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The Janus Syndrome
By Steven E. McDonald
(c)1981, 2007 by Steven E. McDonald
Originally published by Bantam Books, 1981
Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
To Pam and Sandy for the 'toons, the DNA, the cookies and the giraffe.
Thanks to Dirty Dick's No Pap Records for the records, and to Ben Bova for guidance, foresight and inspiration.
1. ST. LOUIS BLUES
Click.
The TV set I'd been staring at for twenty minutes suddenly shut down, leaving me to search for quarters while checking my watch. Seeing the time, I stopped checking the watch. Your time is up, number three. At least mine was.
I looked up and pulled a face, picked up a can of crapawful soda that I'd brought twenty minutes ago, and tried it. Still crapawful. I wasn't exactly comfortable either; the TV seats the Greyhound Bus people had put into the various terminals, including the St. Louis terminal, were designed to make you so uncomfortable you didn't notice the crappy quality of the TV signal.
Show-me. The goddamned show-me state. Missouri didn't have much to show. I wasn't particularly interested in looking, either. Area Fourteen had set one of his favorite midway contacts on me, cloak and dagger and all, and I wasn't amused.
He refused to tell me why I was here, the assumption being I'd be able to pick up things for myself, looking at everything, rather than having preconceptions.
So show me, Missouri.
I was approximately in the middle of the terminal, with a good view all around of a modern gray-a