In the Deadlands by David Gerrold

was sort of like ozone and sort of like flowers.
    The girls were sitting again, hardly even watching. As if they’d lost all interest after making the connection. I turned to Wooze and offered the jar to her. She didn’t look up. She didn’t stand up.
    â€œJust rub it in?” I asked.
    â€œUh-huh,” said one of the girls. I couldn’t tell which, I wasn’t looking at them. “All over. Cover everything you want to take with you.”
    â€œExcept the soles of your feet,” put in the other. “Unless you don’t want to come back.” And with that, they both laughed. I didn’t get the joke. Perhaps I would later. I took some of the goop in my hand and smeared it across Woozle’s chest. I had to go down on one knee and push her arms aside to do it. She didn’t resist.
    After a bit, I made her stand up and I made sure that I’d rubbed her all over—except for the soles of her feet. “What’s it feel like, Wooze?”
    â€œNothing yet. Just slippery.”
    â€œWell, maybe it takes a little time. You do me now.”
    She did. Her hands were dull and lifeless and spread the goop with no more feeling than shovels. She did it mechanically and uncaring, but she was thorough. I helped her a little bit, but it wasn’t necessary. She was like a machine, running sensors all up and down me as if to memorize my body for later.
    Then I was covered with the goop all over and the smell of it was overpowering. “Now what?” I looked at the girls, but they weren’t there.
    â€œHold hands,” they replied. “That is, if you want to go together.”
    Yeah, that sounded right. This was the new kick. This was what I’d been promised in front of Cannie’s—a trip you could share. No more one-man-alone numbers. I was tired of sitting around in a room watching everybody else going in a different direction. I wanted someone to share my direction. Yeah, I was ready for it. Now, you could go and take someone good along to share it with you—and you could share theirs. I reached out for Woozle’s hand. It felt different somehow. Tinier. Yeah, if you were going to share it, you should at least be holding hands.
    I could feel the stuff now. Or, that is, I couldn’t feel it any more. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. I felt... disembodied(?)... no, that wasn’t it either. Creeping cold warmth was seeping out around my edges, dilating into the not-quite.
    My eyes, great multifaceted things, grew till they spread around the top and sides of my head and I looked in all directions at once. Woozle’s hand looked back at mine. We stood half an inch above the floor and listened to water burning our legs.
    What it was, was this—I was a pillar of fire, taken fresh from the freezer, standing still in the lightless and examining things in the reflected glare of (myself) and all was timeless until the water drops spattered into steam upon the hot. That didn’t make sense.
    But who cared? I was tripping. And Woozle was too. She was with me. She always was. Oh, yeah. We were in a tiny red cubicle—red from the frozen flame?— just one cubicle out of millions of identical tiny red cubicles stacked one upon another, left and right and north and east and yesterday and Tuesday and purple and—
    FLASH!
    Woop? What was that? Now the top of the room hung below us. We looked down the long tube at ourselves still holding hands. The red light seeped and pulsed and permeated it all. We were above and looking down and sideways at the little honeycombed rednesses below. Little black insects scraped within.
    The whole city of shining black was below us. We looked down at them from our hot two-hundredth-story window, noses pressed flat against the glass, trying to push through it so as to see our own selves from the outside. Cannie’s was only ten floors below. We watched the black uniforms herding them out of the