Stand on Zanzibar

context (12)

THE SOCIOLOGICAL COUNTERPART OF CHEYNE-STOKES RESPIRATION

“If you want to know what’s shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: extremism. It is an almost infallible sign—a kind of death-rattle—when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them. A sound biological comparison would be the development of the fangs of the sabre-tooth tiger to the point where the beasts can’t close their mouths any more, or the growth of armour that’s indisputably impregnable but which weighs so much the owner can’t support his bulk.

“On this basis, it’s fairly certain that Christianity won’t last out the twenty-first century. To take but a couple of prime instances: the hiving off from Rome of the so-called Right Catholics, and the appearance of the Divine Daughters as an influential pressure-group. The former exhibits a remarkable deviation from the traditional attitude of the Catholic Church as an institution that above all concerned itself with the family, Western style; the Right Catholics have become so obsessed with the simple act of fucking that they appear to have no time left for other aspects of human relationships, although they issue pronunciamenti galore on them. None of these bears even the slight relevance to contemporary reality which a sympathetic eye (not mine) can detect in similar statements originating from the Vatican. And the latter, who professedly model themselves on the mediaeval orders of nuns but who actually have borrowed the majority of their tenets—antimechanisation, distrust of bodily pleasure and so on—from respectable, well-integrated groups like the Amish and then soured them by a judicious admixture of the vinegar of hatred, are capitalising on about the most self-defeating of modern trends, our reluctance to further overburden our resources by having large families. They exploit our vicarious appreciation of people, especially women, who decline to have any progeny whatever, thus relieving us of a sense of personal responsibility for the whole damned mess.

“They won’t last.

“I can’t say I see much better times ahead for Muslims, either; though Islam has become a sizeable minority religion in the Western West in the past half-century, the spearhead of its advance has been the descendant of a schism, like the Right Catholics. I mean, naturally, the Children of X, who have constructed nothing more than an analogue of Christianity using their murdered patron as their Osiris-Attis-Jesus figure. They’ll go the way of the mystery religions of ancient times, and for the same reason: they’re exclusionist, and you aren’t allowed in unless you fulfil certain conditions of birth, primarily that you should be recognisably coloured. (I feel a lot less strongly, by the way, about racial discrimination in organisations I don’t want to join. It’s an indication that they’ll die out eventually.)

“Regrettably, however, this leper-mark of extremism isn’t confined to such expendable traits as religion. Look at sex, for example. More and more people are spending more time at it, and resorting to ever more devious ways of keeping up their enthusiasm, like commercially available aphrodisiacs and parties that are considered to be failures unless they evolve into orgies. A hundred different shiggies a year, which is something a young man can achieve without doing more than taking off his clothes, fulfils neither of the essential biological requirements of the sexual urge: it doesn’t lead to a stable environment for the cubs of the next generation, nor does it establish the kind of rapport between couples (or multiples—marriage works on all kinds of bases, not invariably monogamous) which serves to avert crisis over the possession of other members of the species. On the contrary, it leads rather to a kind of frenzy, because instead of the partners enjoying a continual and reciprocal reassurance about their respective masculinity/femininity they are driven to seek that reassurance anew every few days.

“In effect, applying the yardstick of extremism leads one to conclude that the human species itself is unlikely to last very long.”

—You’re an Ignorant Idiot by Chad C. Mulligan

continuity (12)

IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE AUTOMATIC BUT ACTUALLY YOU HAVE TO PRESS THIS BUTTON

A shrill ringing gaffed Donald through the ears and dragged him struggling out of the deep water of sleep. Cursing, he managed to focus his eyes on the wall-clock and saw it was only nine-thirty anti-matter. He tried for a while to convince himself that what had disturbed him was nothing more than Norman leaving for work a quarter-hour later than usual. But the ringing repeated.

He almost fell off the edge of the bed and forced his arms into the sleeves of a robe. A good few people didn’t own such garments any longer; if they had callers before they were dressed they went to the door as they were and if the callers were shocked that was their problem. At least half the shiggies off the circuit who had briefly stayed in this apartment owned nothing but street-clothes, and those exiguous enough to pack in a single bag. But he was a little old-fashioned.

He made it to the door still less than normally alert, and when he checked through the spy-port to see who was outside all that registered on his mind apart from the number—four of them—was that his callers were from out of town. This was demonstrated by their carrying coats slung over their arms.

Stifling a yawn, he opened the door.

All the visitors were youthful in appearance, though at closer sight the one standing closest to the entrance might have been older than Donald. All wore rather formal clothing: sweaterettes and slax in shades of grey, green, dark blue and beige. The effect was that they were wearing uniforms, one apiece. All seemed to have natural hair, neither dyed nor coiffed. It struck Donald, much too late, that if a group of yonderboys wanted to gain access to someone’s home this was exactly how they would have disguised themselves, discarding their gaudy shirjacks with the built-in fake musculature and their skin-tight codpieced slax.

The one who headed the rest said, “Morning, Mr. Hogan. You don’t have any shiggies here at the moment, do you?”

“I—uh—what’s it got to do with you? Who are you?”

“One moment please.” The man gestured to his companions and advanced with them at his heels; Donald, even yet incompletely awake, fell back, feeling very vulnerable with nothing on except his flimsy thigh-length robe.

“Didn’t expect to be back here so soon,” the spokesman said affably, closing the door. “All right, check it out fast!”

The three sparewheels tossed their coats on handy pieces of furniture. Each proved to have been concealing something in his covered hand. Two of them had small instruments which they proceeded to point at the walls, ceiling and floor, watching them intently. The third had a bolt-gun, and he strode rapidly from room to room of the apartment peering around suspiciously.

Donald’s heart began to feel very heavy inside his chest, as though it were pressing on his intestines and threatening to squeeze up vomit from him like toothpaste from a tube. He said weakly, “Back so soon…? But I’ve never seen you before!”

“I get only our own stuff,” one of the sparewheels said, lowering his incomprehensible instrument. The second nodded. The third returned from his tour of inspection putting his gun away in a concealed pocket beneath his left arm.

“Thank you,” the spokesman said mildly. “Ah—shagreen, Mr. Hogan. I think that should explain our visit adequately…?”

There was no menace in the gentle questioning note on which he uttered the words, but abruptly the heaviness of Donald’s heart became so great it seemed to have stopped altogether, and he could imagine the ponderous burden dragging him down to the floor.

Shagreen. Oh my God. No!

He hadn’t heard the word, to his knowledge, since a day ten years before when the colonel, in that office in Washington, warned him how he would be activated if the need arose. And the reference to “coming back”, and to “our own stuff”—!

I told Norman. Last night I was sick and stupefied and couldn’t control myself. I told him the truth. I’m a traitor. Not just a spy, not just a fool who can start a riot without trying. I’m a traitor too!

He licked his lips, absolutely unable to react even to reveal his dismay. The spokesman was going on, and certainly he did not have the air of an official sent to arrest a traitor.

But all the things he could do would be equally bad.

“I’m Major Delahanty. We haven’t met before, but I feel I know you better than most of your friends do. I took you over from Colonel Braddock when he retired last year. These are my assistants, by the way—Sergeant French, Sergeant Awden, Sergeant Schritt.” The sparewheels nodded but Donald was much too confused to think anything except that he now, finally, knew the name of the colonel who had administered his oath was Braddock.

He said, “You’ve come to activate me, hm?”

Delahanty looked quite sympathetic. “Didn’t pick the best time, did we? What with that shiggy turning out to be an indesper and then you getting fouled up in the riot last night … Schritty, why don’t you fix some coffee for the lieutenant here and maybe for all of us?”

That fixed it firmly in Donald’s mind: “the lieutenant here”. Probably the choice of phrase was calculated. It bit home on his brain like a steel claw.

“I—I have to go to the bathroom,” he whispered. “Sit down and make yourselves at home.”

* * *

When he had emptied his bladder he tugged open the medicine cabinet and stared first at his own reflection, bleary-eyed, unshaven, then at the bottles, packets and phials ranged on the shelves. He stretched out his hand for some Wakup tablets, and his fingers brushed a neighbouring jar. Out of habit he read the label. It said: POISON. NOT TO BE TAKEN.

All of a sudden he was as frightened in reality as he had imagined in his long-ago nightmares. He clung to the side of the washbasin to stop himself keeling over, teeth chattering, vision tunnelled down to a single bright white patch, which was the label bearing the burning words.

Faust felt like this. The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, the devil will come and Faustus must be damned … How long did he buy with the currency of his soul—ten years?

What are they going to make me do? At least I have one hope denied to Faust … Might not be quick, but provided they assume I’m favouring my bowels not my bladder they’ll give me five or ten minutes. The lot at one go should be enough.

He snatched up the jar and flipped off the lid. At the bottom of the opaque container a dusting of whitish powder lay, mocking him.

He was abruptly very cold, but the shaking from terror was at least driven away by the honest shivers that now racked him. He dropped the jar, and the lid after, in the disposall, and gulped down the Wakup pills he had at first intended to take.

After another couple of minutes he turned and left the bathroom with careful, unhurried strides.

* * *

It was a fresh shock to discover that, instead of dialling for coffee from the block kitchen as a stranger might be expected to do, Sergeant Schritt had used Donald’s own maker, kept in his bedroom along with a can of his favourite blend.

Christ, how much do these people know about me? Earlier, when I talked so dangerously to Norman …

His voice, though, remained reasonably steady when he said, “I didn’t realise you’d been watching me so thoroughly.”

“Routine, I’m afraid.” Delahanty shrugged. “We much prefer our operatives to live alone, as you know, but that in itself, these days, is pretty much of a suspicious circumstance, what with there not being enough accommodation to go around. Mr. House is as clean as they come, of course, a good respectable mosque-goer and holding down a very responsible position, but the fact that you were both working the shiggy circuit has given us some uncomfortable moments, I must confess. Especially last night when we detected that ingenious gadget in the polyorgan. I haven’t run across that one before, and it’s the next best thing to foolproof, blast it.”

Holding his cup of coffee very carefully so as not to spill a drop over the rim, Donald sat down. He said, “Ah—how did you find out about that?”

“We had the activation notice yesterday afternoon, but one doesn’t simply rush in to turn the operative on. One does a preliminary sweep to make sure nothing has changed since the last time we investigated, and—well, something most definitely had changed. We chimed in on the very moment when the shiggy was doing her eavesdropping.”

“You have the place bugged.”

“There are more bugs in here than a slum apartment has roaches,” Delahanty said with a faint smile. “Not all of them ours, of course. Schritty?”

Sergeant Schritt bent down to the side of Norman’s Hille chair and did something with one finger that Donald could not follow. When he removed his hand it held, between finger and thumb, a little glittering spike.

“I think that one is a Frigidaire plant,” Delahanty said. “Or rather, the body of it is. The tip is ours. Like they say, little bugs have smaller bugs. Nothing went out of here that wasn’t edited; we didn’t want Mr. House fouled up by successful acts of indesping. Someone might have turned his attention to you and put two and two together. We came within an ace of falling down yesterday evening, though—it was sheer luck we caught up with the girl.”

“It was you who took her away?”

“Oh yes. By the skin of our teeth. I had to pull everybody off watch and go hunt for her, but we did track her down before she’d sold the goods.”

“Are you telling me that someone’s been monitoring everything I did and said for ten solid years?” Donald demanded.

“Oh no. We have to rely on random sampling with inactive agents. Everything gets recorded, half of it gets computer-scanned for certain key words—a vocabulary of about a thousand are listed for you, I think—and we follow up the appearance of any of them in conversation. But actually we haven’t paid serious attention to more than twenty or twenty-five hours of your activities in the past year.” He hesitated. “You seem disturbed,” he added. “Very natural—in this overcrowded world of ours privacy is our most precious defence. Be assured, please, we’ve intruded to the least possible degree.”

“You’ve been watching me continuously since you had the—the activation notice, though?”

Delahanty’s eyebrows rose. “No, I just told you. I had to pull everyone off your back to go look for the shiggy.”

Don’t push it. With luck they won’t bother to examine the tape from the small hours of this morning; I may get away with it. And the worst of all the horrible things I’m faced with is the risk of being court-martialled for breach of my cover. They may only want me for something very minor; they may need me to help analyse intelligence reports, say …

“I hope I’m not seeming too inquisitive,” Donald ventured. “But—well, over the past ten years the whole thing has become more and more unreal to me, until just lately I’ve had trouble convincing myself that activation was still a possibility.”

“That’s an honest comment,” Delahanty approved. “I keep telling Washington myself that they should risk breaches of cover and make random activations to keep operatives alert, even if it’s no more than giving them token assignments during their official vacations. More coffee?”

“I haven’t finished my first cup yet, thanks.”

“Mind if I do? Anyone else…? Right! Let’s get to the nub of it, shall we?” Delahanty leaned back and crossed his legs. “Boat camp, Ellay, six poppa-momma tomorrow. We have travel documents for you, free passage warrant and so forth—Sergeant French will give them to you in a minute. Between now and then, what have you by way of appointments?”

“Tomorrow?”

“I know—the suspense will make it difficult. But that’s the way the planet spins, I’m afraid. Appointments?”

Donald put one hand to his forehead. “I guess nothing—Oh. A party tonight. Guinevere Steel’s.”

“Go to it by all means, but don’t let anyone slip you anything, of course. Did you hear about the case the other day when someone smeared the stuff they call ‘Truth or Consequences’ on the pulpit rail of a cathedral and a respected bishop said some highly unclerical things to his congregation?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The regular news channels didn’t carry it—caved in by pressure-groups, I imagine. But it happened, and by all accounts it must have been spectacular. Don’t let it happen to you, that’s all. The rest of your instructions are in the packet French will give you. You’ll receive a call in the morning notifying you of some financial trouble in a company you’re supposed to have a lot of stock in, and that’ll be the reason for your departure; the reason for your staying away will be a rather charming shiggy whom I regret to say you aren’t actually scheduled to enjoy, but who’ll serve as a highly convincing alibi to anyone flying a reasonably straight orbit.”

Sergeant Awden grinned to himself.

“You mean I’m going to be away a long time?” Donald demanded.

“I don’t know.” Delahanty swallowed the last of his coffee and rose. “However, that’s the programme and I didn’t draft it. There’s a full computer evaluation in Washington, presumably.”

“Can’t you at least tell me”—the half-forgotten phrase rose to his lips like a bubble from decaying weed on the bottom of a stagnant pool—“whether it’s a field job?”

“Oh yes!” Delahanty seemed surprised. “I thought that was implicit in your linguistic speciality. Yatakangi, I believe.”

“They’re going to send me to Yatakang?” Donald was on his feet without realising, hands clenched to stop them shaking. “But that’s absurd! I mean, all I did was take a high-pressure lang-lab course the best part of ten years ago, and—”

“Lieutenant,” Delahanty said with dangerous emphasis, “you don’t have to worry about your ability to do the job. You’ll be made able to do it.”

“I—what?”

“Made able. You’ve run across commercial advertisements for a process called eptification, I imagine?”

“Y-yes.”

“And thought it was another misleading come-on?”

“I guess so. What’s that got to do with—?”

“We eptify people. And it works. If there’s nobody available who’s equipped for a particular job, we make someone over until he is equipped. Don’t worry; you’ll manage—assuming the job to be done is humanly feasible. Reflect on that and relax. But I guess you should go suck a trank as well.”

Delahanty gestured to his sparewheels. French handed a sealed official packet to Donald, who accepted it in numb fingers, and they all muttered a good morning as they filed out, leaving him feeling small and scared and regretting that he hadn’t managed to die.

After a while, he was sufficiently recovered to consider arranging for someone at the party to slip him some of the drug Delahanty had warned him against.

tracking with closeups (12)

IF YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM BEAUT THEM

BEAUTIQUE said letters suspended in empty air, and underneath ever so discreetly the name of Guinevere Steel. Beyond the lettering, indicative of the lavish personal attention one might be sure of getting, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead waiting with expectant expressions for you, madame, each one an immaculate product of the Beautique’s art, finished to molecular tolerances, gleaming, shimmering, polished not like diamonds but like the parts that went into Shalmaneser where nothing could be allowed to go wrong. Their clothing concealed only those sections of their bodies where the raw material the cosmeticians had had to work with left something to be desired.

Also in plain sight was a sleek young man garbed in the traditional style of an artist from the Quartier Latin about 1890—floppy beret over his left ear, smock with a huge bright bow at the neck, and tapered check trousers ending in high-sided boots. In deference to the original image he was affecting there were three or four stripes of random colour on the hem of the smock supposed to represent smears of paint, but they were entirely symbolic. He was as sterile and designed as the girls beside him.

One could see no further into the premises from the street than the partition against which the girls were ranged, a changeochrome surface flowing with impermanent colours weighted to favour the girls’ costumes.

He marched in, wondering with casual amusement how long it would take those eager, alert, welcoming expressions to dissolve.

* * *

Guinevere sensed that something was wrong before anyone had a chance to tell her. There was normally a particular kind of quiet buzz from the body of the shop, a variable but never-ceasing susurrus accompanying the gentle relaxing music that oozed on to the air from dozens of hidden speakers. A false note entered it, and she looked up, head cocked on one side, from the list of final preparations she was making against tonight’s party.

Half-convinced she had been misled, she activated the internal scanners and looked over the main salon. Screened by floor-to-ceiling curtains of imperviflex, the clients sat or lay enjoying the luxy atmosphere while their imperfections were soaked, or filed, or painted away. Mrs. Djabalah in Post 38 was requiring slightly more than the conventional services from her masseuse again, Guinevere noticed with resignation, and scribbled herself a memo to surcharge the bill by a hundred per cent. So long as the girl herself didn’t complain—and there was something rather magnificent about the Djabalah woman’s six feet two of statuesque ebony …

She took a long shot down the central passageway separating the posts and caught a glimpse of a commotion near the entrance. Abruptly alarmed—if that could be seen from the street it had to be stopped now—she switched to the storefront viewers.

At the same moment a nervous voice whispered from the intercom, “Gwinnie, there’s the most awful man down here shouting at us. I think he’s drunk. And he niffs like a whole barrel of whaledreck. Can you blast off and cope with him?”

Guinevere told him crisply. “I’m on my way.”

But she spared time for one rapid survey of her appearance in the mirror.

She found the intruder confronting Danny-boy, her chief usher—him of the Parisian artist’s smock—and growling belligerently. Fortunately, to call it “shouting” was an exaggertion, so the customers in even the nearest posts were unlikely to have noticed anything wrong. Moreover the blonde member of the come-hither team had shown enough presence of mind to move the changeochrome partition so it screened the disgusting stranger from outside.

He was a hulking man, well over six feet, and probably strong in spite of his revolting condition. His hair hung in lank strands all over his collar and merged into a beard and moustache that might as well never have been trimmed, but served as a soup-filter and catch-all for scraps of food. There was a singed indentation in the right lower edge of the moustache as though from smoking hand-rolled joints to the last fraction of a roach. His sweaterette had once been red but was now patched, smeared and streaked with other colours, and if his slax had ever fitted him that must have been years ago; now the waistband had given up struggling against the encroachment of his belly. His feet were planted four-square on her lovely hand-inlaid floor in things that might have been loafers but now were incrustations of garbage totally concealing any fabric that might separate dirt from skin.

He broke off his tirade at Guinevere’s approach. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “You must be Steely Gwin from Port of Sin—I’ve heard such a lot about you! I even wrote a poem about you once. Just a second … Ah yes—‘Girls made up by Guinevere Steel Look a treat but are lousy to feel. She turns meat that was cute Into plasticised fruit With the juices locked under the peel.’ One of those shiggies called you Danny-boy, didn’t she?” he added to the quaking usher. “That should make you feel right at home, then. Limericks are Irish too.” He hee-hawed with laughter and rocked on his heels.

“Want to hear another? ‘If you fancy a shiggy and seize her, And find she’s as cold as Teresa, She isn’t a freak, It’s because the Beautique—’”

Guinevere said with all the dignity she could command, “What do you want in here?”

“Whatinole do you think I want? One of your window-display dummies?” He gestured with black-tipped fingers at the cowering come-hither girls. “Thanks, if I need an inflatable masturbator I’ll build my own. Ah, whatinole do you think somebody wants who comes into a place like this?”

“You must be drunk or orbiting,” Guinevere snapped. “I don’t believe you know where you are.” She cast a nervous glance at the wall-clock. The current hour’s appointments were nearly up, and if the clients were to emerge and see this revolting specimen blocking their exit … “Danny-boy, you’ll have to call the police. I don’t see anything else for it.”

“What for?” the stranger demanded in an aggrieved tone. “What do I do? All I want is to be beautified.”

“To be what?” Guinevere said. Her breath ran out on the third word. “You must be insane! We don’t accept male clients anyway, let alone—let alone objects like you!”

“No?” The intruder took a threatening pace closer to her. “New York State Code provisions on discrimination, any commercial establishment offering a service to the general public and declining to accept a prospective client on racial, linguistic, religious or sexual grounds shall forthwith have its licence revoked!”

Belatedly Guinevere realised that the man neither spoke nor acted as she felt would match his appearance.

“In any case I know perfectly well you don’t discriminate. Apart from Danny-boy—and you’re not going to tell me he doesn’t get you to help him with that impeccable surface sheen!—my old beddy Doll Clark has been coming here for years and he still has his balls. What do you want I should do? Come back in a kilt wagging my hips?”

Guinevere said, with a faint sensation of unreality as though someone had slipped her a cap of Yaginol, “I can ask for proof of ability to pay, at least. And if you could meet my rates you wouldn’t be walking around stinking like”—she borrowed Danny-boy’s simile because it was definitive—“a whole barrel of whaledreck!”

“Oh, if credit is all that’s eating on you—!” The stranger made a face. “Here!”

He reached inside his sweaterette and produced a thick wad of documents. Flipping through them like a dealer riffling a new deck of cards, he extracted one and held it out.

“That do?”

“Hold it so I can read it,” Guinevere snapped. “I don’t want to touch it, or you.”

She looked. It was a bank credit authorisation good for a thousand dollars at sight of bearer. But that wasn’t what shook her to the core. It was the name neatly printed across the bottom, under the picture of a much younger man with his moustache and beard trimmed into Louis-Napoleon elegance.

“But he’s dead!” she said faintly. “Danny-boy! Surely Chad C. Mulligan is dead!”

“Who?” Danny-boy looked blank for a moment. Then: “Did you say Chad Mulligan?”

“Dead?” said the filthy stranger. “Christ, no. And if you make me stand around much longer I’ll prove it conclusively. Come on, come on!”

The clock crept towards the final five minutes of the current session. Any second now the first of the clients being attended to would leave the shelter of the curtains. Guinevere swallowed hard. Which of her assistants could be persuaded to handle this job for a hundred-dollar bonus?

“Danny-boy,” she whispered, “take Mr. Mulligan in charge and do whatever he wants.”

“But, Gwinnie—!”

“Do as I tell you!” She stamped her foot.

After all, he is a considerable celebrity …

Forcing herself to overcome her nausea, she said, “Forgive me, won’t you, Mr. Mulligan? But—well, this is rather an incongruous guise to find you in!”

“Incongruous my insalubrious hole,” Chad Mulligan grunted. “It’s the same way I’ve been looking for the past two years or more. What I’m going to find incongruous is what I’ll be like after your mechanics have overhauled me. But I’m giving up. I’m quitting. The sheer God-blasted inertia of this asinine species has defeated me. I can’t make people pay me attention whether I argue, or bellow, or daub myself with shit. I propose to pretty myself up and join the rest of you Gadarene swine in debauching myself magnificently to death. All right, where do you want to put me so your other customers won’t see the state I’m in?”

And he added over his shoulder as Danny-boy led him away: “Send someone out for a quart of liquor, will you? I need something to nerve me for this.”

the happening world (8)

BE KIND TO YOUR FORFEITED FRIENDS

LOCALE: since it was illegal by city ordinance to occupy that much space by herself what Guinevere had done was to make a settlement on her husband whom she was divorcing largely because his name was Dwiggins and get him to buy with it the vacant apartment below her penthouse and then lease it to her for an indefinite period at a peppercorn rent which was not illegal and the chief method by which the ostentatiously wealthy in the modern super-crowded city secured for themselves that ultimate in contemporary status symbols a home many times larger than one person could reasonably require—to wit two rooms one above the other forty-eight feet by thirty-two, two (ditto) thirty by eighteen, two (ditto) twenty-one by eighteen, four bathrooms en suite and two not, four additional toilets, two kitchen-eateries, and a roof-garden which Guinevere had had as it were hollowed out by an ingenious architect so that it became a bower with its main level corresponding to the lower apartment and the upper containing the automatic watering and fertilising sprays together with the artificial sunlight lamps required to keep the plants and flowers healthy.

CONTENTS (PERMANENT): the largest unit-based suite of polyform furniture ever manufactured for a private customer including large tables convertible into desks or screens and small tables convertible into book-racks or trolleys and chairs upright convertible into chairs relaxing and chairs relaxing convertible into lounges and lounges convertible into sofas and sofas convertible into beds and beds convertible for single or double or multiple occupation and so on—in theory capable of adapting the apartment for everything from a well-attended political meeting with everyone sitting around paying serious attention to the subject in hand to a party like the present one with everyone paying serious attention to the subject hoped to be in hand eventually.

CONTENTS (TRANSIENT IMMOBILE NON-PERISHABLE): the latest decorations and pictures and ornaments and models of phone and TV and polyformer and holographic record reproducer and cosmoramic projector and even books—though the latter were hanging in the balance as potentially non-fashionable.

CONTENTS (TRANSIENT IMMOBILE PERISHABLE): an assortment of seven dozen different kinds of foodstuffs guaranteed by the catering company to be accurately twentieth-century in substance and appearance but not necessarily in flavour—certain essential compounds in such items as free-ranged chicken and slow-smoked bacon being no longer reproducible under modern manufacturing conditions—plus bottles and cases and barrels and boxes and jars and cans and packs of liquor and incense and wine and marijuana and beer and even tobacco to give the guests a decadent life-in-my-hands thrill that would also be properly in period.

CONTENTS (TRANSIENT MOBILE BUT IN A SENSE EQUALLY PERISHABLE): a hundred fifty people including the hostess and her guests and many human staff from the catering company which had a good reputation among the new poor of the happening world for concealing payments to waiters and cleaners by inflating their charges for purchase of goodies and thus enabling them to escape the moonlighting tax supposed to wipe out the profit a fully-supported recipient of welfare might derive from odd jobs like these.

EXCUSE AND REASON: making the guests pay forfeits which if she chose she could make so hideously embarrassing the victims would never want to see her again.

COST: about three thousand dollars.

VALUE RECEIVED: that would have to wait until the end of the party to be assessed.

* * *

Click and cram the elevators cycling, splash and crash the guzzling well begun.

* * *

AUDIO: the most bearable re-made recordings from the latter part of last century, not the most recent (stuff from the nineties was intolerably vieux-jeu). No, it had to be from the seventies, endowed now with a certain quaint charm, and on top of that it had to be the kind of music which led most directly to what was currently acceptable in the real world outside—chants sans paroles in the rather bland monotonous rhythms of five against four and seven against eight. The quality of the recordings was lousy and the divisible-by-two rhythms seemed banal and boring after subtleties like five against eleven. But each of the records allegedly had sold a million.

If someone comes in wearing Arpège Twenty-first Scentury or anything else like that what shall I make her—or him—do?

COSMORAMIC: mostly the fashionable colours of the nineties because they were currently bearable—apple-green, sour lemon-yellow, and the inevitable pale blues—but changeochrome was newer than the century and there wasn’t a moiré setting on the projector which would have been marginally allowable, so it was all stark flat colours and rather drab.

Come to think of it, that stuff of Mel Ladbroke’s is new, so what if someone drecky claims forfeit off him for bringing it? The hole; it’s my party and I say what’s allowed.

GUSTATORY: likely to be the biggest success of the party, no whistlers or moonjuice or any other this-very-instant drinks, but that weird cocktail chart dug up from about 1928 and programmed specially into the consoles—things called “Old-Fashioned” and “Bosom-Caresser” ought to appeal if only for their amusing silly names. Also the food exotic. Out of period, but absolutely unavoidable, generous supplies of antalc, disgorgeant and counter-agents to the most popular lifters, Yaginol, Skulbustium and Triptine. Not permitted at the party, all too new, all post-turn-of-century, but people would certainly turn up orbiting on one or two or maybe all of them.

Snff…? That’s Dior Catafalque, I swear it is! Whereinole did she dredge it up? It’s been off the market for twenty years! Make a point of asking her what it is; recognising it would date me …

SARTORIAL: the most incredible, the most phenomenal mish-mash assembled under one roof this generation except maybe in the General Assembly of the UN.

That girl’s wearing Nipicaps. I can tell—who better? Bit early to start imposing forfeits but that will be a lovely lovely start. Something mild—after all, they’re one of my own products—but something forceful enough to make people realize I mean business. One moment: girl? That’s no shiggy! Well, that forfeit defines itself, doesn’t it? Yum!

* * *

1969: the hostess in an outfit of PVC which was about as near as they were coming in those days to the stark sleek mechanical styles of the current trend, regrettably needing to be underpinned with the badly engineered and somewhat uncomfortable brassière and girdle appropriate to it—a discovery she had made too late, not having obtained and tried on the costume until it was too close to the start of the party to change her mind. But at least the slick surface was a kind of foreshadowing of 2010; she hated the idea of fur or velvet or one of those other crudely textured fabrics women used to stuff themselves into.

“My dear, haven’t seen you in lightyears! That’s a most marvellous rig you’re sailing under—did it belong to your grandmother?”

19??: Norman House in a full set of jet-black evening dress with a genuine stiff shirt and white bow-tie and even shoes of that revolting stuff called “patent leather”—a hundred per cent genuine to judge from the cracks in them. Guinevere gave him a venomous smile for not allowing her an instant opening for attack and wished that he didn’t look so inarguably magnificent in the sombre garb.

“You mean this is really tobacco? Cigarettes of that stuff that was supposed to cause so much cancer? My dear, I must try some—my parents didn’t smoke it ever and I hardly believe I saw the stuff before!”

1924: Sasha Peterson in a softly draped tea-gown of semi-translucent chiffon hanging almost to her ankles but slashed behind to the waist, invoking an old-fashioned air called “elegance”. Guinevere thought of what the mode-masters were saying about a swing back to a more natural look in shiggies and wished she had never dreamed up this sheeting party.

“Well, if I can’t have a whistler whatinole can I have? Oh, give me some bourbon on the rocks, then—I take it that’s allowed? I mean, if they had cold drinks at the court of Emperor Nero they had them in the last century?”

1975: a very young shiggy with a beautiful bosom wearing a niltop over a minisarong. Can’t legislate for that—any girl who’s recently discovered that her body attracts men will go the available limit to display it to them.

“Are we not even supposed to talk about the real scene? I mean, I don’t know whatinole people did talk about at parties in the last century—I wasn’t old enough to go to them.

1999 and only scraping under the limit by a chronological accident: Donald Hogan in a curiously antique-seeming brown and green totalsuit with a spiral zipper going from right ankle twice around to the left shoulder, face flushed and apparently worried about something but ascribing it for official purposes to the fact that if Norman hadn’t remembered to book him whatever was available from the rental agency he’d have had to turn up in the only universally acceptable costume—his skin.

“I shouldn’t hope for too much, darling. All tobacco ever did to me was make me throw up. I don’t know whatinole people used it for. No, darling, you can’t take it in like the smoke from a joint, you have to sort of puff it in straight and then accustom yourself to inhaling it without dilution.”

1982 or thereabouts: a positive travesty in the literal sense, in one of these ghastly outfits with five or six layers of mesh in contrasting colours hanging from the hips and shoulders, and shoes of enormous size sticking out below.

“One of the reasons I come to Gwinnie’s parties is she doesn’t feel obligated to ask all these sheeting brown-noses you keep treading on everywhere else, but there are too many of them here for my liking tonight!”

* * *

Right. Find out who they are and why.

* * *

“Of course the whole thing is sheeting crazy. That was the wildest roller-coaster of a century the human race has ever lived through, if you can call it living—hey, notice that good in-period catchphrase I used?”

Any time: Elihu Masters in a regal suit of Beninian robes, a loose red-and-white top over baggy pants and open sandals his round balding head framed in a kind of crown of upright feathers varnished into brown rigidity around a velvet skullcap.

“Yes, but what kind of a twentieth-century party? One of those stiff soirées you read about in old magazines dating back to 1901, or something right up close to our own day like a Sexual Freedom League meeting? I don’t know whatinole I’m supposed to be doing and Gwinnie has that forfeit light in her eye. Maybe it’s safest to tag along after her and be in the support group when she picks on someone.”

1960: Chad Mulligan perspiring in a hound’s-tooth check tweed suit which was all the costume rental agency had left in his size when he shrugged and let Guinevere persuade him to attend.

“Yes, of course I’m nervous. I hate to miss these parties of Gwinnie’s because normally I make out fine and she’s never picked on me yet, but this time I’m violating the conditions so flagrantly—I mean, this isn’t a last-century costume, it’s all I could dig out from my father’s wardrobe and it says right on the label ‘Summer collection 2000’ but there wasn’t anything older.”

1899: an incredible multi-caped garment vainly hauled in around a large waist and a skirt dangling to the ground and a silly bonnet on top of it all and the excuse prepared that there was no reason in those days why a dress shouldn’t have been worn for two years or even longer.

“When Gwinnie gets really nasty I’m going to blast off. I know another party which ought to be humming by then.”

Any time: Gennice, Donald’s one-time shiggy, in a minor stroke of genius, an undatable Japanese happi-coat and traditional slippers to match.

“Must have been funny living in those days. I know someone who rebuilds and runs cars for a hobby, for instance, but for all he can do to the—what’s it called? Exhaust?—they stink worse than a barrel of whaledreck. Makes my eyes water just to go near one when he’s got it running!”

1978: Horace, a friend of Norman’s, in a ventilated parka with contrasting hood over jodhpurs, a perfect memorial to the way men’s fashions were going over the edge into pure schizophrenia in that hysterical epoch.

* * *

SITUATION: a lot of people drifting about and looking each other over covertly or sometimes overtly, knotting gradually into groups of former acquaintances separated by strands of people who never met before and who haven’t yet softened their self-consciousness to the point of blending in. In short, as was probably the case in Pharaonic Egypt where they first established the tradition of giving parties, a party that hasn’t jelled.

* * *

“That’s a very curious perfume you’re wearing, darling.”

Nervous laugh. “Of course, you’re an expert on that, aren’t you? Do you like it? It’s a bit musty, isn’t it? It’s something called Dior Catafalque that my mother gave me when she heard I was coming to your party.”

“Catafalque? Really? Isn’t that the thing they lay out corpses on when they’re lying in state?”

“Yes—I think that’s the idea. It’s supposed to be sort of musty and decaying.” Shudder. “Actually it’s pretty horrible, but it is in period, isn’t it?”

“Goodness, I wouldn’t know for certain. I’ll take your word for it, though.”

* * *

SITUATION: same.

* * *

“Don! Don!”

“Oh—hullo, Gennice. Nice to see you again.”

“Don, this is Walter that I’m living with now—Don Hogan that I was with before, Walter. Don, you don’t look as if you’re enjoying yourself at all.”

It shows that much? But they said keep on with your ordinary life until you leave, so … Wish I had the guts to back down. I’m frightened!

“I need a lift, I think. Don’t suppose Guinevere would approve, though.”

“There’s plenty of pot. And someone did say that that codder there—I think the name’s Ladbroke—was from Bellevue. He may have something.”

* * *

SITUATION: same.

* * *

“You’re Chad Mulligan? Prophet’s beard, I thought you were dead!”

“Might as well be. Intend to be. Just think I might as well take a lazy man’s way out. Get me another drink.”

“Elihu, here’s a man you ought to meet! I saw one of his books in your room when I called the other night!”

* * *

SITUATION: same.

* * *

“I say, someone told me you were from Bellevue and … Oh. Excuse me. I just saw somebody I know.”

“Yes, that’s right. My name’s Schritt—Mister—Helmut Schritt.” A quick glance around and an insincere smile. “Routine precaution. There’s a vanishing chance that someone might try to foul up your—uh—business along the lines I recall being mentioned last time we met. Act as normally as you can and avoid any entanglements that would prevent you leaving a bit earlier than the mass, okay?”

“Act normally!”

“That’s what I said. Like keep your voice down when you talk about the—uh—subject of importance, hm?” Another of the insincere smiles.

* * *

SITUATION: same.

* * *

“Darling, that’s a wild rig you’re sailing under!”

“Gwinnie, I’m so glad you like it!”

“But aren’t those Nipicaps a trifle out of period…?”

* * *

Sudden tension. A personal silence for all the screaming of the records in the background. A shifting of several of Guinevere’s closest sparewheels to encircle the victim and savour the inaugural forfeit of the evening.

“I—uh—I…”

“Well, I mean, I should know, darling, since I have them made specially for the Beautique and sell them by the literally thousands! And they only made their splash two years ago.”

“Forfeit!” someone said decisively, and there were grins.

“Ye-es, I think so. And it sort of writes itself, doesn’t it? Take it off, darling, from there”—shoulder—“to there”—waist.

Sickly embarrassed but complying: result, the strange hermaphrodite. Scalp to neck, elaborate coiffure, immaculately painted face with eyebrows arched and lashes lengthened and lips clear red and earrings jangling; waist to floor, skirt and hose and jewelled 1988-style boots; between them, that incongruous bare male chest with good solid muscle and hair in concentric curves swirling out from the nipples.

“I think that’ll do nicely,” Guinevere said with satisfaction, and those around chortled and clapped her and each other on the back and those as yet out of range of her decisions relaxed and began to chatter loudly again.

* * *

SITUATION: same but with an admixture of high nervous laughter.

* * *

“Darling, of course I’m only really well grounded in feminine fashions, but I do seem to detect something a teeny bit incongruous in that outfit you’re wearing…?”

“Well”—swallow hard—“ah … as a matter of fact—”

“Darling, don’t prevaricate. You know how much I detest prevarication.”

“Forfeit! Forfeit!”

“Well, Gwinnie dear, it’s as old as I could lay hands on, honestly it is.”

“No doubt, darling, but you’ve been to lots of my parties and I’m sure you’ve had as much fun out of seeing other people pay forfeits as they’re going to get out of you. Now let’s see. What would be appropriate? Bearing in mind that it’s early yet, so because of that and because we like you a whole great slobbering lot we’ll want to keep it a mild one, won’t we?”

* * *

SITUATION: less laughter, more tension.

* * *

“Sadistic bitch, isn’t she?”

“You should see her when she gets on to an Afram, Mr. Mulligan.”

“If you call me ‘Mr. Mulligan’ one more time I’ll throw this liquor all over your smart period-piece.” Gulp. “Cancel that—I’ll break the glass on your ought-to-be-nappy skull. Anyway, she’s wrong.”

“What?”

“She’s wrong. But that’s irrelevant, I guess. If that’s the way her guests like her to run her parties I’ll just sit quietly here and give thanks to any deity who may exist that I ran into intelligent company. Elihu, I’d like to know something more about this place Beninia. There are some highly anomalous factors in what you’ve been telling me—”

“Excuse me, Chad, please. How did you mean, ‘she’s wrong’?”

“Norman, you do have eyes, hm? And you’re blessed with a reliable memory, hm? The hole, then! What were you wearing in the summer of 2000? Something like that, I’ll wager.”

“The summer of—? Prophet’s beard, of course! I’m an idiot.”

“You belong to an idiotic species. I even wrote a book to draw attention to the fact. I was idiotic myself to think it would do any good.”

He turned back to Elihu and waved his empty glass without looking away to his right, hoping that a passing waiter would take it in exchange for a full one.

Norman shouldered his way through the people crowding close around Guinevere and her intended victim. He heard suggestions: “Take it off and put it back to front! Take off everything that’s newer than the century! Make it look a bit older—like by tearing a few holes in it at the right places!”

“Just a second, Gwinnie,” he said boredly, triumphantly.

“What do you want to do, Norman—arbitrate?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. That looks like a year 2000 garment to me. How about it, friend?”

“Why, it says right here on the label that it is, but—”

“Twentieth century, then.”

“What? Norman, you’re spouting dreck. Go away. Now I think what we ought to do is—”

“The twenty-first century didn’t begin until a minute past midnight January first 2001.”

Awkward pause. Someone: “Sheeting hole, I think he’s right.”

“Dreck. I recall distinctly on New Year’s 2000 we all—”

“And the commentators did say that wasn’t right, it comes back to me now.”

“The hole, let’s make him do it anyway.”

“No, got to fly by the course we set in the first place.”

Silence in the immediate vicinity.

“Gwinnie, I’m dreadfully afraid he’s right. He is, you know.”

Nods.

“Well, how funny! Lucky for him you came along, isn’t it, Norman? Never mind, sparewheels, there’s bound to be someone else. Break it up and let it fall free, hm?”

And, as she contrived to brush against Norman on her way to match orbits with a circulating waiter: “Fix you later, you clever brown-nose!”

“You’re welcome to try, darling,” Norman said. “You’re welcome to try.”

* * *

SITUATION: suddenly and to Guinevere’s enormous chagrin, a real party flying high and free in a genuine party-type orbit.

* * *

“Chad Mulligan? Never in a million lightyears!”

“I so testify.”

“Not the fat Afram?”

“No, the one with the beard.”

“The lean Afram?”

“Sheeting hole! No! The WASP talking to both of them.”

“Christ, everybody’s been saying he was dead!”

* * *

“Mel, I think some time later on we might break out a few caps of that stuff I asked you to bring. There’s a too-clever bleeder here I’d like to fetch down from orbit.”

* * *

“Hi, Don. Elihu, this is my roomie Donald Hogan—Chad Mulligan, Don.”

“Hi. Now, as I was saying, what McLuhan didn’t foresee although he came sheeting close to it was—”

“I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. Masters, but this is about the last place I’d have expected to run into you.”

“When Norman called on me the other night he mentioned this party and said I should come if I wanted to see the kind of problems Aframs still have to cope with in this country, so I thought it over and decided he was probably right, I ought to.”

“You won’t get the full measure of Guinevere’s ingenuity just standing by and watching, sir. You need to be someone like Norman, who’s about on her own level, not someone with cachet like yours.”

“Why?”

“If you’d turned up wearing your ordinary street-clothes she’d only have made you pay some kind of nominal forfeit—standing on your head for ten seconds, or singing a song, or taking off your shoes. Something that wouldn’t have interfered with your enjoyment of the rest of the party, I mean.”

“That’s what one generally expects at a forfeits party, isn’t it?”

“There’s been a change since you went abroad, sir.” Why all this “sirring”? Must be a subconscious response to the fact that as of this morning I’m officially Lieutenant Hogan! “A few years ago that was true. Not any more.”

“I see. I think. Give me examples.”

“Oh … Well, I’ve seen her compel guests to daub themselves all over with ketchup—and shave their heads bald—and crawl around the floor on hands and knees for an hour, until she got tired of enforcing that—and, if you’ll forgive me going into such details, to piss themselves. That comes later and is used to get rid of people she doesn’t want to stay around when the orgy starts.”

“That goes without saying, does it?”

“Oh yes.”

“Is that why people stand for such treatment?”

Chad Mulligan broke in; for the past few moments, unnoticed, he had abandoned the conversation he was having with Norman and had been listening to Donald and Elihu.”

“Sheeting hole, no! At least I’ll wager it’s not why Norman keeps coming, unless you’ve got a well-concealed masochistic streak—hey, Norman?”

“Some people come out of masochism, definitely,” Norman shrugged. “They like to be publicly humiliated. You can generally spot them; they’re blatantly infringing whatever the rule of the evening is, but steering clear of Guinevere’s direct attention until fairly late when they’ve drunk enough or smoked or ingested whatever they need to give them sufficient offyourass for the show-down. Then they go in for cringing and begging to be let off and being jeered at for spoilsports—the whole shtick—and generally they come while they’re getting the treatment. Which of course makes everything free-falling for them and that’s why they accepted the invitation anyway. Harmless, mostly.”

“I was asking about you, not them,” Chad said impatiently.

“Me? I keep coming here because—okay, I’ll open up wide. It’s a constant challenge. She’s a mean bitch, but she’s never yet caved me in on one single forfeit, and there have been times when there were thirty or forty of her pet sparewheels yelling for me to pay one. That’s why I keep on accepting. And frankly it seems to me like a damned stupid reason. This one is going to be my last, and if you weren’t here, Chad, and if I hadn’t conned Elihu into coming, I’d have left already.”

Donald looked at Chad Mulligan. He still only half-believed that this was the genuine article, but the resemblance to the pictures on the jackets of Mulligan’s books was unmistakable—the keen eyes peering out from under heavy brows, the hair combed diagonally back, the neatly trimmed moustache and beard setting off the cynical line of the mouth. There was a more dissipated look to the face in reality than there had been in the publicity shots, but maybe that was due to age rather than actual surrender.

He hoped so.

* * *

“Darling, you do the zock marvellously! You have the genuine free-fall touch!”

“Why, Gwinnie, that’s sweet of you.”

“There’s just one trouble, darling. The zock is strictly a this-minute dance, isn’t it?”

“Forfeit! Forfeit!”

“I’m afraid they’re right, darling, much as it pains me to insist. Don’t you know any of the old dances? How about the shaitan? That goes to this kind of rhythm, I think.”

“Of course it does, Gwinnie. I’m terribly sorry, I should have thought. You want me to do the shaitan for my forfeit?”

“That’s right. But—somebody hand me that dish of honey from the table there? Thank you, lover-girl. Hold this in between your elbows while you’re demonstrating it.”

“But—Gwinnie! It’ll get all over everything!”

“That’s the idea, darling. Come on now, and make with the whole bit. I want to see you touch the floor with the back of your head.”

* * *

“Well, yes, I am a bit out of sorts, I guess. You see, I’m taking this metabolic-rebalancing course that the Orbital Clinic provides for people who don’t respond to Triptine—you’ve heard about that? Uh-huh. And there’s one drecky drawback, which is it makes you much more susceptible to colds, so I’m full to here with counteragents and what with one thing and another my hormones and enzymes are going over Niagara in a barrel. I say, is that twentieth-century or nineteenth?”

“Of course, it’s public knowledge that if the Nark Force was given the funds and support it needs to enforce the legislation it’s supposed to the government would be out on its ear tomorrow. But the discontent needed for a genuine revolution is being drained off into orbit somewhere and that suits Washington fine.”

“So they got these two volunteers, you see, this codder and this shiggy who didn’t give a pint of dreck about doing it in public, and they laid on this exhibition of human reproductive processes for Shalmaneser.”

“No matter what they say I can’t tolerate adherents to a cult which doesn’t respect the human rights of non-members. That’s bigotry irrespective of what verbal haze you generate around it. And these Right Catholics with their insistence on unrestricted breeding are trespassing on the human rights of everyone else’s children. They sheeting well ought to be banned.”

“Right across the block from where my brother-in-law lives. And such a mild-mannered old codder too, he said. Just picked up this butcher’s cleaver and chopped the heads off the kids he was looking after, then went up on the roof with this crate of empty bottles, and started hurling them down on the people below. Killed one, blinded another, had to be fused by a police copter. Could be anybody, you see—and without universal personality-profiling how can one be sure who’s going to turn mucker?”

“Well, we’re pretty lucky, you see. We managed to get into a club—about fifteen couples, all celebrated their twenty-first, very nice people—and there’s a sitting rota so we get to look after the prodgies of members who have clean genotypes. There are nearly a dozen altogether and one of the shiggies is supposed to be preg with twins. Marvellous. We can reckon on having prodgies around the place at least one night a week. It’s not like having one’s own, but—well, there’s no help for it. We have schizophrenia on both sides of the marriage and the risk is far too great.”

“Oh no. Philip is much too young to come along to a party like this. Time enough later on to become sophisticated and cynical and debauched like us oldsters, that’s what I keep telling him. Of course he doesn’t like it—goes on all the time about what other parents allow their prodgies to do at his age—but one doesn’t want to see the bloom of innocence rubbed off too soon, does one? You’re only young once, after all.”

“Frank and Sheena? Oh, they went to Puerto Rico. Didn’t have any choice—they’d sold the apt, bought the tickets, got jobs out there … But they were furious! Said they were going to get out of the States altogether as soon as possible so they could after all have their own prodgies. But lord knows where they can go. Can’t see them roughing it in some benighted backwater country for long, myself, and of course they’d never be allowed back if they did start a family after being forbidden to do so here.”

“You heard what happened? Thought they were being clever. Found someone in the Eugenics office who was open to—ah—persuasion and got themselves a forged genalysis. Went to a private clinic, and the karyotype said they were going to have a mongoloid idiot. Twenty-five thousand buckadingdongs it cost them to get that gene certificate, and they had to have the kid aborted after all!”

“We got ours through the Olive Almeiro Agency. Very big operation. Naturally it can’t be passed off as our own—my wife is even fairer than I am and the kid is dark, hair, skin, eyes, the whole shtick—but we could have waited five, six years for a baby to match our own genotype and then not been able to afford the cost.”

“So when these two had finished Shalmaneser said where’s the baby? And they said oh, you have to wait nine months for that.”

“Look, I don’t mind panhandlers as such—in fact I think it’s a damned good idea to license them because at least that gives you the option of choosing whether you’re going to support a given individual case instead of simply taxing you and passing the money on in welfare allotments to wastrels and vagabonds. But the way the union has got whole districts of the city sewn up now and insists on kickbacks and drives non-members out of the area—that’s more than I can swallow!”

“Oh, are those the new Too Much joints? May I try one? I heard very good things about the strain. Thanks. I hope Gwinnie doesn’t recognise them or she’ll make us pay forfeit on them and I don’t like the look in her eye. She’s building up to something really nasty, I suspect.”

“The draft got his balls. They’re cracking down very hard at the moment. Did everything he could—turned up for the board with mother in tow, wearing one of her dresses, orbiting like crazy, and they took him anyway. He’s in that horrible army hospital St. Faith’s right this minute undergoing aversion therapy for ambivalence and tripping both at once. It’s absolutely inhuman, and of course if it works when he comes back he won’t want to know any of his old friends, he’ll be one of their automatic push-button people, a good solid respectable citizen. Doesn’t it make you want to weep?”

“One thing about this crazy party, I do depose—I never expected to see so many shiggies at Guinevere’s place looking like shiggies instead of like sterile-wrapped machines. Do you suppose she’s testing the temperature to see if she should move the Beautiques over to the natural trend?”

“Happened all in a moment. One second, just a bunch of people walking down a street, not going any place in particular, and the next, these brown-noses clanging on big empty cans with sticks like drummers leading an army and all sorts of dreck flying through the air and windows being smashed if they weren’t out already and screaming and hysteria and the stink of panic. Did you know you can actually smell terror when people start rioting?”

“Louisiana isn’t going to last much longer, you know. There’s a bill up for next session in the state legislature which will ban child-bearing by anyone who can’t prove three generations of residence. And what’s worse they’re only offering five to two against it being passed. The governor has his two prodgies now, you see.”

“I was in Detroit last week and that’s the most eerie place I ever did set foot. Like a ghost town. All those abandoned factories for cars. And crawling with squatters, of course. Matter of fact I went to a block party in one of them. You should hear a zock group playing full blast under a steel roof five hundred feet long! Didn’t need lifting—just stand and let the noise wipe you out.”

“It’s more than a hobby, it’s a basic necessity for modern man. It fulfils a fundamental psychological urge. Unless you know that if you have to you can kill someone who gets in your way, preferably with your bare hands, the pressure from all these people is going to cave you in.”

“I graduated with a master’s rating on throwing knives and a grade one rating on hand-to-hand. I already have a marksman certificate on bolt-guns, and next I’m intending to collect one for projectile weapons—rifles, pistols and crossbows.”

“Sure you can come around, but don’t hope for too much. I’m living in a group, you see, and there are eight of us, so I don’t feel much need for variety. Also we have two kids and our shrinker says they have positively Polynesian emotional stability so the last thing I want is to interfere with a setup that’s paying such fine dividends. It’s the extended family bit, of course.”

“Nevada’s mavericking again, did you hear? There’s a bill up for next session to recognise polygamy and institute proper marriage and divorce laws to cover it. Up to groups of ten, I think it says in the draft.”

“Don’t lie to me, darling. I saw that codder’s blip go up on your screens the moment he asked you to dance. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again, I don’t mind you bivving it privately but I won’t stand for it in public. So I’m an old-fashioned block, so I’m still your wife and if you want me to stay that way you behave when you’re in company—catch me?”

“So Shalmaneser said well, if it takes nine months, why were you in such a sheeting hurry at the end? Haw-haw-haw!”

“I’ve been hoping to have a word with Chad Mulligan, but I can’t pry him away from those Aframs he’s talking to. I want to ask him whyinole when all our dreams are about wide-open spaces and room to move and breathe we like to cram ourselves together at parties till we can’t hardly cross the floor of a room without shoving aside twenty other people.”

“Look, lover, you carry it off very well but I fly a perfectly straight orbit and what’s more I’m married so why don’t you find someone who likes to biv and stop harassing me?”

“I got one of these super disposalls, too, because the garbage clearance down our block is five weeks—catch me, five!—overdue. And the first day I try to use it comes in this sheeting little pest and says I’m violating the clean-air laws. Great balls of dreck, clean air! There hasn’t been any clean air in our neighbourhood for sheeting weeks because of rotting dreck all over the streets and now it’s beginning to block the passages!”

“Yes, but what’s the use of arguing about politics these days? Isn’t such a thing as politics. There’s just a choice between the ways you’re going to cave in through force of circumstances. Look at Common Europe, look at Russia, look at China, look at Africa. The sheeting pattern’s the same except in some places it’s gone further than others.”

“Look, Schritt—all right! Look, Helmut! If you don’t get off my orbit and let me fall free for a bit I’m going to stand right up where everyone can hear me and pull rank, do you hear me? I don’t give a pint of whaledreck if Chad Mulligan does sound subversive to you—he happens to be talking to our ambassador to Beninia and I’m interested in what they’re saying. I was told to carry on with my ordinary activities and if you’ve read my original brief you sheeting well ought to know that it includes being interested in everything relevant or not relevant to my assignment. Now go dig a hole and lie down in it!”

“Things are getting tough again in India, apparently. It’s the protein that was lost when the slit-eyes poisoned the Indian Ocean. And by the way, I hear the containment programme is running behind—a current spilled over past one of the barrages and they’ve been hauling out contaminated fish as far north as Angola.”

“I have this new autoshout of GT’s that programmes itself on a signal from the satellite. Haven’t missed a show in three weeks through rescheduling. Should get one.”

“I use nothing but Kodak Wholopan R myself. The rating is 2400, to start with, which means there’s practically nothing you can’t catch, and there’s ninety-five per cent recovery on a division factor of twenty, which means you never need more than one print and a pair of scissors.”

“No, that’s what’s so extraordinary. Freefly-suiting is terrific exercise, a sort of dynamic tension method because all your muscles are working against each other. Of course, you have to watch your calcium balance like a spy, but there are treatments which actually improve it over normal Earthside levels now.”

“The acceleratube makes commuting perfectly possible. I can get to work quicker from Buffalo than I used to when I lived in Elizabeth.”

“I think I’ll have to take copter lessons.”

“You know that magnificent new block in Delaware that we spotted from the plane as we were coming in and thought what a great place it could be to live? Well, I just met someone who told me what it’s meant for, and unless you feel like going out and shooting a fuzzy-wuzzy we can kiss the dream goodbye. It’s a sheeting jail, that’s what it is—a new maxecurity jail!”

“We’re going to have to do as they’ve done in London and Frankfurt. We’re going to have to make better use of the space already enclosed by the cities we have. In London they’ve more or less given up the idea of streets except for arterial throughways. They’re building over them and leaving nothing but tubeways for passenger transit.”

“It just sort of folded like a leaky accordion, all thirty storeys of it. Girders bulged outwards, floors lay down on top of each other, and squelch, all the people who were living in it—I think they said nine hundred—were flattened out like sardines in a sandwich. Apparently when they programmed the computer which designed it they forgot to instruct it to allow for the weight of the occupants.”

“Exceptionally good freevent the other night. It was literally indescribable because it was so abstract. I still haven’t got over it.”

“What it does is sort of invert the responses—for example I never found anything in my life quite so funny as the B Minor Mass. And let’s face it, you know, in the ultimate analysis that’s a proper response in contemporary terms.”

“Yes, I knew somebody who applied to them. Wanted to go out being gored by a bull in front of a big cheering audience, believe it or not. So they fixed it, got the setup from Mexico, wrung the buckadingdongs out of him and the cost ran to plenty, of course, and he had a heart attack from overexcitement before they turned the bull loose, so back he went to hospital to be revived and he ran out of funds while he was getting better and in the end he just signed an ordinary release and they withdrew his prosthetics. A débâcle on a grand scale, but still a débâcle!”

“He and his sister joined the Mrs. Grundy Memorial Foundation and some sheeting little prig turned up some forgotten ordinance and the case comes up next week. Going to be a major point of principle at stake.”

“Skiing in Patagonia, I think. We were going to spend it under the Caribbean, but Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere go there such a lot we’re afraid it’ll be dreadfully crowded.”

“She’s quite marvellous. All I did was give her that lock of my mother’s hair and she told me the most fantastic things—I mean, I never knew mother had all those affairs, one after the other, and most of them with brown-noses! I knew I was right not to trust her with what father left!”

“The Vedantas, of course, say something quite contrary.”

“One of these Antarctic treks, probably. I hate the snow but whereinole else is there that Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere haven’t been recently? I can’t stand all these interchangeable people!”

“The future is inherently perfectly knowable. All the faculty takes to develop is the proper kind of exercise and meditation.”

“You sound as though you fell in love with Beninia right from the start. Was it just because you knew and admired Zadkiel Obomi or was there something else to it?”

“There’s this tour to Khajuraho which sounds like fun, with all those parties planned around the erotic sculptures on the old temples, but apparently the tourists have to go there under armed guard because of danger from native robbers and frankly I don’t see how I could enjoy it to the full with a circle of gunmen standing all around me.”

“This marvellous recording of the Ninth which puts you right in the middle of the choir—when the Ode to Joy lets loose it’s like an earthquake!”

“I’ve been painting some Jackson Pollocks with my polyformer this week and it’s left my arms stiff as fenceposts.”

“Moonbase Zero is more like a submarine than anything else. I really admire the people who stay there for a whole tour—some of them stick it for over six months, you realise?”

“Our shrinker recommended sending Shirley to this new school at Great Bend and I think that’s a marvellous idea but Olaf has these dreadfully antique views about juvenile eroticism and says they lay too much emphasis on sensuality, so I’m going to file for divorce and get custody and then Wendy and I will take her out there ourselves.”

“Makes you wonder how our ancestors ever managed to breed such a sheeting horde of human beings when every time you felt like it you had to take off all these layers and layers of cloth.”

“I think I’m going to sue them even though they didn’t give me a guarantee. I mean, eight thousand isn’t to be dropped like an empty pack of reefers, is it? And all the pup did when we got it home was sit around snivelling and pee on the floor every half-hour. The prodgies were heart-broken, of course, because they did so much want a green dog and they just wept and wept so I’m sure it was traumatic for them. Edna says I should have gone to some other company who’ve cut down the side-effects, but believe me I’m not going to risk another gene-moulded pet. They can make do with a regular cat next time.”

“Well, if your genotype is okay, why don’t you just get yourself preg by someone else who’s also clean? Me, for example? I have my genalysis with me, as it happens.”

“Charlie, got any stiffener with you? I just had this shiggy in the roof-garden and I promised Louise as well and I don’t want to be left dangling when the big scene takes over later.”

“This mutated cactus with the huge orange flowers that last for weeks after they’re cut, but you have to keep them under a glass bell because they do stink rather, a bit like rotting meat.”

“I never took to polyforming. Rather stay with my old hobby of vicarious music. Blocky it may be, but I don’t have the talent to go through a Cage score on my own jets, and I do love the feeling of actually creating the sounds with my fingers.”

“The bleeder slipped her a cap of Yaginol while she was preg and of course they had to abort the phocomelus. She’s suing him.”

“Thinking of cutting out to join one of these communities in Arizona.”

“Dead set on going into the space service but I guess he’ll grow out of it when he discovers shiggies.”

“Sold my shares in Hitrip like a sheeting idiot and then two months later they announced the Too Much strain and I guess I lost fifty thousand buckadingdongs on the deal.”

“So they programmed Shalmaneser with the formula for Triptine, you see, and then these jokers fed in the question How Hi is a Chinaman.”

“I think instead of increasing it to four months’ vacation they should operate two shifts on monthly rotation. Of course it would cost but the degree to which it would increase the self-respect of the employees would more than make up for it.”

“Most of them seem to be at it in the roof-garden. Want to go and watch, get some pressure up for later?”

“I think these cigarettes are horrible. Made my throat so sore. And my guts are all sour and nasty. Did people really use twenty in a day?”

“They call it streamlining, of course, but what it comes down to is they’re undermining my responsibility in the firm and I’m going to fight tooth and claw to hang on to what I’ve got. If I have to play it dirty that’ll be their fault, not mine.”

“It makes genuine three-dimensional poetry possible for the first time in history. Right now he’s experimenting with motion added, and some of the things he’s turned out are hair-raising.”

“You hold the knife this way, see?”

“Refuse to teach their children to read and write, say it handicaps them for the post-Gutenberg era.”

“Not many people have spotted it but there’s a loophole in the Maryland eugenics law.”

“A polyformer for water-sculpture, quite new.”

“Of course I don’t love Henry the way I love you but the shrinker did tell me I ought to occasionally.”

“I’m just cutting jets for a prayer or two but I’ll be back—don’t get involved with anyone else.”

“That makes seventeen different mixtures I’ve tried, and I’d better have some antalc, right away.”

“I think it was bitchy not to tell Miriam it was pig-meat.”

“They’re trying to ranch the orange ones in Kenya but apparently so far only the pale-blue ones will breed true in the wild state.”

“I think I’m going to shake off my holding in MAMP. It’s been years after all and by this time I’m wondering if the rumours about the big strike were just propaganda.”

“Had a chance to talk to Chad Mulligan? Nor have I. I was wondering whether to be really twentieth-century and go ask for his autograph.”

“Campaign to get whales back by breeding up from smaller aquatic mammals but the cost is astronomical!”

“Blew up three bridges before the fuzzy-wuzzies fused them and one of them turned out to be in the same class as my son Hugh.”

“I’m sorry to snivel like this but it’s damned unfair having him killed in a stupid sheeting accident like that and now being married to someone who’s not allowed to father prodgies. And he was only six, he couldn’t even read yet!”

“Watch out for Guinevere—I think she’s building up to the big staged ones. I’m going up to the other floor for a bit. Some of the things she does when she’s in that mood don’t strike me as funny.”

“I got on fine with Don and to be quite honest I half-hoped he’d ask me to make it permanent. But I couldn’t stand his roomie.”

“Of course it can’t be the Chinese who supply them with sabotage equipment. Explosives and thermite maybe, but not the tailored bacteria they used to bring down that apartment building in Santa Monica.”

“So Shalmaneser said how high is a Chinaman? I don’t know, but if he’s any higher than I am we might as well quit because they have us beat.”

“Accused of reviving thuggee—you know, Kali-worship?—and the crowd stormed the court and set them free.”

“Spend my vacation taking that induced-schizophrenia course they offer at the Leary Clinic—think it’ll broaden my horizons.”

“Wanted to be burned alive in protest against the draft but the directors of the company apparently decided it was interfering in politics and not in accordance with their corporation charter so he tried to do it by himself and they put him out before he’d done more than sustain third-degree burns. Going to jail for ten years, I gather. Evasion.”

“A totally corrupt police-force is the next best to a perfectly honest one. Ours is quite livable with. Mark you, it takes a bit of time occasionally finding out who’s bidding against you, but there are only a few possibilities in a small community like ours.”

“So when he said he had a clean genotype but he was going to be sterilised anyway I lost my temper—can you blame me?”

“It’s twentieth-century for me to be jealous, isn’t it? You keep away from my wife or I’ll get Gwinnie to make you pay forfeit for behaving in a twenty-first century manner!”

“I’m going to have to find out more about Beninia, Elihu. I can’t really believe what you say is true.”

“I got two glasses of the ’98 Château Lafite before it ran out and believe me it was quite an experience.”

“Have you tried it intravenously? You can get diadermic guns for about forty or fifty bucks, and it makes a galaxy of difference to the lift.”

“Talking about clearing the old Renault factory but it’ll be like civil war—there are sixty thousand squatters on the ground and apparently some of them have bolt-guns and the place is crawling with old projectile weapons of course because they went over to sporting guns when they closed.”

“Told me about this public execution he went to in Algeria and it got me so excited I just couldn’t help myself. Why don’t you ask him about it? He did say he bivs occasionally.”

“So she told her to smear her belly with apple-butter and let the sparewheel lick it off. She’s getting nasty, darling. Next time it won’t be licking, it’ll be biting. Want to blast off for home?”

“Look out, he’s got a knife!”

“But the whole aesthetic of holographic television is being called in question by Eldred’s work.”

“I’ve taken over the selection programme for the Museum of Last Week, did you hear? How about letting me have some of your stuff?”

“Tripping.”

“By the way, Norman, I did men-

“Work”

tion, didn’t I, that I’m being

“Religion.”

thrown out of my place and I’m

“Psychology.”

looking for a spare tatami?”

“Eugenics.”

“How are we doing for liquor?”

“Society.”

“Mel Ladbroke, right? Look,

“War and peace.”

you don’t by any chance—? Oh,

“Sex.”

sheeting hole! Forget it.”

“Food and drink.”

“Are you by yourself, lover?”

“Politics.”

“It would make a difference if

“Hobbies.”

they could afford to buy gene-

“Art.”

moulded maize stocks, for exam-

“Entertainment.”

ple. But they can’t.”

“Housing.”

“Gwinnie’s saving you up, you know!”

“Travel.”

“People are stupid, including me.”

“Guinevere got anybody’s balls yet?”

* * *

GRAPH GUINEVERE: an early peak followed by a flat low line marked at its inception by Norman’s correction of her judgment regarding the man in the year 2000 suit. Since then, a state of suppressed anger, punctuated by only enough minor forfeits to keep that hard core of her sparewheels contented. Saving up the remainder—all noted with sharp eyes and double-checked mentally to avoid a second similar gaffe—for an unusually extensive series of set-piece forfeits at the end of the evening. Included with question-marks, people like the ambassador who has completely wasted his cachet and Chad Mulligan’s into the bargain by talking together non-stop throughout the evening despite several attempts to make them circulate. Trust a brown-nose to foul things up, ambassador or no.

GRAPH DONALD HOGAN: a jagged line varying between sick dismay masked with polite and occasionally quite interesting chat to Elihu, Chad, Gennice and other acquaintances, and raw fury at being dogged by Sergeant Schritt. Four separate attempts to corner the man from Bellevue privately and perform that quasi-suicidal act of obtaining from him some sort of lifter or whatever that would enable him to break his cover under the pretence of being slipped a cap by someone unknown. Shortly, the line due to snap up into the unknowable hyperbolic future course of the activated spy.

GRAPH GENNICE: a high-level curve with a lot of peaks of amusement and enjoyment because she’s very fond of her new man, but with occasional wistful dips caused by wondering whether it’s her departure that made that nice Don Hogan feel so low tonight.

GRAPH CHAD AND ELIHU: an early plateau low on the scale, then a simultaneous rise and a long, long parallel run not across the regular chart of the party but away from it at an angle of their own, pacing each other and still rising.

GRAPH NORMAN: an early peak caused by so successfully scoring off Guinevere, followed by a slow decline with occasional bumps tending towards determination to see her look equally foolish if she tries to involve him in a set-piece forfeit or towards self-disgust because he prizes such a petty achievement.

GRAPH THE PARTY: a planar representation hillocking over the roof-garden where those interested mostly in sex congregated early and heavily indented in the vicinity of Donald, Norman, Guinevere herself and one or two more, otherwise generally on an acceptably high level although a good many people have had the edge taken off their enjoyment by the aura radiating from Guinevere by now consulting in whispers with certain chosen sparewheels and who can be sure what infelicity, what incongruity, as minor as having referred to a post-turn-of-century artwork has given her the opening for another arrowed forfeit?

* * *

“If Gwinnie picks on me I’m going to give her a present. From this firm that sends people around to invade your apt and wreck the furniture!”

Now I can get the two shiggies, the fat and the thin ones, to change clothes, which ought to be good for five minutes and a few giggles, and during that time slip Norman a cap of …

* * *

“What was that?”

“That girl with the hideous caped outfit, I think—I saw Gwinnie consulting a history of costume in the other room just now.”

“Excuse me, do you mind saying that again?”

* * *

Like a cool breeze soughing through the room: a wave of interest and curiosity.

* * *

“No, that weird codder Lazarus hasn’t been through the mill yet and I never knew him to miss. He loves being humiliated, gives him the strangest kind of lift, apparently.”

“Are you sure? Who told you?”

“I made a wager with myself that she’d pick on Renée—you know, the fat shiggy with the glandular thing they can’t cure, like a big sagging jelly? She always gets hit hard.”

And what I’m going to do to Norman will make history. Not this time the cunning brown-nose doesn’t get off lightly! That codder with the Black Belt in case he tries to duck out, to be safe. Where is he? Not involved with another shiggy!

“But it must be pure propaganda! I mean, so far not even the dogs and cats and bushbabies they’ve made over for pets are…”

“Is something going on over there?”

“Let’s find out, shall we?”

“Darlings, how convenient for me to have caught you talking to each other! You see, I’m terribly afraid that—”

“If SCANALYZER carried it the news must have been processed by Shalmaneser so it’s at least possible. Unless they carried it in the rumour slot, was that it?”

* * *

It began to dawn on Guinevere by slow degrees that for the first time ever since she took to throwing forfeits parties the arrival of her well-briefed gang of sparewheels in the neighbourhood of the victims chosen for the first of the grand forfeits, the set-pieces that would include dialogue and climax in acts of maximum humiliation to get rid of people she was tired of knowing, had not signalled silence and giggling and craning of necks and climbing on furniture for a better view. Instead, on the far side of the room, a large number of the guests were talking to each other with serious faces, apparently sceptical but not scoffing. She waited a moment. A few people drifted away from the unidentified focus of attention and others joined; somebody hurried out of the room and came back with half a dozen friends also to be told—whatever the news might be.

“Hullo!” Norman said softly. “What’s going on? Guinevere isn’t getting the rapt audience she counts on.”

“Think war’s broken out?” Chad muttered and grabbed a fresh drink from a passing tray.

Alarm transfixed Donald like a lightning strike. The randomness of his activating this morning, unaccountable in terms of what the news channels were carrying, made him think for a moment that it could all too easily be war.

“Chad, what did you say about crying wolf in The Hipcrime Vocab?”

“Howinole do you expect me to remember? I’m drunk!”

“Wasn’t it something about—?”

“Ah, sheeting hole! I said it was an ad-hoc form of Pavlovian conditioning adopted by those with a lust for power to prevent the people due to be slaughtered in the next war from taking them out and humanely drowning them. Okay?”

“Why do you hate Miss Steel so much?” Elihu asked Norman under his breath.

“I don’t hate her personally, though if she were enough of a person to be worth such a strong emotion I think I easily could. What I hate is what she represents: the willingness of human beings to be reduced to a slick visual package, like a new television set—up-to-the-minute casing, same old works.”

“I hope I can believe that,” Elihu said unhappily.

“Why?”

“People who hate in concrete terms are dangerous. People who manage to hate only in abstracts are the only ones worth having for your friends.”

“Plagiarist!” Chad threw at him.

“Did you say that?”

“Christ yes. Put it in a book.”

“Someone quoted it to me once.” A look of wonder crossed Elihu’s face. “As a matter of fact it was Zad Obomi.”

“Profit but no honour in my own country,” Chad grunted.

“What’s she going to do now?” Norman said, watching Guinevere intently. They all turned to look; they were in a good spot from which to see what happened, able to view it along a sort of alley between the clump of people who had congregated to witness the humiliation of the fat girl and the thin one, and the other group worriedly muttering to each other about the as yet mysterious news.

“Shelley-lover,” Guinevere said to the man at the centre of the latter assembly, “if the news you’re spreading is so millennially important don’t you think you should share it with everybody rather than letting it wander around on its own, suffering the folk-process? What is it—have the Chinese towed California out to sea, possibly, or has the Second Coming been announced?”

“Second!” someone unidentifiable said within earshot of Don. “Prophet’s beard, you should try that new stiffener Ralph’s been feeding me!”

Guinevere looked for him with a glare of murderous ferocity and failed to locate him.

“Well, it’s something that was on SCANALYZER earlier this evening, Gwinnie,” the man she had addressed as Shelley explained in an apologetic manner. “Apparently the government of Yatakang has announced a two-generation programme based on a new breakthrough in tectogenetics. First off they’re going to optimise their population by making sure that only children of first-class heredity get born, and later, when they’ve done that, they’re going to start improving the genalysis and—well, I guess the only way you can put it is to say they propose to breed supermen.”

* * *

There was a stunned pause. The woman whose six-year-old son had been killed in an accident and who had by then re-married a husband forbidden to father children shattered the silence with a moan, and instantly everyone was talking, forfeits forgotten, except Guinevere, who stood in the middle of a clear patch of floor with her face whiter than chalk and her long sharp chromed nails digging deep, deep into the palms of her hands. Watching her, Norman saw how the tendons stood out on the backs of them like thick knotty cables feeding power into a machine.

“You!” Chad said. “You there—what’s your name! Don Hogan! This is your line, isn’t it? Is it dreck or not?”

At first Donald couldn’t answer. This must be why they’d activated him. Somewhere, ten years in the past, someone—or far more likely, something, since it would have been a computer analysis they trusted to make forecasts on such an important subject—had suspected the possibility of a development along these lines. Against that vanishingly small risk they had taken precautions; they had chosen, and nurtured, a man who—

“Are you going deaf, codder?”

“What? Oh—sorry, Chad, my mind was wandering. What did you say?”

Listening to the repetition of Chad’s question, already aware of what it was, Donald cast his eyes around nervously for Sergeant Schritt, and there he was, a few places distant in the throng. But his cocksure manner of earlier had faded in an instant; he looked, in fact, as though he was going to cry.

His lips moved. He didn’t see Donald before him although he raised his face and his gaze swept across where the other was standing. Off the writhing mouth Donald read what he was saying too quietly for it to carry through the mounting chatter. It was approximately, “Sheeting hole, sheeting hole, and they wouldn’t let me and where is she now who’s got her who’s making her preg—?”

It went on. Donald, embarrassed, turned his eyes away. He felt he had just looked into another man’s personal hell.

But in a state like that Schritt wasn’t going to worry about his charge delivering classified information to a potential subversive like Chad Mulligan. In any case, everything Donald knew about the subject was thanks to his college courses and the New York Public Library. Only the all-encompassing patterns he had been able to formulate out of what he read were in any sense less than public knowledge.

He said tiredly, “It doesn’t have to be dreck. SCANALYZER carries both gossip and hard computer-evaluated fact, and the guy didn’t say it had been in the rumour slot.”

“Who’ve they got over there who could handle such a programme?” Chad was leaning forward now, elbows on knees, eyes sharp and alert, his drunkenness magically forgotten. Also, Elihu and Norman were listening intently to what Donald and he were saying.

“Well, the first part—the simple optimising of your embryos—has been theoretically possible since the 1960s,” Donald sighed. “Reimplantation of externally fertilised ova is offered in this country as a commercial service, though it’s never been popular enough to become cheap. Governmental decree, though, might—”

He stopped short and snapped his fingers. “Of course!” he exploded. “Chad, you impress the hole out of me, know that? You did ask, didn’t you, ‘who’ve they got over there?’”

Chad nodded.

“It was the right question. For the second stage—the bit about going beyond the mere purification of your gene-pool to actual improvement of the stock—you do need the genius of someone with high-level breakthrough capacity. And they have a man like that, somebody who hasn’t been heard of for almost ten years except as a professor at Dedication University.”

“Sugaiguntung,” Chad said.

“That’s right.”

Elihu looked, puzzled, at Chad first, then Donald, asking a question with lifted eyebrows.

“Sugaiguntung was the man who put Yatakang into the tailored bacteria market when he was in his twenties,” Donald said. “Brilliant, original, supposed to be one of the world’s greatest tectogeneticists. Then he—”

“Something about rubber,” Chad interrupted. “It’s coming back to me now.”

“Right. He developed a new strain of rubber-tree which replaced the natural strains in all the Yatakangi plantations and as a result it’s the last country anywhere on Earth where synthetics can’t compete with tree-grown latex. I didn’t know he’d been working on animal stocks, but—”

“Has he any? What would you need, anthropoid apes?”

“Ideally, but I imagine quite a lot could be done on pigs.”

“Pigs?” Norman echoed in a disbelieving tone.

“That’s right. Pig-embryos are often used for teaching purposes—the resemblances are astonishing until very shortly before birth.”

“Yes, but we’re not talking about the embryonic scale,” Chad pointed out. “This is deep-down stuff, right inside the germ-plasm. Orang-outangs?”

“Oh my God,” Donald said.

“What?”

“I never made the connection before. The Yatakangi government has been diligently preserving and breeding orang-outangs for the past five or six years. Right out of the blue they imposed a death penalty for killing one and offered a reward equal to about fifty thousand dollars for capturing them and bringing them in alive.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Chad said with decision, dumping his glass on the nearest table and jumping to his feet.

“Yes, let’s,” Norman agreed. “But—”

“I don’t mean stop talking about it,” Chad snapped. “You live together, don’t you? We’ll go to your place. Elihu, will you come along too? When we’ve sorted this out there are still more questions I want to ask you about Beninia. Okay? Right, let’s blast off out of this freaking awful party and go find some peace and quiet!”

They were not the only ones who had had the same idea. Glancing back as they waited for a chance to filter through the exit door, the last thing Donald saw was Sergeant Schritt leaning on the wall with one hand, with the other holding a large glass of vodka or gin from which he tossed gulp after gulp down his throat to put out the fire of sorrow in his heart.

And by tomorrow, how many more like Sergeant Schritt?