Stand on Zanzibar

context (25)

A FAVOURITE STORY OF CHAD MULLIGAN’S

“This very distinguished philosophy professor came out on the platform in front of this gang of students and took a bit of chalk and scrawled up a proposition in symbolic logic on the board. He turned to the audience and said, ‘Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll agree that that’s obvious?’

“Then he looked at it a bit more and started to scratch his head and after a while he said, ‘Excuse me!’ And he disappeared.

“About half an hour later he came back beaming all over his face and said triumphantly, ‘Yes, I was right—it is obvious!’”

continuity (36)

MAKESHIFT

The moment Norman and Chad appeared in the lobby of the GT tower an anonymous staffer dashed over to them and announced that Rex Foster-Stern wanted to see them. A second came up and said that Prosper Rankin had been looking everywhere for Norman, and a third caught sight of him and came to let him know that Hamilcar Waterford was asking where he had got to.

Rankin and Waterford could stew, but Rex was a different matter. Norman said, “Where is he?”

“Down in the Shalmaneser vault.”

“That’s where we’re going.”

“Er…” The staffer was plainly flustered. “Who is the gentleman with you, sir?”

“Chad Mulligan,” Norman said, and brushed the staffer aside.

GT’s image-maintenance was excellent, but Norman could detect the subtle clues that indicated it was breaking down. It meant nothing that there were two parties of visitors in the huge lobby waiting to be escorted on a tour of the building—proof that rumours of the corporation being poised on the edge of catastrophe hadn’t managed to outweigh the impact of the Beninia publicity. It meant nothing that a team from Engrelay Satelserv was bringing in cameras and other equipment on air-trolleys to cover the formal banquet scheduled for this evening. It meant nothing that reporters of all possible skin colours and probably also the Alexandrian five sexes were coming and going with one eye on the current release-sheet and the other on the way ahead.

The real situation was reflected in the staffers who whispered together in corners, in the refusal of a board member heading for the exit to even smile at a foreign journalist, in the scent of tension Norman could practically take a grip on with his hands.

Down, directly to the lower level of the Shalmaneser vault. Someone must have called to warn Rex that Norman had arrived, for the man’s agitated face was the first thing revealed when the elevator door slid back.

“Norman! Have you any idea of the trouble you’ve—?”

“Did you do as I asked?” Norman cut in.

“What? Well, yes, but the trouble it’s cost to do it, and the money! Why, we had to postpone contracted time worth half a million on your say-so!”

“A little trouble is a fair exchange for a disaster, isn’t it? And how much does the Beninia project involve?”

Rex wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Norman, I know you’re pretty well in charge of that, but—”

“The hole! I am in charge of it, Rex, and I have more to win or lose on it than anybody except the Beninians themselves and maybe Elihu Masters. What have you arranged for us?”

Rex swallowed and let his hand fall to his side. “He’s due to clear for direct vocal interrogation in about—ah—six minutes. But fifteen minutes was the most I could fix for you; after that there’s the regular SCANALYZER contract time and that I dare not monkey with.”

“And I see you’re keeping the tourists away for the moment.”

“It’s driving your old dept out of their skulls, but what else could I do? I don’t know what company secrets are going to be idly chatted about, do I?”

“Chad!” Norman turned. “Fifteen minutes be enough, or do you want me to go up to Rankin and cancel the SCANALYZER slot?”

Chad had walked forward as curious as any casual sightseer off the street and was surveying the whole apparatus of Shalmaneser from one end to the other. Some of the staffers at work on the equipment looked uncomfortable at his intense interest in them.

“What? Oh! Yes, if I can’t hit it in a quarter of an hour I obviously didn’t draw the right conclusions.”

“Mr. Mulligan, are you claiming to be able to solve in fifteen minutes a problem that’s been blocking our best technicians for days on end?” Rex sounded as though an affirmative answer would make him explode with sheer fury.

Chad finished his study of Shalmaneser’s exterior and leisurely faced Rex. “And who are you?” he inquired.

“Foster-Stern, VP in charge of projects and planning. This whole scene comes under my dept.”

“Ah-hah. In that case you can spare part of these remaining few minutes to check me out on the data Norman gave me, see if he overlooked anything significant.”

This is a new Chad Mulligan. Norman realised the fact with a start. He’d heard contempt in that voice before, but it had always been searing, edged with the passion born of frustration. Now it seemed cold and deliberate, such as might be used by a man in charge of subordinates whom he could only rule by sarcasm and insult. The overtones rang loud and clear, saying: I’m a better man than you are!

Additionally, Chad’s stance had altered. Gone was the slumped posture of the man resigned to defeat, promising he would debauch himself to death and abandon his ambitions. There was a tension in his body and a light in his eyes as though he were bracing himself for a terrific contest and fifty-one per cent sure of coming out the winner.

As though he has always been trying to make an impression ever since I first met him, and now he’s forgotten about that and gone back to being himself.

And Chad Mulligan being himself was a far more impressive sight. The curled lip, the hands that jabbed the air as if to carve out by the handful the substance of words uttered in his barking voice, the aura of authority gathering around him as one by one he added more staffers to his audience. Question and answer; question misunderstood, answer cut short with a glare; staffers tripping over their own tongues in their eagerness to be helpful …

Norman was barely listening. He felt dazed. He had wagered his entire hopes on a man whom he could scarcely claim to know, and the idea that he was holding a ticket for a won bet was hard to digest.

Where have I seen this kind of transformation before…?

The thought “man I can scarcely claim to know” showed him the association that led to the answer, and it seemed ridiculous: Donald Hogan.

But there was the fact. In just this way Donald had revealed the occasional, much curtailed trace of excitement at a scrap of amusing or potentially significant information, capable of being matched like a missing piece from a jigsaw puzzle into a fascinating new pattern.

And in just that way also Donald had shattered Norman’s view of him as though the real man had reached past him and broken the distorting mirror in which he had always previously preferred to look.

Killed a mucker with his bare hands? Not Donald. Never placid nonentity Donald whose temper I risked a score of times in petty domestic rows!

He shied away from the vision of his body lying on the floor after trying his roomie’s patience too far and forced himself back to the here and now. Chad was saying, “One minute to go, right? Check me out one more time on the procedure, then: I say cue for question and that switches in the gadget which limits the reply to manageable proportions, but if it doesn’t work I have to say either hold or cancel according to whether I want to revert to the same subject or change to another.”

His listeners nodded in unison.

“What do I say if I want to make him accept new data?”

Blank expressions. Eventually Rex said, “Well, Mr. Mulligan, I don’t think you ought really to—”

“Fasten it. What do I say?”

“You say ‘postulate’,” Rex said reluctantly.

“That’s hypothetical! What do I say to make him take it?”

“Well, you see, we didn’t really envisage programming him with fresh material verbally, so—”

“Mr. Foster-Stern! If you keep me hanging about, I’m quite prepared to tell Norman over there he’s got to arrange cancellation of the SCANALYZER slot, and you don’t want that, do you?”

Rex swallowed enormously, Adam’s apple bobbing. He said in a faint voice, “You have to say, ‘I tell you three times.’”

Chad stared, and broke into a grin. “The hole! So someone in this monstrous ziggurat must have had a sense of humour at one time! I bet whoever dreamed that one up didn’t last here, though.”

Someone standing close to Shalmaneser’s printouts called, “Cleared down now, sir—ready for vocal interrogation!”

* * *

I have told you once, I have told you twice—What I tell you three times is true …

That snatch of doggerel from The Hunting of the Snark went around and around in Norman’s head as he watched Chad approach the readin mike with maddening slowness. His comparison of the man to a champion preparing for a fight had been exact, he realised. To Chad, this was a challenge of unique quality—perhaps the only one that would have forced him out of his self-imposed role of disillusioned cynic.

“Shalmaneser?” he said to the mike. “Hi, Shal. My name is Chad Mulligan.”

Norman had heard Shalmaneser’s voice before, but it always made him shiver a little—not because it had any intrinsic eerie quality, but because of the associations it conjured up. In fact it was derived from the speaking voice of a celebrated operatic baritone and was rather pleasantly inflected.

But the baritone was dead—suicide—and knowing that made it almost intolerable.

“I know your books, Mr. Mulligan,” Shalmaneser said. “Also I have stored several TV interviews with you. I recognise your appearance and voice.”

“I’m flattered.” Chad dropped into a chair facing the mike and the battery of cameras trained around it. “Well, I gather you don’t have much time for idle conversation, so I’ll come straight to the point. Cue: what’s wrong with the Beninia project?”

“It won’t work,” Shalmaneser said.

Norman stole a glance at Rex. It was impossible to tell by looking whether the man’s agitated condition was due to Chad’s nonchalance or to the knowledge that using Shalmaneser in this fashion slowed his lightning reactions to a level close to the human, wasting precious time. Giving a machine the power to talk in ordinary English had meant funnelling everything through subsidiary installations which worked at less than a thousandth of the speed of light-writers.

“Cue: why not?” Chad said.

“The data given to me include unacceptable anomalies.”

“Cue: would it be fair to say you don’t believe in what you’ve been told about Beninia?”

There was a measurable pause. Rex took half a pace forward and started to say something about anthropocentric concepts compelling Shalmaneser to search his entire memory-banks.

“Yes. I don’t believe it,” the artificial voice announced.

“Hmmm…” Chad plucked at his beard. “Cue: what elements of the data are unacceptable? Be maximally specific.”

Another, longer pause, as Shalmaneser examined everything he had ever been told which referred to the subject and discarded all but the most essential items.

“The human elements concerned with social interaction,” he said at length. “Next, the—”

“Hold!” Chad snapped. Once more he tangled his fingers in his beard and tugged at it. “Cue: have you been taught the Shinka language?”

“Yes.”

“Cue: is its given vocabulary among the anomalies that cause you to reject the data?”

“Yes.”

All around, technicians began to exchange astonished stares. One or two of them dared to sketch a smile.

“Cue: are the living conditions described to you as obtaining in Beninia of a kind which lead you to expect different behaviour from the people there from what you’ve been told?”

“Yes.”

“Cue: is the political relationship between Beninia and its neighbouring countries another of the anomalies?”

“Yes.” Immediately—no delay.

“Cue: is the internal political structure of the country also anomalous?”

“Yes.”

“Cue: with maximal specificity define your use of the term ‘anomalous’.”

“Antonym: consistent. Synonym: inconsistent. Related concepts: congruity, identity—”

“Hold!” Chad bit his lip. “Sheeting hole, that was a bad choice of approach … Ah, I think I see how I can … Shal, cue this one: does the anomaly lie in the data given to you with direct reference to Beninia, or does it only become apparent when you’re dealing with Beninia in relation to other countries?”

“The latter. In the former case the anomaly is of the order which I am allowed to accept for the sake of argument.”

“Whoinole is that codder, anyway?” someone asked in hearing of Norman.

“Chad Mulligan,” someone whispered back, and the first speaker’s eyes grew wide.

“Evaluate this, then,” Chad said, frowning tremendously and staring at nothing. “Postulate that the data given you about Beninia are true. Cue: what would be necessary to reconcile them with everything else you know? In other words, what extra assumption do you have to make in order to accept and believe in Beninia?”

Rex jerked forward another half-pace like a marionette, his mouth open. All around the vault, which was now in dead silence except for the echo of Chad’s voice and the soft humming of Shalmaneser’s mental processes, Norman saw jaws drop correspondingly.

Obvious!

The pause, though, stretched, and stretched, until it was intolerable. One more second, Norman thought, and he was going to scream. And—

“That a force of unknown nature is acting on the population and causing them to behave differently from known patterns of human reaction under comparable circumstances elsewhere.”

“Shal,” Chad said softly, “such a force exists, and is at present being investigated by experts to determine its nature. I tell you three times!”

He spun his chair through half a circle and got to his feet. It was only then that Norman saw how, despite the chill in the vault, he was running with sweat and sparkling drops of it were forming on the ends of his beard.

“All right,” he said wearily. “Try him now.”

The tension snapped. Someone Norman didn’t know darted forward to the chair Chad had vacated and hurled a question into the mike. The answer came back: “The estimated return for the Beninia project will be—”

“Hold!”

The man looked at Rex. “I think he’s done it, sir,” he exclaimed.

“Someone get me a drink!” said Chad Mulligan.

tracking with closeups (26)

ALL IN DUE TIME

The banked machines playing over the tape-recorded reports of the Metropolitan Police prowl-cars for the past twelve hours—mainly for the benefit of the computer responsible for crime-prevention—made a note of a particular section on a particular spool and shortly afterwards sent it, flagged with a code-number, to a detective sergeant in the Analytical Department.

The code ran 95 (eugenic infraction)—16 (drug trafficking)—01 (female)—22 (probable age)—01 (applicable to a single individual).

Quirking his mouth at the idea of a eugenic infraction being the responsibility of a single individual, the sergeant spun the report-tape forward to the appropriate point, already knowing what to expect: a shiggy in a state of unmistakable pregnancy had been observed orbiting on some psychedelic or other, and just in case it was Yaginol the matter ought to be looked into.

The sergeant, as part of his training, had been shown a few Yaginol-induced foetuses. Some of them had made members of the course under instruction vomit. He himself had managed to restrain the impulse, but if he had a nightmare nowadays he imagined himself the father of such a monster, lacking eyes, or limbs, or perhaps worst of all the entire brain, the skull being open at the fontanelle to show that inside there was nothing but air.

* * *

From now on, the doctor said, she had to be consistent. She would have to put up with the cyclothymic variations which normally would have indicated it was time to shift from Skulbustium to something else—Yaginol, for a man or a shiggy who wasn’t pregnant, Triptine for one who was. Triptine was better than Skulbustium, the hitrip not being so dependent on the groundmood, but Skulbustium was much easier to come by and the whole idea was to bring into the world a baby who would never see the ordinary, drab, loathsome city called London, but always the private wonderland where Poppy spent her life. So when the doctor said she must choose something and stick to it until the child was born, she chose Skulbustium for fear supplies of Triptine might be interrupted. It was still fairly new, and she didn’t know anyone who was homecooking it yet.

But it was bad on the days when her normal glandular rhythms cycled towards depression.

When the police came to the tall apartment block where she shared a flat with Roger and another couple named Sue and Ted, she was in a down phase.

The two constables who paid the call weren’t interested in making work for themselves. They said so in as many words to Ted, who answered the door, and most people wouldn’t have expected otherwise. At worst, a bloody-minded fuzzy-wuzzy would sniff the air and tell you to come along and there’d be a fine which was a nuisance and you’d have to stretch your credit for the next lift. Today, even that wasn’t on the programme. All they wanted was to make certain a pregnant girl, known to the Eugenics Board and answering the description in the report from the prowl-car, wasn’t using Yaginol and threatening to visit a handicapped child on the community.

Poppy heard Ted say, “No, of course she’s not. She wouldn’t be such a sheeting fool.”

“Have to take her for a little ride, though, codder. To a doctor, that’s all.”

The world was a place of echoing colours, mostly drab—the colour-range of shit. The world was a place of tingling smells, making her nose run and her eyes water. The world was a place of indefinable menace, that clad her skin in the crawling caress of invisible cold snails. They figured out afterwards she must have been trying to hide, but what she opened wasn’t a closet-door. It was a window.

Twenty-seven storeys above the hard flagstones of the drab, loathsome city called London.

continuity (37)

STORAGE

They gave Donald and Sugaiguntung inflatable mattresses in the mouth of the cave, which was an armoury and a communications centre. Concealed from the outside by a sudden bulge in the wall, there was a TV set and a whole miniature studio of radio and phone gear. But it had to be operated with discretion; volcanoes did not mask the tell-tale traces of electronic equipment as they did heat.

In the early morning when Donald awoke from unrestful slumber Sugaiguntung was tossing and turning and his teeth were chattering. Alarmed, Donald felt his forehead. His skin was hot and dry and he complained of feeling nauseated.

A call was answered by a girl in drab green battledress who stripped off Sugaiguntung’s clothes and applied culture tabs and took his temperature. She said finally, “It is what we call jungle fever. Everyone catches it who comes here. It is not dangerous.”

“Can’t you give him anything for it?” Donald demanded.

“I am not in a big hospital,” the girl said with a trace of sadness in her face. “I can give an antipyretic and a heroic dose of ascorbic acid. But what I should need is the specific, fremonium chlorhydrate with apyrine, and we have none. I will see if some can be got from Gongilung, of course.”

“Does it last long?”

“Three days, four perhaps. After that there is lasting immunity.” The girl was offhand in her manner. “Sometimes there is delirium on the second day.”

By now Jogajong had been informed and appeared at the mouth of the cave, tousled from sleep. He listened to the girl’s report, nodding.

“Keep him warm and comfortable. Give him much to drink,” he said. “It isn’t bad, it happening now. There’s nowhere he could go in any case.”

* * *

By the evening of the first day, Donald was wishing he had brought his stock of tranks with him. He needed them to keep calm. Culture tabs reported that he was not, as he half-suspected, suffering from the same fever as Sugaiguntung, but he felt feverish with impatience. Jogajong could hardly have avoided noticing, but even sitting here in this jungle hideout he had things to do, so it was late in the day before he had a chance to approach Donald and address him with pure Yatakangi politeness.

“You’re not used to waiting, Mr. Hogan—that’s plain!”

“I don’t know what I’m used to,” Donald sighed. “I spent most of my life, up till a short time ago, in a routine which I was sick of. Suddenly I was picked out of it and tossed into this chaos. And life goes so much faster here I’ve become just as sick of this in ten days as I was of the other after ten years.”

At the far side of the clearing one of Jogajong’s young officers appeared, holding up a phang with a dead snake skewered on the point. He displayed it for his leader, saluting, and was rewarded with a grin of approval.

“Was it a very poisonous snake, or something?” Donald inquired at random.

“No, not poisonous. Good to eat, a delicacy. We don’t lead a very luxy life here.

“Good to eat!” Donald almost started to his feet. “Well, if you say so, I guess…” He mopped his face, hating the clammy sulphurous smell from the volcanic vent, which today had been especially active, they said, loading the immobile wet air of the clearing with fumes that could not blow away.

“I apologise for the routine and its attendant boredom you’re having to endure here,” Jogajong said, and Donald could not tell if he was being sarcastic. “I would arrange a diversion—take you out with us on a small raid, perhaps—but at present the climate of opinion is not much in my cause’s favour, and what is more I believe you are a valuable person not to be risked in that way.”

Donald thought about that for a while. He said at length, “Is it because of the—uh—the climate of opinion that you’re stuck here?”

“Precisely. It was envisaged that I should begin to work openly when I was landed here. There is a great deal of support for my cause among the common people, if not among the wealthy. The opposition party is not strong in Gongilung although some groups—fisherfolk, as you know, some intellectuals and the building trades especially—are loyal. On the more distant islands the administration of entire communities is in our hands and I hoped to launch a popular campaign and if necessary declare independence and withstand siege. Unfortunately the claim about the optimisation of the next generation postponed that action. Thanks to what you have done, of course, the lie will be shown up for what it is and the indignation that follows will provide a suitable impetus for the revolution.”

He spoke as though he had the authority of an evaluation by Shalmaneser to back his views. Possibly, Donald realised, he had—at least, the Washington computers must have analysed his chances pretty well before he was brought back here from the States.

He said, “But if the Solukarta government hadn’t dug this trap for themselves, you’d honestly have started a civil war?”

Jogajong shrugged. “It would have been a longer and slower job, I’m sure, and probably there would have been a high price to pay. But what is the price of freedom?”

“What’s the price of life?” Donald countered bitterly.

“I come from a country where life has been held cheap for centuries,” Jogajong said. “I know the price of mine. But one must make one’s own price and enforce it.”

“Most people don’t get the chance,” Donald muttered.

“I didn’t quite hear that…?”

“I said most people don’t get the chance!” Donald snapped. “Have you heard any news from Gongilung since I arrived? Was anything said about a building that was blown up?”

“Blown up? It was reported that some collapsed owing to an explosion, but they said it was due to the bad sewers. Often we find pockets of methane that can be set on fire.”

“Whaledreck. I had to use a bomb to get rid of a pestilential policewoman.” Donald looked at his hands. “How many people were killed?”

“Not many,” Jogajong said after a pause. “Seventeen, eighteen—I think that is what they reported to me.”

“Women and children among them?” Donald’s voice grated in his own ears.

“All women and children,” Jogajong said. “It was to be expected. The men were at their work.” He leaned towards Donald and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “Don’t distress yourself over them. Think as I do that they died in the cause of their country.”

“They didn’t die in my cause,” Donald said, and shook off the hand.

“A cause that your country shares with mine,” Jogajong insisted.

“That’s true,” Donald said. “Your country, mine, every other country in the world, has the same cause and what it does is, it takes people who don’t give a pint of whaledreck for it and sends them off to kill women and children. Yes, it’s the cause of every country on earth! And you know what I call that cause? I call it naked stinking greed.”

There was a short silence. Jogajong spoke stiffly to end it.

“That is hardly the attitude I’d have expected from an American officer!”

“I’m not an American officer. They gave me a rank because it was a convenient way of blackmailing me into behaving myself. As ‘Lieutenant’ Hogan I can be arrested and tried secretly by court-martial if I don’t do as I’m told. Apart from that I’m a very dull, ordinary kind of codder with one natural aptitude and one that’s been trained on me by means I never dreamed were possible. My natural aptitude eventually bored me, but my taught one makes me hate the sight of myself.”

“In my country,” Jogajong said, “a man who thinks like you goes voluntarily to join his ancestors. Or used to in the old days. Now, the usurper Solukarta has copied your Christian habits and closed that way of escape. Which is a reason why we have so many muckers, I think.”

“Possibly.” In the old days of a month ago, Donald might have been intrigued by that suggestion; now he let it pass. “But I’m not at the suicide level yet. I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”

“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”

“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”

Jogajong’s face froze into a scowl. “I’m sorry, Mr. Hogan,” he said, rising. “I see little point in continuing this conversation.”

“That makes two of us,” Donald agreed, and turned his back.

* * *

And the next day was much the same except that, as the nurse had warned, Sugaiguntung passed into delirium for several hours. Donald sat beside him in the cave, listening to ramblings in Yatakangi whose hypnotic effect kept driving him off into musings of his own and sometimes into sleep. However, in the evening one of the fisherfolk from Gongilung risked his life and brought some of the necessary drug from a pharmacy there, and the delirium was over by the time Donald found he was ready for sleep.

Also the next day was like the first.

* * *

So was the next.

tracking with closeups (27)

RECIPE FOR A MUCKER

Philip Peterson had been at home all evening on his own, brooding. His mother had been invited to a party of the sort that … well, in her view that sort of party was unsuitable for her son because he wasn’t yet blasé and hardened like his old mother. Instead he held a small private party of his own, starting with three whistlers and going on to the reefer-box. It took a while for the lift of the pot to work through the bringdown of the alcohol, but the two fighting together gave him rather a pleasant feeling, as though he too were about to fight, or make love, or something of equal importance.

At about eleven poppa-momma he called a girl he knew but she wasn’t in. After that he played some of his favourite zock recordings, the kind Sasha preferred not to hear while she was in the apt, and danced by himself around the room.

He began to feel lethargic, and he didn’t want that, so he took one of Sasha’s Wakup pills from the store she kept in the drawer at the head of her bed which she fondly believed he didn’t know about, but all the pill did was prevent him from going to sleep, not make him feel lively. He put the lights out and sat down in a chair and played over the zock recordings again. They showed up much better in the dark and he could practically feel himself being drawn into them. His clothes began to get in his way so he took them off and strewed them around, walking a repetitious ellipse on the carpet. Eventually he grew hungry and went to see what there was that he could dial for and chose one of his favourites, cold roast ribs of real beef with salad, which he mainly selected when Sasha was out.

(Later they drew attention to the “very underdone” code he had dialled and said learned things about masculinity symbols.)

He was sitting by himself slicing the meat and spearing the salad at about five past three anti-matter when the main entrance tell-tale showed that someone had used the Watch-&-Ward Inc. key coded to this apt. He got up and turned off the recording he was watching and went and stood over by the door.

The light from the corridor outside, when the door was opened, showed him Sasha giggly with her dress down around her waist and those fine plump curved rounded breasts exposed to the eager mouth of the stranger with her to whom she was saying sssh and wait a minute and do be quiet we don’t want to wake my son.

He reached out as the door was closed but before the light was turned on and used the knife he had been cutting his meat with to slash away the rest of Sasha’s clothes. The material divided with a soft cry and the skin down her back from below her right shoulder-blade to her buttocks divided with a scream. Light. The stranger, still straightening from the adoring obeisance he was performing at the altar of her ripe mature womanhood, said something about holding it, what the—?

Philip said, “What are you doing to my mother my mother my mother?” and at each repetition gestured with his right hand, which happened to be holding the very sharp steak-knife. On the third repetition the stranger turned his eyes up in their sockets and bubbled and lay down on the floor with both arms folded over the stab-wounds in his belly.

A high, shrill voice was ringing from wall to ceiling to wall. Philip turned off his ears and used his eyes now they were becoming adjusted to the light again. Standing near the door there was a rather beautiful woman, not quite as young as she once was, but almost naked except for some rags she was clutching to her. Irresistibly attracted, he approached her, letting fall the thing his hand happened to be grasping at the time, and when she dodged his lips and insisted on keeping her own mouth wide in that ugly expression he forced it shut with his fingers. After a little while she stopped resisting and let him do what he wanted, which he did with a great deal of enthusiasm because somebody somewhere else a long time ago had kept on stopping him from doing it on some wholly ridiculous grounds about being too young darling. Of course I’m not too young. Here I am doing it aren’t I?

But she wasn’t very exciting after the first time so he went and looked for a partner with a bit more energy and he got a coloured shiggy who happened to be in the elevator car and didn’t scream quite loudly enough and he was trying to persuade her white roomie whose apt she had been carrying the key for when someone who happened to be passing spotted him shoving her in through the door and the fuzzy-wuzzies fused him when he came out to look for the next one but that was too late.