He did not go home immediately.
He wasn't entirely sure why he didn't. He knew that he wanted to go
home more than anything else. To go back to the house he had known for
so long, back to the soft comfort of the old, heavy, carved furniture,
back to the rows of books, and the neat paintings on the walls. And
back to Marian, who would be waiting there for him. Oh, he wanted to
go back, but somehow something held him, some cold, unreasoning core
of apprehension that lay in his mind, whispering in his ear as he
walked down the steps of the Hoffman Medical Center into the crush of
traffic on the street below. His wrist still tingled from the needles
that had stamped the small green bar there, indelibly. The mark was his
passport, and he shivered as his mind echoed Cranstead's words back in
the office. "You're free in every sense of the word. Go wherever you
like, do anything you want to do. Deliberate criminality won't occur to
you, and you'll be incapable of it if it does. We've seen to that. But
otherwise, the ultimate decision is up to you--"
A cab skidded by and he hailed it. He settled back in the seat as the
little car swept up into the heavy elevated traffic that moved down
through the miles of curves and straightways into the center of the
City. It was huge, this beehive that had spread down from Boston and
up from Washington to engulf the entire Atlantic Seaboard, a place
where he could lose himself for a little while, and maybe think things
through before he went back to his home and to Marian. He stared from
the window at the bright lights below--the Lower Level commercial
traffic, speeding with its never-ending hum--the tattered sections of
the Old City that lay below, half-hidden ruins of an age that few men
could remember, or would want to remember if they could. The driver's
voice broke in on his reverie, and he gave a little start.
"I said, where you goin', Mister?"
"Oh. Anywhere. I don't care." He hesitated for a moment. "I'm a Free
Agent."