First Person Peculiar by Mike Resnick Page A

wordlessly in my ear (or somewhere) to hit the deck before I got my/his/our damned fool head blown off.
    This was contrary to everything they had told me at the Institute. I wasn’t even supposed to be in communication with my former self. Even emergency conferences while bullets flew through the air were supposed to be impossible.
    The more I thought about it, the more I decided that this definitely qualified as a bona fide Institute-visiting emergency. So I put on my jacket and left the condo and started off for the Institute. I didn’t have any luck flagging down a cab—like frightened herbivores, New York cabbies all hide at the first hint of nightfall—so I started walking over to the East River slidewalk.
    I had gone about two blocks when a grungy little man with watery eyes, a pockmarked face, and a very crooked nose jumped out at me from between two buildings, a wicked-looking knife in his hand.
    Well, three years without being robbed in Manhattan is like flying 200 missions over Iraq or Paraguay or whoever we’re mad at this month. You figure your number is up and you stoically take what’s coming to you.
    So I handed him my wallet, but there was only a single small bill in it, plus a bunch of credit cards geared to my voiceprint, and he suddenly threw the wallet on the ground and went berserk, ranting and raving about how I had cheated him.
    I started backing away, which seemed to enrage him further, because he screamed something obscene and raced toward me with his knife raised above his head, obviously planning to plunge it into my neck or chest.
    I remember thinking that of all the places to die, Second Avenue between 35 th and 36 th Streets was perhaps the very last one I’d have chosen. I remember wanting to yell for help but being too scared to force a sound out. I remember seeing the knife plunge down at me as if in slow motion.
    And then, the next thing I knew, he was lying on his back, both his arms broken and his nose spouting blood like a fountain, and I was kneeling down next to him, just about to press the point of the knife into his throat.
    I froze, trying to figure out what had happened, while deep inside me a voice—not angry, not bloodthirsty, but soft and seductive—crooned: Do it, do it.
    “Don’t kill me!” moaned the man, writhing beneath my hands. “Please don’t kill me!”
    You’ll enjoy it, murmured the voice. You’ll see.
    I remained motionless for another moment, then dropped the knife and ran north, paying no attention to the traffic signals and not slowing down until I practically barreled into a bus that was blocking the intersection at 42 nd Street.
    Fool! whispered the voice. Didn’t I save your life? Trust me.
    Or maybe it wasn’t the voice at all. Maybe I was just imagining what it would say if it were there.
    At any rate, I decided not to go to the Institute at all. I had a feeling that if I walked in looking breathless and filthy and with the mugger’s blood all over me, they’d just Erase me again before I could tell them what had happened.
    So I went back home, took a quick Dryshower, hunted up Dr. Brozgold’s number in the book, and called him.
    “Yes?” he said after the phone had chimed twice. He looked just as I remembered him: tall and cadaverous, with a black mustache and bushy eyebrows, the kind of man who could put on a freshly-pressed suit and somehow managed to look rumpled.
    “I’m an Erasure,” I said, coming right to the point. “You worked on me.”
    “I’m afraid we have a faulty connection here,” he said, squinting at his monitor. “I’m not receiving a video transmission.”
    “That’s because I put a towel over my camera,” I told him.
    “I assume that this is an emergency?” he asked dryly, cocking one of those large, thick, disheveled eyebrows.
    “It is,” I said.
    “Well, Mr. X—I hope you don’t mind if I call you that—what seems to be the problem?”
    “I almost killed a man tonight.”
    “Really?” he