Stand on Zanzibar

context (7)

BULL FIGHT

Scene: a cathedral during morning service.

Cast: Bishop and congregation.

Detail: a smear along the front rim of the pulpit. It was applied with a paintbrush and consists of a vesicant (formula related to mustard gas but a sight more efficient) and a hallucinogen (GT’s catalogue reference AKZ-21205 converted by boiling with dilute sulphuric acid into the product nicknamed “Truth or Consequences”).

Prediction: when the Bishop closes his hands, as he invariably does, on the pulpit rail …

Truth: “I take my text from the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, from the seventeenth chapter, and from the first verse of that chapter. Hr-hm! ‘I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters.’

“Now I have no doubt that some of you—(ouch! What in the name of…?)—will have been a trifle shocked (what can possibly have made my hands smart like this?) at the choice of text which I’ve made—quite deliberately, I assure you (perhaps it’ll wear off if I try and ignore it)—in order to dramatise in the most violent possible fashion a truth which some people, professedly Christians like ourselves, have closed their eyes to. (It burns like hellfire!)

“The point which I want to make, which I hope to convince you needs to be made, is this—and it’s quite a simple one. Because the Book from which I took my text is that among all others which is relevant to everyday human experience, it does not shun some of the less palatable aspects of our lives. It does not express approval of them, naturally, but it certainly does not censor, as it were, the home truths about us which we have to face squarely if we are to lead the kind of lives it’s our Christian duty to attempt. (Ah, that’s better, it’s coming down to a sort of warm glow like gloves.)

“And because Man has a spark of the divine in his nature, the founders of our Church did not shrink from using very human—one might almost say crudely human—analogies in their teaching.

“The analogy of the prostitute, who sells her body for gain, is one which a few generations ago might have been regarded as distasteful by a great number of people. But the fact that our society called such people into existence was itself a shame—a disgrace, one might call it, using the strict technical aspect of the term ‘grace’. Fortunately we have come to recognise some concomitant aspects of the responsibility with which we have been charged by being created in material bodies, and among these is a recognition of the fact that the fact that the choice of the symbol of marriage between our Lord and His bride the Church was no accident—that, in short, the union between man and wife is an expression of love, an expression of love, in other words—ah—an expression of love. (I hope they won’t notice if I lean back against the pillar behind me!)

“Of course, prostitutes are becoming harder and harder to find these days. When I was a young man, there were some among my fellows who—ah—resorted to such persons, and I thought they were to be pitied, because clearly they had not come to terms with the built-in, as it were, faculty for expressing affection which is implied in the act which has not only the perpetuation of our species as its goal but also the giving of delight by one person to another or others.

“(?)

“When I say ‘others’, of course, I have in mind the regrettable fact that we human beings are far short of perfect and in a sense the full achievement of this heaven-sent faculty for pleasing one’s life’s partner is, like other human activities, one requiring testing and practice before the ultimate skill is achieved, and thus and therefore we find people who marry and genuinely regret that they chose this particular partner to whom in the upshot they are not after all suited and from whom with regret we part them regretfully because …

“Well, anyway. (Never realised before how heavy and sweaty these idiotic robes can become!)

“Lots of people don’t get this point, as you very well know. I mean, ever since the great schism of the late twentieth century, we’ve been treated to the nauseating spectacle of some head-in-the-sand bigots over there in Madrid bombarding what are supposed to be their fellow Catholics with a succession of bulls and encyclicals and what-not just because the Church of Rome cottoned on to the basic truth that there’s more to making love than manufacturing a series of babies who can be splashed with a bit of holy water and sent off to heaven to keep the hallelujahs flying and recognised the need for the contraceptive pill. But here’s this Pope Eglantine going on about how you mustn’t interfere with divine ordinances and give your other kids a chance to grow up in comfort so they can become rounded adult human beings, oh no, you must never ever enjoy yourself with anybody else except to procreate as though there weren’t enough of us around treading on each other’s heels and getting in the way all the time and taking away the bread from our mouths practically because they’re so greedy and selfish and Christ it’s enough to make you want to turn Muslim, really it is, because they’re promised a string of perpetually virgin houris when they die and what else is the contraceptive pill except a here-and-now counterpart of that no mucking about when your wife gets her belly full and night after night lying alone and unable to sleep for the pressure and you know literally it gets to be an ache after a while and all those sheeting idiots like Augustine who had his fun when he was a kid with the women of the streets and then turned around and forbade it for everyone else I think he had the pox and it got into his spinal fluid and brought on GPI and if it weren’t for the fact that he’s probably impotent anyone would think the same thing had happened to Pope Eglantine and his gang of Right Catholics. Why don’t I shut up and stop stuffing your ears with nonsense when you ought to be stuffing some other organ entirely?”

Consequence: the congregation was extremely disturbed.

continuity (6)

AUCTION BLOCK FOR ME

“Mr. House.” The tone absolutely neutral. “We met earlier today. Sit down, won’t you? It’ll have to be on the bed, I’m afraid—or perhaps you’d rather we adjourned to one of the public lounges downstairs?”

“No, this is fine,” Norman said distractedly, lowering himself on the very edge of the narrow bed. His eyes roamed randomly from point to point in the small room.

“May I offer you some refreshment? I recall that you don’t take alcohol, but perhaps coffee, or—”

“No thanks. I’ll smoke, though, if you don’t mind.”

“Ah, Bay Golds! That’s the brand I used to favour—no, I won’t, thank you. I gave it up. I was using it as a refuge from clear-headedness, and once or twice I nearly visited disaster on myself in consequence.”

Skirmishing. Abruptly Norman found the words to speak his mind. With the reefer in his hand still unlit, he said, “Look, Mr. Masters, let me say what I’ve come to say and then get out and stop bothering you. Mainly, it’s that I know I didn’t make a very good impression on you at lunchtime.”

Elihu leaned back in his chair, crossed his right leg over his left, put the tips of his fingers together, and waited.

“I’m not talking about the kind of impression Old GT and the rest of the high muckamucks brought me in to make on you. That has nothing to do with me as a person—it’s all the corporation image bit, here’s an enlightened employer with coloured VPs, and it’s stale news. The big companies have been doing it for fifty or sixty years and all it’s done is assuage a part of their guilt. What I’m apologising for is the impression I set out to make.”

He looked at Elihu squarely for the first time. “Tell me honestly: what did you think of me?”

“Think of you?” Elihu echoed, and gave a sad chuckle. “I didn’t get the chance to form an opinion of you. I’ll tell you what I thought of the way you were coming on, if you like.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“You were demonstrating to the distinguished visitor that you could be an even bigger bleeder than GT’s chief executives.”

There was a pause. Eventually Elihu dropped his hands to his lap. “Well, I’ve answered your question, and by your silence you haven’t had much benefit from it. Now answer one of mine. What happened to you when you were called down to the disturbance in Shalmaneser’s vault?”

Norman swallowed gigantically, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Nothing of much importance,” he muttered.

“I don’t believe you. When you came back you were on your automatic pilot; there wasn’t a spark of genuine personality in anything you did or said throughout the meal, just a set of conditioned reflexes operating well enough to fool anyone except maybe a psychologist—or a diplomat. I’ve learned to tell the difference, just by walking into a room, between an honest negotiator and a delegate instructed merely to parrot his government’s official standpoint. You may be able to lie to the WASPs you work for, but I’ve grown old in the study of human deceit, and I know.”

He leaned forward and took Norman’s left hand in his. He probed between the tendons with the tips of his fingers. For a moment Norman was too astonished to react; then he snatched himself loose as though he had been stung.

“How did you guess?” he said.

“I didn’t. An old man—I suppose you’d call him a witchdoctor—taught me muscle-reading in the back streets of Port-au-Prince while I was ambassador to Haiti. I thought for a moment you must have suffered some sort of major injury to that hand, but I can’t feel the effects of one. Whose hand was it, then?”

“My three times great-grandfather.”

“Back in slavery days?”

“Yes.”

“Cut off?”

“Sawn off. Because he hit his boss and knocked him into a creek.”

Elihu nodded. “You must have been very young when you heard about it,” he suggested.

“Six, I think.”

“A bad thing to tell a child that age.”

“How can you say that? It was the kind of important thing kids my age needed to be told! Six wasn’t too young for me to have learned that the kid I liked most on our block, the one I thought of as my best friend, was ready at a minute’s notice to join with other kids I didn’t like and call me a dirty nigger bastard.”

“Have you noticed you don’t hear that used so much any longer—that particular insult? Probably you wouldn’t have. I notice the shifts in usage because I spend years at a time out of the country, and the process has gone quite a long way whenever I return. Nowadays where you used to say ‘bastard’ you tend to say ‘bleeder’ instead—to mean ‘haemophiliac’, I assume.”

“What?” Confused, Norman shook his head.

“If the point isn’t clear, I’ll deal with it in a moment. How did this story about your ancestor affect you?”

“I used to get pains in this arm.” Norman held it out. “They called it rheumatism. It wasn’t. It was psychosomatic. I used to dream of being held down and having it sawn through. I’d wake up screaming and mother would yell at me from the next room to shut up and let her get her sleep.”

“Didn’t you tell her you were having nightmares?”

Norman looked at the floor between his feet. He shook his head. “I guess I was afraid she might scold my great-grandfather and forbid him to talk to me about it.”

“Why did you want him to? Never mind—you don’t have to spell it out. What happened today that connected with this traumatic at age six?”

“A Divine Daughter tried to wreck Shalmaneser with an axe. Chopped the hand off one of our technicians.”

“I see. Can they put it back?”

“Oh yes. But the surgeons said he might lose some of the motor functions.”

“And you walked in on this, from cold?”

“Prophet’s beard—cold! I didn’t know it was more than one of their sheeting demonstrations, slogan-shouting and waving banners around!”

“Why hadn’t your company police taken care of it before you arrived?”

“Worse than useless. Said they didn’t dare fire from the gallery for fear of hitting Shalmaneser, and by the time they made it to floor level I’d fixed her.”

“So you did fix her. How?”

Norman closed his eyes and palmed them. His voice barely audible between his hands, he said, “I saw a liquid helium leak once, from a pressurised hose. That gave me the idea. I got one of the pipes and—and I sprayed her arm. Froze it solid. Crystallised it. The weight of her axe snapped it off.”

“They can’t put her hand back then, presumably.”

“Prophet’s beard, no. It must have spoiled instantly—like a frosted apple!”

“Are you facing serious consequences from this? Are you going to be arraigned for maiming her, for example?”

“Of course not.” The words were half-contemptuous. “GT looks after its own, and in view of what she was trying to do to Shalmaneser … We’ve always cared more about property rights than human rights in this country. You should know that.”

“Well, if it’s not the consequences it must be the act itself. How has it made you feel about yourself?”

Norman let his hands fall. He said bitterly, “You missed your vocation, didn’t you? You should have been a shrinker.”

“My neuroses aren’t the kind you can project on to other neurotics. I asked you something, and unless I’m much mistaken it’s what you came here to talk about, so why not get it over with?”

The forgotten reefer went waveringly to Norman’s lips. He got it lit, drew in and held the first puff. After half a minute, he said, “How I feel about myself? I feel I’ve been conned. I feel ashamed. I finally evened the score. I got a trophy—I got a paleass’s hand. And how did I get where I could take that off? By following the rules for living that The Man laid down. And they’re no good! Because what use is that hand to my long-ago ancestor? He’s dead!”

He drew on the reefer again and this time held the smoke for a full minute.

“Yes, I think he probably is,” Elihu agreed after a few moments’ reflection. “As of today. Think he needs to be mourned?”

Norman gave a quick headshake.

“Right.” Elihu resumed his original position, elbows on chair-arms, fingertips together. “A short while ago I remarked on something that apparently struck you as irrelevant—the fact that you don’t hear people calling each other ‘bastard’ so much any more. It’s important. To be born out of wedlock doesn’t signify, any more than it did in slavery days when our forefathers and mothers didn’t marry—they simply bred. What you do hear used as an insult is a word that probably means ‘haemophiliac’. It matches the preoccupations of our society; it’s become detestable, anti-social, to have children if you’re carrying a harmful gene like that one. Are you on my orbit now?”

“Things change,” Norman said.

“Exactly. You aren’t six years old any longer. A boss can’t do to his subordinates what a long-ago white man did to your three times great-grandfather. But is the world a paradise because of those truisms?”

“Paradise?”

“Of course not. Aren’t there enough problems to handle in present time, that you should brood over ancient ones?”

“Yes, but—” Norman made a helpless gesture. “You don’t know what sort of a dead end I’ve been lured down! I’ve been working on the current version of myself for years, for decades! What am I to do?”

“That’s for you to work out.”

“It’s easy enough to say ‘work out’ the answer! You’ve been away from this country for years at a time, you said so yourself. You don’t know what The Man is like, even nowadays—you don’t know how he leans on you all the time, needles you, goads you. You just haven’t experienced my life.”

“I guess that’s a fair comment.”

“For example…” Norman gazed without seeing at the wall behind Elihu’s head. “Heard of a woman called Guinevere Steel?”

“I gather she’s responsible for the mechanical styles women are affecting here at the moment, as though they were built in a factory and not born of a mother.”

“Right. She’s planning to hold a party. It’ll be a microcosm of what I mean, all there in the one apartment and dripping slime. I should drag you along with me, and then perhaps you’d—”

He stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly appalled at what he was saying and who he was saying it to.

“Mr. Masters, I’m dreadfully sorry! I have no business to talk to you this way!” Rising to his feet, covered in embarrassment. “I ought to be thanking you very sincerely for your tolerance, and here I am insulting you and…”

“Sit down,” Elihu said.

“What?”

“I said sit down. I haven’t finished, even if you have. Do you feel you owe me anything?”

“Of course. If I hadn’t been able to talk to somebody tonight, I think I’d have gone insane.”

“How well you express my feelings,” Elihu said with ponderous irony. “May I take it that right now you aren’t excessively concerned with GT’s company secrets remaining inviolate?”

“I know too damned well that they aren’t.”

“I’m sorry?” Elihu blinked.

“A private problem … Oh, why try and hide it? The shiggy I’ve been keeping around lately turned out this evening to be an industrial spy; my roomie discovered an eavesdropping gadget hidden in a polyorgan she brought with her.” Norman gave a harsh laugh. “Anything you want to know, just ask—I can always claim she was the one who got away with the secret.”

“I’d rather you told me openly if you tell me at all.”

“Yes, I shouldn’t have said that. Go ahead.”

“What do GT’s people think is my purpose in approaching them?”

“I don’t know. No one has told me.”

“Have you figured it out for yourself?”

“Not exactly. I was talking about it with my roomie earlier this evening. But we didn’t reach any definite conclusion.”

“Well, suppose I were to say my intention is to sell my dearest friend into slavery to The Man, and that I believe it’s for his own good—what then?”

Norman’s mouth rounded slowly into an O. He snapped his fingers. “President Obomi?” he said.

“You’re a very intelligent man, Mr. House. Well—your verdict?”

“But what have they got that GT might want?”

“It isn’t GT as such. It’s State.”

“Not willing to risk another Isola-type crisis?”

“You’re beginning to amaze me, and I’m not joking.”

Norman looked uncomfortable. “To be frank, it was one of the ideas my roomie and I were tossing around. If I hadn’t heard it from yourself, though, I’d never have credited it.”

“Why not? GT’s annual profit is almost fifty times the gross national product of Beninia; they could buy and sell many of the underdeveloped countries.”

“Yes, but even granting their ability to do it, which I can’t contest, the question remains: what is there in Beninia that GT might want?”

“A twenty-year rehabilitation project that will create an advanced industrial bridgehead in West Africa, serviced by the best port on the Bight of Benin, able to compete on their own terms and on their own ground with the Dahomalians and the RUNGs. State has a computer analysis which suggests that the intervention of a third force is the only factor likely to prevent a war over Beninia when my good friend Zad dies—and that day can’t be as far off as I’d like it to be. He’s working himself into his grave.”

“And this will belong to GT?”

“It’ll be—mortgaged to GT, let me put it that way.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“But if the alternative is war—?”

“From the inside, from the status of a junior VP in the corporation, I say that war itself isn’t as foul as what GT can do to a man’s self-respect. Listen!” Norman leaned forward earnestly. “Do you know what they’ve duped me into doing? I subscribe to these Genealogical Research outfits, these near-crank businesses which claim to trace your descent on the basis of your genotype. And do you know I haven’t commissioned one to track my Afram heritage? I don’t know where my black ancestors came from to within two thousand miles!”

“And supposing it’s a cousin of yours—and mine—who gives the order and the armies march into Beninia! What’s going to be left of the country? The loser is going to scorch the earth behind him when he retreats, and there will be nothing left except rubble and corpses!”

Norman’s intensity faded. He shrugged and nodded. “I guess you’re right. We’re all human beings, after all.”

“Let me tell you the scheme. GT will float a loan to finance the operation, and State will buy a fifty-one percent interest through front agents—mainly African banks. GT will guarantee five per cent per annum for the twenty-year period of the project, and publish estimates of a yield in excess of eight per cent. That’s solidly based, by the way, on State’s computations; when they give the data to Shalmaneser they expect it to be confirmed. Then they’ll recruit the teaching staff, mainly among people who were colonial administrators and so on in the old days, people who are used to West African conditions. The first three years will go on diet, sanitation and building. The next decade will go on training—a literacy drive first, then a technical education programme designed to make eighty per cent of the population of Beninia into skilled workers. I see you’re looking incredulous, but I say I believe this will work. There’s no other country in the world where you could bring it off, but in Beninia you can. And the last seven years will go to build the factories, install the machine-tools, string the powerlines, level the roads—everything else, in short, to leave Beninia as the most advanced country on the continent, South Africa not excepted.”

“Allah be merciful,” Norman said softly. “But where do you get the power to feed into the lines?”

“It’s going to be tidal, solar, and deep-sea thermal. Mainly the latter. The temperature gradient between the surface and the sea-bed at those latitudes could apparently run a whole country much larger than Beninia.”

Norman hesitated. “In that case,” he ventured at length, “the raw materials will presumably be coming from MAMP?”

A new cordiality entered Elihu’s manner. “As I said before, Mr. House, you suddenly astonish me. When we met earlier today your—ah—superficial image was so flawless as to conceal from me this sort of perceptivity. Yes, that’s going to be the carrot with which we coax the GT donkey into agreement: the promise of a built-in market that will enable them to put the MAMP mineral deposits to work.”

“On the basis of what you’ve told me,” Norman said, “I presume they jumped at the idea.”

“You’re the first person at GT to hear the full details.”

“The—? But why?” Norman’s question was almost a cry.

“I don’t know.” Elihu seemed suddenly weary. “I guess because I’d kept it to myself too long, and you were here when it broke loose. Shall I call Miss Buckfast and tell her I want you sent to Port Mey to conduct the initial negotiations?”

“I—wait a moment! What makes you so sure she’ll consent when you haven’t even explained the project to her?”

“I’ve met her,” Elihu said. “And I only need to meet someone once to know if this is the sort of person who’d like to own nine hundred thousand slaves.”

the happening world (5)

CITIZEN BACILLUS

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice

Take stock, citizen bacillus,

Now that there are so many billions of you,

Bleeding through your opened veins

Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific,

Of that by which they may remember you.

Gravestones, citizen bacillus?

“Here lies in God the beloved husband

Of Mary, father of Jim and Jane”?

But they closed the cemetery at Fifth and Oak

And put up an apartment block on it.

Ideas, citizen bacillus?

They raised you literate and educated,

Equipped to exercise initiative.

But now our technological society

Insists you behave as a statistic.

Products, citizen bacillus?

It’s not by any means improbable

You possess advanced crafts and skills.

But there’s a tape in the chemical milling machine

Accurate to one molecular diameter.

A son, citizen bacillus?

Apply to the Eugenic Processing Board,

Give them a sample of your genotype.

But be prepared to hear it’s disallowed

And don’t complain in hearing of your neighbours.

No, no, citizen bacillus!

Here is your monument and it stands high!

The cars which you wore out, the clothes you tore,

The cans you emptied, furniture you broke,

And all the shit with which you clogged the drains.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice …

tracking with closeups (7)

THE TOO MUCH STRAIN

Until very recently Eric Ellerman had thought that this was the worst time of the day, the interval between waking and arriving at his job, spent steeling himself afresh each morning for the ordeal of facing his colleagues. But there seemed to be no “worst time” any longer.

It was purely and simply hell to be alive.

From the breakfast alcove where he was gulping his second cup of synthetic coffee—the three-child tax had taken away his chance of buying the real thing—he could see the morning sun glinting on miles of green-houses, rising from the far side of the valley, climbing up over the hill and vanishing into the next dip. Above them loomed a gigantic orange sign: FOR ME IT’S HITRIP OF CALIFORNIA EVERY TIME, SAYS “THE MAN WHO’S MARRIED TO MARY JANE”!

But how much longer can I live in sight of my work?

Through the flimsy wall separating him from the children’s room came the fractious squalling of the twins, neglected while Ariadne dressed Penelope ready for school. She was crying again too. How much longer before the hammering from the next apartment started? He cast a nervous glance at his watch and discovered that he had time to finish his drink.

“Arry! Can’t you quiet them?” he called.

“I’m doing my best!” came the fierce reply. “If you’d give me a hand with Penny that’d help!”

And, as though the words had been a signal, the banging from next door began.

Ariadne appeared, hair tousled, negligee hanging open to show the way her belly was sagging, shoving Penelope in front of her because the child was rubbing both tear-swollen eyes and refusing to look where she was going.

“All yours,” Ariadne snapped. “And I wish you joy of her!”

Abruptly Penny darted forward, throwing out her arms. One small hand struck the cup Eric was holding and the last of its contents shot across the windowsill and dribbled towards the floor.

“You little bleeder!” Eric exploded, and slapped her with his open palm.

“Eric, stop that!” Ariadne cried.

“Look what she’s done! It’s a miracle she didn’t soak my clothes with it!” Eric scrambled to his feet, dodging the dark-brown liquid as it trickled over the edge of the built-in folding table. “And shut up, you!” he added to his eldest daughter.

“You haven’t any right to call her dirty names!” Ariadne insisted.

“All right, I’m sorry—does that satisfy you?” Eric seized his lunch-bag. “But go and shut up those twins, will you? Before someone comes to the door to complain and sees you in that state! Don’t show yourself outside unless you’re wearing your new corset, for God’s sake. Maybe that’ll quiet some of the lying rumours that are going around.”

“I can’t do more than I’m doing already! I buy my pills at the block store making sure everyone can hear what I’m getting, I carry the Populimit Bulletin under my arm when I go out, I—”

“Yes, I know, I know! There’s no use telling me—try telling some of these sheeting neighbours of ours. But go and shut the twins up, please!”

Ill-temperedly, Ariadne went off to make the attempt, and Eric snatched at his eldest daughter’s hand. “Come along,” he muttered, heading for the front door.

They’re as good as telling me openly now that I ought to get a divorce. And maybe they’re right. I’m damned certain I should have gotten a raise for the work I put into developing the Too Much strain—heaven knows I need it (mustn’t say that, mustn’t, they’ll be convinced that it implies I really am what they think I am)—and maybe I would have but for what they assume about Arry …

He tugged the door open, thrust Penelope out into the corridor, and only then saw what was on the outside under the apartment number. Fixed to the panels with adhesive tape in the form of a rough cross, there was one of the crude plastic Mexican figures of the Virgin Mary which could be had for a dollar in local novelty stores, with a contraceptive pill jammed into its half-open mouth.

Underneath someone had chalked in hasty letters: “What’s good enough for her should be good enough for you!”

“A dolly!” Penelope exclaimed, forgetting her determination to go on crying until she was exhausted. “Can I have it?”

“No you can’t!” Eric roared. He ripped it down and stamped on it until it was a heap of coloured fragments, then scuffed at the chalked letters with the back of his hand to make them illegible. Penelope began howling all over again.

From the end of the corridor came a loud shrill snigger in the voice of a boy about ten or twelve. Eric whirled, but caught sight only of a foot and leg vanishing.

The Gadsden boy again. The little bleeder!

But it was no use making accusations. Smug in the knowledge he would never have more than his one child, clever enough at petty politics to have been elected blockfather thrice running, Dennis Gadsden would scarcely need even to deny the charge against his son.

Could I help it if our second cub turned out to be twins? Did I plan for all three of the bleeders to be girls? Sex-determination is expensive! It’s not illegal anyhow—we have clean genotypes, no diabetes, no haemophilia, nothing!

Not against the law, granted. But a drecky lot of difference that made. There wouldn’t have been—couldn’t have been—any eugenic legislation at all unless public opinion had already come around to the attitude that having three or more children was unfair to other people. In a country of four hundred million inhabitants raised on a dream of wide-open spaces where a man could do as he liked, it was logical enough.

We can’t live here much longer.

But—where else? They teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, thanks to the state tax on families larger than two children. Anywhere else in California the cost of travelling a longer distance to work would be prohibitive—and they’d have to move a good long way before they escaped the legacy of their reputation, even if they were to let one of the twins go for adoption. And although they’d avoid the tax by going over the border into Nevada, precisely because that maverick state had declined to impose child taxes and more than the minimum of eugenic legislation the cost of a home there was double or treble what it was in California.

Although—do I want to keep on at this job?

By a miracle, the elevator to the ground floor was empty apart from him and Penelope. He thought about the idea of quitting his job during the brief descent, and came to the same conclusion as always: unless he moved a long way off, divorced Arry—excessive fertility had been allowed as grounds in a Nevada court, though not yet in California or the other states of the union—and stripped himself of all associations with his family, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting another post comparable to his present one.

In any case, the thing he knew most about was the genetic selection and manipulation of strains of marijuana; it was his most salable skill. And Hitrip of California could easily slap a ten-year injunction on him under the Industrial Secrets Act to prevent him working for anyone else in a competing line of business.

Trapped.

The elevator door slid open, and he led Penlope, protesting as always, along the corridor towards the block school. He quelled his compunction about leaving her to the tender mercies of her peers with the usual glib reflection that she had to learn to sink or swim, and marched off towards the rapitrans terminal.

At least the four yonderboys who’d been haunting him recently hadn’t put in an appearance yesterday or the day before. Perhaps they’d grown bored; perhaps it hadn’t been him personally they’d been interested in.

He had his ticket checked by the auto gate-control and passed on to the platform to await the humming monorail car.

And there they were, all four of them, lounging against a pillar.

This morning the platform was even more jampacked with people than usual. That meant the trains weren’t keeping their schedule—probably there had been sabotage on the track again. The rapitrans system was a prime target for pro-Peking “partisans”; no amount of patrolling was proof against such tactics as dropping a bottle that appeared to contain an innocent soft drink but actually had been spiked with a colony of tailored bacteria capable of reducing steel or concrete to a fragile sponge. Normally this would have made Eric furious, like everyone else, but today the throng of impatient passengers held out the hope of evading the yonderboys’ notice.

He moved, sidling, towards the rear of the platform, keeping as many bodies as possible between himself and the four gaudily dressed youths. He thought at first he had made it. Then, as the car finally rolled in, he sensed a shoving behind him and glanced back to discover that they had worked their way over to where he stood and now flanked him in pairs.

With an insincere grin the leader motioned him to enter first, and he did so, quaking.

The car was crowded, of course. It was necessary to stand. Only those lucky people who got on at the first station were able to enjoy a seat for their journey. But the noise made it possible to talk privately if one spoke very close to the listener’s ear, and that the yonderboys proceeded to do.

“You’re Eric Ellerman,” one of them said, and a tiny spray of spittle landed on his cheek with the words.

“You work at Hitrip.”

“You live at Apartment 2704 in that block there.”

“You’re married to a woman called Ariadne.”

“And you have too damned many prodgies, right?”

Prodgies? Eric’s terror-bemused mind wrestled with the term, and finally sorted it out. From “progeny”. Means “children”.

“I’m Stal Lucas.”

“A lot of people can tell you about Stal. People who’ve learned to do as he asks, and been—safe.”

“And that’s my sparewheel Zink. He’s a mean codder. He’s evil.”

“So listen carefully, Eric darling. You’re going to get us something.”

“If you don’t, we’ll make sure that everyone knows the facts about you.”

“Such as that you have other cubs back where you came from in Pacific Palisades, by another shiggy.”

“And what you’re up to now is not three, but five—or six.”

“They’ll love you for that, darling. Just love you!”

“And they’ll be pleased to hear you go to Right Catholic services in secret, won’t they?”

“And you have a special dispensation from Pope Eglantine in Madrid to buy the Populimit Bulletin—”

“And anyway you don’t have a clean genotype like you say but an undercover Right Catholic in the Eugenics office was bribed to alter your charts—”

“And when they grow up your cubs will almost certainly be schizophrenic—”

“Or their cubs will be—”

“What do you want?” Eric forced out. “Leave me alone, leave me alone!”

“Sure, sure,” Stal said soothingly. “You follow our programme and we’ll leave you alone, promise promise. But—ah—you work at Hitrip, and Hitrip’s got something we want.”

“It’s got Too Much,” Zink said from the other side.

“One little pack of seeds,” Stal said. “Like a dime bag. That’s all.”

“But—but that’s ridiculous!”

“Oh, it can’t be ridiculous.”

“But it doesn’t grow direct from seed! And it needs special chemicals all the time, and—and you can’t plant it in a window-box, for God’s sake!”

“Friend of yours, isn’t he—God? You keep Him supplied with new recruits to the heavenly choir. You breed like He wanted us to, Right—Catholic?”

“Fasten it, Zink. What do you grow it from, then—cuttings?”

“Y-yes.”

“Cuttings will do. Too Much is too much at three bucks fifty a pack of ten reefers. But it’s good pot, I’ll grant that. So that’s the programme, darling: a dime bag of good fertile cuttings—and you’d better let us have a table of the kind of treatment it needs to grow up. And we’ll be generous and keep your secret for you, about those cubs in Pacific Palisades.”

The monorail car was slowing for its next station. Eric said frantically, “But it’s impossible! The security—the guards they have on it!”

“If they don’t let the geneticists who evolved it get a close squinch, who gets one?” Stal said, and the four yonderboys moved towards the door, the other passengers, nervously eying their identifying clothes, making way for them.

“Wait! I can’t possibly—!”

But the doors were open and they were gone on the crowded platform.