

that youth was wasted on the young, who had neither the time nor resources to

properly enjoy life, and nowhere was that more graphically illustrated than here.

Still, these people had worked hard and lived full, if extremely dull, lives and

shouldn't be begrudged for this last fling. They were lucky in a number of ways,

at that.

Most people never get the chance to go coast to coast, let alone to

someplace far away like Whitehorse, and, of course, their lives had been

satisfying to them, anyway.

Lucky…

I knew I shouldn't have gone to a bar on a Friday night, not even in

Whitehorse. You sat there, drinking a little, watching the beautiful people—and

the not-so--beautiful people pretending they were—drift in and out, mix it up,

watch couples pair up and others mix and match. You sat there and you

watched it and you drank a little more, and the more you watched and the longer

you sat the more you drank.

It'd be easier, I often thought, if I were physically scarred or deformed or

something like that. At least you could understand it then, maybe come to grips

with it then, maybe even find somebody who took pity or had sympathy for you

so you'd meet and talk and maybe make a new friend. Harder, far harder on a

man's psy-che to have the scars, the deformities within, hidden, out of sight but

no less crippling or painful.

I finished the bourbon, and, leaving a couple of dol-lars for the barmaid, left

the place. Nobody noticed, not even the barmaids.

It was a little after midnight, yet the July sun shone brightly outside, sort of

like six or seven anywhere else. It was hard to get used to that most of all,

because your eyes told you it was day while your body said it was really late and

you were very tired. One of the tour groups was struggling into the lobby

looking haggard, turning the place briefly into a mob scene. I just stood and

watched as they bid their goodnights, some laugh-ing or joking, and made their

way to the elevators to turn in. None noticed me, or gave me the slightest glance,

and I waited there until they'd cleared out before going up myself. No use in

fighting that mob, not with only two elevators.

I got a newspaper and glanced idly through it while waiting for the elevators

to return. Nothing much, really. Internationally, the Russians were yelling about

something the CIA supposedly did in some African coun-try I barely knew, the

Americans were yelling about a new Russian airbase in the Middle East, there

was some sort of local rebellion in Indonesia, and the Common Market was

debating the duties on Albanian tomatoes. An earthquake here, a murder there,

the U.S. President was pushing for some new missile system, and the Ca-nadian

Prime Minister was in the Maritimes trying to keep Newfoundland from

seceding. Big deal. I suspected that this same newspaper could be used, with

perhaps a few names and locales changed, for roughly every third day of the

past two decades.

The elevator came and I got in, riding it swiftly up to my room, still glancing

through the wire-service laden local paper. NORAD scrambled in Alaska when a

UFO was sighted south of Fairbanks, but it was gone when they'd gotten there,

as usual. Ho hum. UFO stories seemed to run in ten-year cycles, with a

particular rash of them right now. I remembered meeting the ambassador to

Uranus once in San Francisco, really a balding, gray-haired little man with thick

glasses who might never really have been anywhere near Uranus, or even

Pittsburgh, but got a lot of attention by saying he had so often he almost

certainly believed his fantasy himself by now.

I unlocked the door to my room, went in, and flopped on the bed. All the

lonely people… That was a line from a song once, when I was growing up, and

it was certainly true. The world was full of such people—not the nonentities

downstairs, both old and young, who live but might as well not have lived, but

the lonely ones, the ones who fly to Uranus in their minds or maybe become

flashers in Times Square or take a crack at killing a politician. There were

degrees and degrees of it, from the horrible to the hilarious, but those nuts had

found a release, a way out. For a few there was no release, no way out, except,

perhaps, the ultimate way.

Some just got naked in cold, plastic motel rooms and jerked off to some

private fantasy they might not ever want to actually experience.

I got up after a while and walked into the bathroom. It was one of those kind

with a full-length mirror—you couldn't even shit without watching yourself doing

it—and I stopped and stared at myself as I had so many times before.

Behold Victor Gonser, I thought. Age—thirty-five. Height—five eight and a

half, something like that. Average. Over-all—average. Caucasian male who'd

always been almost scarecrow-thin and still looked that way, only now there was

an incongruous double bulge at the tummy that looked totally ridiculous. Most

people gained all over, or at least had heavy asses, but, no, mine ballooned

around the navel like some hydrogen gas bag.

There wasn't much hair left, and the thin moustache, all I could ever really

manage, gave me one of those mild-mannered accountant looks. Truth was, I

looked weak in all areas, the face a patsy's face, the kind of face that told you

you could walk all over this guy. And even this Caspar Milquetoast was

something of a fraud. The uppers were kept in a jar overnight, and I peered at

myself from a distance of six inches through glasses that looked like the bottoms

of Coke bottles.

There'd be no release tonight, I knew. I was too down, too depressed, too

sober despite the double bourbon. It was, I thought, a ridiculous situation for

somebody like me, but, damn it, there it was.

Somebody once said that a few of my colleagues envied me, and that had

shaken me up for quite a while. The people in question were better looking,

more outgoing, seemed to enjoy their lives. Envy? Me? But, of course, there

were the things they saw that I'd attained that I'd once also seen as wonderful,

only to find they were meaningless once you had them.

Money, for example, was always envied, and I'd had nothing to do with that

department. Dad had been a corporate lawyer with a really big-shot firm and

he'd made a bundle in his time. Home to me would be a mansion to most

people, sitting in the very wealthy Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. In a

place where a two-bedroom shack was a quarter of a million; we had twenty-two

rooms on fourteen wooded acres, complete with pool, riding stable, tennis

courts, you name it. It was a lot particularly when you consider that Mom had to

have a hysterectomy for a cancerous condition only a year or so after I was

born and that left just the three of us on the place. Two, really, since I guess we

saw Dad for about an hour a night and maybe every sixth weekend. That was

another of life's little jokes on people, I always thought. Self-made men who

worked damned hard and made a couple of million dollars were always so busy

they never were home enough, never had time enough, to enjoy any of that

money. And, when they started realizing this, as Dad finally did, they'd wind up

dropping dead of a heart attack just when they've decided to take it easy and

enjoy life.

As Dad did. Dead at forty-six. No geriatric cruises, no graduations,

weddings, sailing, none of that for him. That was left to the nonentities, the

retired feed grain salesmen from Des Moines with the IRA account.

Life was always full of cruel jokes like that, I thought glumly. And, when I'd

stood there, watching him being lowered into the ground surrounded by enough

big shots to buy California, I'd felt no. loss, no pain, no sense of grief, and I'd

felt guilty for that, but damn it all, it's hard to grieve for a man you barely knew.

Mom, now, she was a different case. I had to hand it to my father that he'd

remained married to her all that time, although he was no TV sex symbol star

himself. She was plain, beyond the best beauty and fashion con-sultants money

could buy, and she'd been poor. They both had been when they'd married just

out of college, and she'd gone to work and supported him through law school.

There was a bond there, between these two seem-ingly plain, ordinary people

from Moscow, Idaho, one that didn't fall apart as his spectacular law school

grades had attracted a large firm well connected to Senator Carlovich and which

he'd ridden to Washington and the seats of power. I don't know if it was love—I

was never sure of that—but it was more than a strict Catholic upbringing that

kept them together. I think, perhaps, that they each had what they wanted out of

life, or thought they did. Money, power, prestige.

But Mom wanted more than Washington social life, more than the routine of

being married to the powerful and well-connected, more than her political

activities and championing of liberal causes. I was the only child she had, and,

by damn, I was going to be somebody, too!

A private all-male military style prep school, one of the best, shielded from

the world, from the ordinary folk and the roots both she and Dad had risen

from, only the best training and prepping for Victor Leigh Gonser, yes, ma'am!

Hell, I was eighteen before I even met a girl in other than the most rigidly

controlled social situations, and by that time it was getting too late. I discovered

that I simply didn't know what to do. I hadn't had a childhood, I'd had a

mini-business adulthood, so pro-tected from my peers that I could hardly

identify with them. It's in the teen years, particularly, that you learn the rules

society has set down—how to meet and mix with other people, all the social and

sexual signals, the anthropology of your culture. Without them, and out in the

world, you find you're as well prepared for socializ-ing as you would be if you

were living amongst a New Guinea tribe. You're not a part of it, you don't fit.

And, of course, when you fail out of ignorance to respond to the rituals of

society you get pigeonholed and stereotyped and promptly ignored. In my case

the men, and women, at college at first thought I was gay, then decided, finally,

that I was sexless, a neuter without the needs they all had. God! How I envied

them.

So I threw myself into my studies, for that was all I had, and ignored the

social life and activities that the rest of the world enjoyed around me. The work

was absurdly easy, even at Harvard—money-hungry univer-sities had gone for

the least common denominator in a generation where such basics as reading and

math were largely irrelevant, and it had reached even here. Not that there wasn't

some intellectual stimulation, but it was the rare professor and the rare course

that offered it, and you could tell those men and women were not long for the

academic life. They did the inexcusable at a modern university—they thought,

and, worse, promoted thinking among those with whom they came in contact.

I excelled at university studies, not merely for this reason but because it was

the only thing I had to do that I could take some pride in accomplishment. I took

mas-sive loads, partly because I was interested in practically everything but also

because I had nothing outside the academic life to occupy my time or mind, and

the heav-ier the workload the less time I had to dwell on my lack of humanity.

Oddly, the social sciences held the greatest attraction for me, as if, somehow, I

could find what was lacking in my own being by studying others in a clini-cal,

professional pattern. I studied human behavior the way the biologist studies the

workings of a cell or the life of a paramecium. I wound up graduating summa

cum laude with double majors in psychology and sociol-ogy and a strong minor

in political science. For gradu-ate studies I concentrated on psychology simply

because I felt that I understood the interaction of human beings in groups as

much as anyone did up to then. It was the individual mind, the human psyche,

that somehow eluded me. Yet it was political science that I finally got my

doctorate in. The truth was, everybody I met in the psychology department was

definitely nuts, and a good deal of modern psychology exposed too much of the

human being studying it to others—the essence of psy-chology, of course.

This is not to say that I didn't try analysis. On a one-to-one basis I could be

frank, open, and free, but the problem was that I generally seemed to know as

much as the psychiatrist and more than many. The foundation of clinical

psychology is to get you to admit and recog-nize the causes of your problems

so that you can work them out. My trouble was that I knew the causes of my

problems, understood myself quite well, but that I could articulate what I needed

to join human society only to another similarly afflicted. The rest just couldn't

really understand.

Just after my twenty-fifth birthday something truly disenheartening happened.

I had graduated, received my Ph.D., and I was ready to make my own way in

the world from an academic standpoint, but not at all prepared to do so on an

emotional level. I was a twenty-five- year old sexually repressed virgin. There

seemed only one thing to do, and I did it, back home in Washington; when

outside a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue I was approached by an attractive

black woman, nicely dressed and finely featured. I actually approached the

proposi-tion clinically, as I did everything, reflecting that I had little to lose with

almost no money on me if it were a set-up for a rob-and-roll, and, what the

hell…

It was legit, and it was fascinating, and it was as coldly businesslike as any

academic lab exercise on both sides. It broke my cherry, but it was neither

satisfying nor particularly pleasurable in the end. All it showed me was that I was

a normal male with the ability to perform; it did nothing to integrate me into the

lives of real people.

I was offered an instructor's position in political sci-ence from a number of

places, but selected Johns Hopkins in Baltimore partly because it was close to

home and familiar surroundings and partly because it was the most prestigious

institution offering me anything. I did a couple of books that sold moderately

well, mostly examinations of political attitudes, and while I found the faculty

politics and under-graduate standards at Hopkins to be a mini-Harvard, I

managed to find myself a niche. Although my political writings weren't really

pop-ular with my colleagues, I was non-threatening, never rocked the boat, and

found it easy to say the right thing at the right time to the right person to keep it

that way. Not only the psychology, but all those years growing up around

Washington hadn't been totally wasted. Still, I tended to associate more with

faculty in other, unre-lated disciplines than with my own immediate colleagues. It

made it easier to keep out of arguments and office politics, and, of course, it

helped satiate my never-ending curiosity about practically everything.

And so, I guess, those who could not know what was going on in my head

(and no one else could) could envy me—rich, with a solid position at a top

school, and with a modest amount of national fame through my books and

occasional TV talk show stints. They especially loved me for voter analysis

around election time.

Mom died when I was thirty-three. Funny—she'd always been paranoid about

cancer since that operation so long ago and it had become a passion with her.

So she died of a heart attack on the tennis court at age sixty-one.

I felt real grief for her, even though she was at the heart of most of my

problems. She had meant well, and she'd been proud, and, I guess, she'd been

the only real human being I could relax with. I considered an offer from

American University so I could live in the house, but one look at the place with

just me and no social life made that idea ridiculous. I just rented it for a fantastic

sum to the Majority Whip of the Senate, who needed it, and took a large old

brownstone near Hopkins.

Mom's passing, though, had a serious effect on me. For the first time in my

life I was totally, utterly, truly alone. There was no one else now (I suppose

Mom went to her grave bewildered that her frenzied matchmaking did no good

at all) and every time I looked in a mirror I saw myself growing older, falling

apart a little more, losing my last chance at ever joining humanity. I was

becoming, had become, not human at all, but a sort of friendly alien, a creature

that was nonhuman in all respects and, like Marley's ghost, could only wander

the world watching happiness it could not share, existing but somehow apart. I

moved through crowds, the only one of my kind.

I often envied women, and even occasionally fanta-sized myself as one. Not

that I was gay, as I said—this was different. It seemed to me that women had an

in-nate social advantage in a society that was male created and, despite years of

liberation, still predominantly male dominated. Women, even the most sheltered,

were raised to know the rules of the game. Oh, it might be as a warning—if this

guy does this, watch out!—but they all knew. They had more options than men,

too, in a curi-ous way. I suppose that was why many men feared the women's

rights movement. Society—not codified laws, cultural laws—now gave them all

the options. Marriage was an option. Children, in or out of marriage, was an

option. They could work, with the full backing of the law and the courts, in any

field they wanted competing directly with men, or they could opt to be

supported by men. Men, on the other hand, had none of these options. The

courts still put the burden of divorce and child support on the man while

granting custody to the woman, no matter what the relative age or income. Men

couldn't have children. Men could not opt to be supported by women if they so

chose.

And, in any case, no woman seemed to be in my position in a crowd.

Women could walk into a motel bar and be the center of attention, no matter

what they looked like, of lonely men on the make. A female colleague of mine

once confessed that she'd dropped a bundle in Reno and was left with nothing

but a bus ticket home—yet men bought her breakfast, lunch, and dinner with

only a little prodding, and she'd made out quite well, thank you. And she was as

ugly an old bag as you could imagine.

It wasn't the sexual part of a woman's life I craved, it was the social

interaction that was seemingly almost automatic. Academically I knew that there

had to be some women, somewhere, who were in my kind of fix, but I couldn't

conceive of them in real-life terms.

I wanted a wife, children, parties, dancing, mixing, socializing, feeling, love,

tenderness, togetherness with another human being.

And there I stood, looking at reality, in a motel john in Whitehorse and

knowing it just wasn't going to happen.

Since Mom died I'd gone away for the whole summer, conscious of the fact

that neither of my parents had lived to a very old age and that I could go any

time. If I couldn't participate, at least I could visit.

My first year I'd gone on the Grand Tour in Europe. I'd been there before, of

course, but this time I poked into everything and anything. I spoke passable

German and my French was very good indeed and it helped a lot.

And this time I'd decided on Alaska and the Yukon, mostly because it was

already dramatically changed from when I was a boy and I had this strong

feeling that, if I didn't see it soon, I'd come back to find it domed over and

paved, a chilly California. I'd salmon-fished at Katmai, took a trip into Gates of

the Arctic National Park, walked the garbage-strewn streets of Barrow, taken a

boat down the Yukon, and now, after a flight from Fairbanks, it had been more

than worth it—the place, spoiled or not, still was absolutely the most scenic area

in the whole world.

And huge, and wide, and lonely.

I loved the place, but knew that July was not January, and I wasn't so sure I'd

like it in the opposite season.

From Whitehorse I intended to take the once-a-day tourist train of the White

Pass and Yukon Railway to the trail head at Yukon National Park on the

Canadian side, then make my way down the Chillicoot Pass, a reverse Trail of '

98, way down to Sitka at the bottom, where I could catch the ferry south. The

trail was excellent, thanks to the National Park Service, and while I couldn't have

hiked a hundred feet up it the way the pioneers did in the gold strike days, I was

wonderful at walking down trails. It was a natural capstone to my Alaskan Grand

Tour, as it were, and one that I'd have hated myself for passing up. I looked

forward to the walk, but not to its ending, for that boat would take me to Seattle

and a plane home. I didn't want to go home, really. That bar had brought it all

back to me, and, in a sense, represented what home and "real life" was.

I didn't really want real life any more, not that kind, and lying in bed, in the

stillness of the early morning, I wondered if I really wanted life at all.

The White Pass and Yukon Railroad owes its exis-tence and continued huge

fortune to the gold rush. One look at the Chillicoot Pass showed that only the

hardiest could climb it under the best of conditions—yet tens of thousands did,

carrying all that they owned on their backs. The lucky ones made it to the top

without collapsing or being robbed by Soapy Smith and other pro-fessional

crooks, but, as with all gold rushes, even the lucky ones who made it to the

headwaters of the Yukon River and the boats that men like Jack London piloted

downriver to Dawson and the gold fields, rarely struck it rich. Those who did,

though, were faced with prob-lems as well, for never had gold been so remotely

lo-cated and so hard to get not merely out of the ground but out of the area once

you did. As the boomtowns grew, their new, swelling populations also needed

almost all manufactured goods—and it was due to this that enterprising business

pioneers, in a stunning feat of engineering, built the narrow gage railroad all the

way from the port at Skagway up, over the mountains, to Whitehorse and the

river and road connections. Although the gold fever was now long gone the

railroad pros-pered, supplying growing population of the Yukon and dealing

now in new, less glamorous but no less needed resources of the burgeoning

north country. So big was the business that they'd been trying for years to get rid

of the one tourist train a day, as there was still only a single track and it was

needed for more profitable goods, but, while service was not really what it once

was, that train still ran.

At the beautiful headwaters of the Yukon River, in a bed of glistening lakes at

the river's source, the train stopped at the old station where once the

gold-seekers had transferred to glittering stern-wheelers, only now it was to feed

the captive tourists a captive lunch and allow northbound freights to pass. It was

here, though, that I got off with a pack and little else, since, just around the lake

over there, was the top of the Chillicoot. It was a warm day, around 60 degrees,

which meant almost hot down in Skagway, only a few miles for the eagle to fly

but a long, long way down. The air was crisp and cleaner than most people have

ever known, and, near the trail head, you could look down through scat-tered

clouds and see the Pacific far beyond gleaming in the sun.

Although it was a long walk, with all its switchbacks, it was an easy day trip

from this direction—three or four for the one in great condition coming up the

way the pioneers did—but I had been trapped by the tourist train's schedule and

it was past midday. My ferry wasn't due in down there until after 7 P.M. the next

Jack L. Chalker - Identity Matrix

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