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creeping up a staircase.
    “. . . but now you’re over the hill?” The camera pulled back to reveal the tweed jacket and dignified face of a professorial gentleman, the commercial’s narrator.
    “Then come to Rekall, Incorporated,” he continued, “where you can buy the memory of your ideal vacation cheaper, safer, and better than the real thing.” The scene changed to a beach at sunset. The narrator sat comfortably in an odd-looking chair which floated over the water. “So don’t let life pass you by. Call Rekall: for the memory of a lifetime.” Quaid watched, fascinated, as the Rekall jingle played and a twelve-digit phone number filled the screen.
    Quaid was intrigued. He was held in thrall by a foolish dream. That was what this outfit seemed to be selling: a dream, in the form of a memory. Would that be good enough? He knew he needed some way to resign himself to his ordinary life. Maybe this was it.
    The commercials blared on, exploring intimate toiletries, supposedly excellent investments, nostril suppositories to denature the pollution, and other products, but Quaid didn’t notice. Maybe he had found a way to visit Mars after all!
    In due course he arrived at his job. He wasn’t late, quite, and soon he was onsite, doing what he did best. When the demolition execs wanted something broken up fast and well, he was the first man assigned. He never slacked off; he used the work as exercise, building his muscles unceasingly. After all, Lori was turned on by muscle, and maybe the dream woman of Mars was too.
    He tried to distract himself from that last thought, focusing his attention on the job at hand. They were in the midst of clearing away one of the old auto factories that littered the landscape. Pollution levels had finally become life-threatening some fifty years ago, as everyone had predicted they would, but it wasn’t until people started dropping like flies that anyone had done anything about it.
    Fossil fuel-burning vehicles were no longer “regulated” or “reconditioned”—they had been banned outright, and clean fusion technology, which had been available for years, was finally put to a practical use. The car manufacturers had fought the changeover tooth and nail, but they had finally yielded to public pressure and designed emission-free cars. It was a drop in the bucket, too little almost too late, as far as eliminating pollution went, but it was a start.
    The car manufacturers had abandoned their old, outmoded factories in favor of streamlined, wholly mechanized plants in which robots were run by computers. But the detritus of the past remained and it was Quaid’s job to get rid of it. This morning he was working on the entrance road leading to the site of the derelict factory. He was hardly conscious of the passage of time as he reduced the roadway to quality rubble.
    The thing about working hard was that it took his mind off foolish dreams; he focused exclusively on the job to be accomplished, as if it were the center screen of a truly fascinating video, tuning out all else. There was a certain joy to the breaking up of surfacing; it was as if he were pounding away at the strictures of society that kept him here on dull Earth instead of on some more interesting planet. He was accomplishing something.
    But now the dream returned, refusing to give up. He tried to ignore it, but it hovered by him. Rekall—was there anything to it?
    “Hey, Harry!” he shouted above the roar of the hammer. Harry was a middle-aged jack-jock, with a beer belly and a Brooklyn accent. They’d worked together for a couple of years and Quaid had found him to be a likeable, stand-up kind of guy. “You ever heard of Rekall?”
    “Rekall?” Harry shouted back. Bits of rock fell from his hair as he shook his head. He didn’t place the reference.
    “They sell fake memories!” Quaid prompted.
    Now Harry remembered. “Oh, yeah,” he said, and bellowed the company’s jingle at the top of his lungs. Then he