The Best of Fritz Leiber

The Good New Days

“THEY DON’T BUILD slums like they used to,” Whitey Edwards told me, reaching up for a loose corner of the flexo and pulling it down to prove his point. It domed springily over our dreg-bottomed coffee cups, revealing in the hidden space behind it the limp multicolored spaghetti of the utilities piping: gas, water, metered syntho-milk, sewage, coaxed TV, med-mist, Musik, robo-talk, robo-juice, tele, vele, elec, gelec, and such. Few of them running fat with their peculiar contributions to the good life, I judged.

“That may be so,” I answered, slapping aside the dodderer’s hands and thumbing the blue elastic panel back in place with a fast rub along its adhesive edge. Again it decently covered the flaccid tangle of what looked like rainbow-hued sheep’s gut and rubber unmentionables. “But they built Ma like a bull and she’ll gore and trample you if she finds you tearing down her kitchen. It’s bad enough what the giant centipedes are doing.”

The jumbo TV, jammed between sink and fridge, flickered weak and ghostly. A gaggle of five-job wives and eight-job men were having a closed-end discussion of everything in creation on the executive patio edge of a swimming pool big enough to hide a space-to-seabottom cruiser. Their sweet eldritch cackle was unintelligible, but their state of undress was a slight counter-irritant to boredom.

Whitey Edwards sighed, not looking at these suburban goddesses, but squinting his rheumy eyes against the Monday sun coming up like doom over the dusty flats between Beatsville and the Henleys’ happy if fragile little family castle. Earth’s spotted, spitting, seething star shot its angry rays under the great awning rigged in front of our windows and door.

“Once,” the old boy said, shaking the head-topping that gave him his name, “they built slums solid with steel beams and heavy lath and great bloody pipes of iron and tile and lead that made ‘em think twice before they tore ’em down. But now.” He sighed his wheezy grief. Whitey’d used to be a con-and- destruction worker decades back, before the robots took that over, before I was born.

The TV zoomered in on a taut little job in bolero jacket and loincloth. The sound cleared for her fast, happy words “... caring for this pool put my husband and I in the pool-counselor raquette...” and died.

I started to tell Whitey I had even more current job sorrows than his. Since Thursday I’d been terminated from my street-smiler’s job for competing with the psychiatrists, robot and human, and for all I know with the giant centipedes. Just then my brother Dick erupted from the bed-closets, throwing clothes over his sallow nakedness like a Gypsy escaping from a Nazi gas chamber—or as if he were a sprint-in-the- gutter one-jobber. And with that job only since Friday night after being three weeks on probationary relief.

I called sweetly at him, “Are you scared a customer will put a gush of quarters into one of your metal bandits with her own little pinkies if you’re a minute late?”

Dick scowled, gyrating around a stubborn trouser leg. “Don’t you worry, Dickie,” I kept on. “All the women I illicitly psyched were as nervous of machinery as sex; they wanted a man to do it for them.”

Society, graciously, used to let people work vending and other coin-operated machines, like laundromats. But now, like laundromats too, you have to pay an attendant to do it for you—because machines are temperamental and individual enterprise is almost as holy as money and anyway, there aren’t enough jobs to go around more than two or three times.

Dick groggled something at me and got the door open, all set for a spring-heel takeoff. But there in his way was a tiny man, dressed like a respectable beetle, with dimpled fist raised to knock. He had glasses with zoomer lenses; silver antennae quivered out of his gray hat; a flat black belly-box was his ventral carapace. He looked around, especially at the cluttered floor, as if we were a touch unsavory, but he held his ground.

As Dick paused at this coleopterous apparition, Ma came charging out of the bed-closets, red in the face and black was the rest of her. She grappled Dick around the elbows and roared, “Stop! No son of mine is going out to give battle to the 21st Century on an empty stomach.” Grabbing a quarter orange she shoved it between his teeth like a boxer’s mouthpiece and then snatching this way and that she slammed a sandwich in his one hand and a cup in the other and on the next time around poured it steaming full.

No one can deny that Ma stands squarely in back of her four sons, like the manager of a quartet of fistic champions, conscious of our genius and determined that it get recognition in the form of seven-or eight- job careers. Though at the moment Dick was the only one of us with any job at all, except for Tom, who lives away with his wife and two kids. But obstructions and setbacks never daunt Ma. It’s not the money she’s after, mostly, it’s the glory of the House of Henley pitted against the whole bloody world.

Pricked by tender filial warmth, I eyed her—a murderous son-punishing behemoth but my blessed

mother—while Whitey gave her an unseen wave. He’s an old admirer she tolerates ever since Pa recognized her superior nuclear power and died.

Dick bit out and swallowed the meat of the orange and tongued aside the peel so as to yell that the coffee was burning his hand and what would it do to his throat? Ma ripped the fridge open against the pull of the great spring I’d fixed outside to keep it shut since the latch broke. She whisked out an ice-cube and tucked it in Dick’s cup. The fridge door thudded shut and the spring whirred like a rattlesnake about to jump loose and strike, but it didn’t.

Then Dick gulped his coffee while Ma held him and screeched in his ear about using lunch hour to scout for a second job and not stalk girls. When he’d finished his drink, she gagged him with his sandwich and let him go.

The beetle-man dodged aside. Dick took off with a straight-line velocity that would have broken his neck and scattered his bones if we’d still been living on the twentieth floor and not in this ground-level flat they tricked us into exchanging for.

The TV blinked and—presto—there was a soldierly file of eight-job men (tabbed for that by the digit on their left shoulder) single-footing with pleasant monotony past the golden plastic statue of a twelve- jobber. Each as he reached screen-center turned head and shouted an inaudible but optimistic something at me and bared all his perfectly tended teeth in a dazzling grin.

I breathed a happy sigh and got set for a spell of quiet—at least until the centipedes decided to start scuttling—but just then the beetle-man poked his head in and piped politely at Ma. “Good morning. Mrs. Henley, I’m your area med statistician, come to take your blood-pressure and photo-snap your insides and all for posterity, like we arranged for a week ago.”

Ma slowly turned her head and glared at him like a bull that spots the matador, or, more likely, a peanut- vendor strolling across the ring. The red in her face went purple and she slowly reached for the bubbling coffee flask and slowly lifted it. The beetle-man innocently watched the lethal globe ascend with its tip- tilting seething brown hemicore, as if all this were a job-indoctrination demonstration in astrophysics.

Whitey started up, but I pushed him back in his chair, saying rapidly, “Not you. Even being an old friend of the family wouldn’t save you from the horns at this moment.”

Then I rasped loud as ambulance-brakes at Ma, “Hold your hand, you murdering old frump!”

She turned at once, as I’d known she would. I cited her and she charged me with the coffee flask high, very much like a small Miura, but armed in a fashion to have made Manolete himself turn pale. But I slipped her with a half veronica and as she went past I kissed her low on the back of the neck, just at the spot where the matador’s sword goes in. I whisked my arms around her beloved thick waist, and the next instant she and Whitey and I were as happy as tin larks together flitting through a sparkling star cluster, and she was pouring fresh coffee for us.

But the beetle-man, never dreaming the deadly peril he’d been in, advanced another step into the kitchen and called, “Mrs. Henley, it’s very needful you have your medical inspection. You’re distorting area med statistics and there are drastic penalties for evading med census. No need for you to undress, just hold still now—”

I pushed the coffee flask back against the wall and I stroked Ma as I held her tight, so she didn’t go quite as purple as she howled at hun, “You filthy med-spy!—do you think I’ll submit to your peepings and be stuff for your filthy pictures when I’m not granted decent human med service if I do sicken? Here I have four grand sons, supermen ah!—Meaghan here, who’s a master mind doctor, and Harry who’s still in bed, the greatest poet in the world, and Dick the Prince of Personalities, whom you saw speeding to work and I need not comment on, and Tom, who’s a bloody wonder—and the filthy world takes so little note of them that if I go to the clinic it’s only robot doctors who’ll see me and never a flesh-and-blood physician!”

Whatever the topic of her rant, Ma always gets in a commercial for her boys.

The beetle-man quivered back a little at all that, but not very far, and piped soothingly,“Mrs. Henley, there’s nothing vulgar or inferior about robo-med. The Secretary of Mental Health himself prefers—”

He started to take another step into the room.

“That old sham!” Ma roared, palpitating hi my grasp and purpling dark. “He’s the same one whose minions are forever sentencing my genius son Harry to the clutches of the remedial psychiatrists.”

“But Mrs. Henley,” the little fellow went on with rash courage, “I can see with my own eyes you’re not in the best of health. An immediate med-check—”

That gave me my opening and I shoved Ma into Whitey’s arms and advanced on the beetle-man quickly, waving my finger like a sword between his bug eyes. “You watch yourself, lad,” I cried, “or they’ll be terminating you for making diagnoses who are only census-taker. That’s what the licensed psychers did to me for adding only a few words of insight and wisdom to my street-smiling.”

At that very moment a ghostly pattering began and swiftly grew louder. It seemed to come from everywhere.

“What’s that?” the little chap asked wonderingly.

“The giant centipedes,” I told him.

He paled and his zoomered eyes searched the shadows under table and sink as he scuttled backwards, and just at that moment, perhaps from the floor being swayed by our movements, the great spring on the fridge came loose and went klishing across the floor very close to his feet—a twenty-inch coil of gray wire. He leaped for the lintel of the doorway to hoist himself out of reach of the venomous monster of his imagination, but he missed and fell and went leaping off as if old Fu Manchu’s whole blessed menagerie were at his heels. In pure pity I followed him under the great awning, polka-dotted now by the shadows showing through of the stuff pattering down on it, and caught up with him just beyond the mounting flake-drift.

“Don’t be frightened,” I told him, grappling him gently and forcing him to lift his zoomers to the ragged- topped wall behind, now only four to six stories high instead of the thirty it had been a week ago. Along its roller coaster margin two sinuous many-legged great silver beasties scampered, chomping great bites out of it and raining the digested fragments down from their rear ends in concrete cornflakes.

“Those are the giant centipedes,” I explained. “Demolishment robots, only.”

I was thinking of how Harry might make a shuddery poem of them —glittery cosmic crawlers nibbling the gray rim of infinity, eating their way in toward us from the ends of the universe—when at that instant a weightier chunk, rejected by one of the creature’s delicate digestive apparatus, no doubt, came thunking down like a meteor not four feet from us, denting the hard ground and raising a geyser of dust. The beetle-man darted off a dozen more steps while I ducked back under the awning, calling to him, “Now be off with you, little official, and trouble Ma no more. She’s too much for you, but let that not cast you down. Look on her as a revenant from a hardier, crueler age— a duchess out of place.”

I’d no sooner got back in the kitchen, where Ma and Whitey were chatting over their coffee, than Ellie, Dick’s wife, came out of the bed-closets full-dressed with bright suitcases in her hands and a dirty dark look in her eyes. She was saying, “Listen all of you, for I’ll not tell it twice: I’m leaving that one-job no­ good and going back to my last husband, who’s still got the three jobs I left him with when I thought to better myself by entering this house of mad pride and sloth and poets snoring,” and she brushed past me, the silver spring twinging again as she chanced to kick it.

“Meaghan, let her go, who can’t appreciate the Prince of Personalities,” Ma said to me loftily, her color down to ladylike bright pink again, but I still would have followed and argued with Ellie—Dick didn’t deserve to be deserted when he’d just got a toe on the bottom rung of the ladder, which of course was why she was leaving him though she didn’t know it, a jealous no-job little wifey—except that just then who should appear in the doorway but my eldest brother, Tom, filling it with his big grin and his great shoulders and his aura of three-job success—or would it be four now?—and saying, “Hi, Ma. Ellie leaving Dick again? Who’s the tiny one hanging around outside? Housing official come to coax you once more from this death trap? Hello, Whitey. No, no coffee, Ma, I want to talk to Meaghan here. I’ve got something for the lad!”

I knew what that meant, of course, and I was already hunched on my hands and knees, starting to fix the spring to the fridge again— a job that might easily take the rest of the day, I decided—when I felt Ma’s kindly talons on my shoulder, lifting me up, and she saying, “Whitey’U fix that, Meaghan,” and then her beloved claws were propelling me to a seat at the table flush against the blue flexo, with my cup in front of me and beyond that Tom’s great face as full of a smile of eager elder-brother benignity as my cup was of steaming coffee —Ma having poured again and dropped in a pinch of dexy (I saw her) to give me spirit.

All the while I was thinking chiefly, What job’s he found now that’s so bad he won’t take it himself but offer it to me? It’d have to be pretty bad, for at last count Tom’s three jobs were grinding mirrors for leisure-time astronomers who hadn’t time to grind their own —that’s one—and selling retailers a brand of all-cornsilk cancer-free cigarets with the genuine coal-tar taste and the nicotine life—that’s two—and answering for a robot answering service whenever the decibel-rating of the caller’s voice began to indicate extreme rage. He still had the third job, at any rate, by the phone-rig hanging around his neck.

“Meaghan,” he beamed, “next to an all-girl squad of revivalist angels, there’s naught so wondrous as brother-love. I got something great for you. By the by, I have Number Four myself now—I travel in ladies’ glow-in-the-dark underthings.”

As Ma raised a cheer at that, I looked around for escape, but Whitey was squatting at the fridge and blocking the door to the outer world, as happy with his tinkering as a great-grandfather cockroach (one of which was walking up his leg) while Ma, cheering still but with a policeman’s eye on me, was taking a cup of coffee big and smoking as a volcano into the bed-closets—to fire Harry’s poetic genius, no doubt, or in lieu of that toss him on his lazy feet.

“Meaghan—” Tom began, but just then his neck phone rang and he twitched it on and I could hear a voice like angry wasps. Tom listened and his face grew pink—he takes after Ma hi that—and he said, “Certainly, madam. However—” and then his face grew purple and he began to bubble his mouth like a fish.

I leaned across the table and put my lips to the mouthpiece and shouted, “I love you dearly, unknown, indeed I do. I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that,” and I twitched the thing off.

“That won’t satisfy her,” Tom said when he got his right color back and his breath.

“It will for twenty minutes,” I told him, “and what in this world is good for any longer?” And then I added, reckless in my light-heartedness, “You were saying. ?”

“Meaghan,” Tom began again, “I know you had this trifling street-smiler’s job—”

“Not so trifling or little,” I defended, though I hadn’t intended to. “The sociologists decided people looked too tense and glum going back and forth to work and shopping and so on, so they hired folk like myself to mingle among ‘em and strike up talk, casual-like, to cheer ’em up. Not quite the worst idea in the world, either.” “Yes, but you went too far,” Tom reminded me. “You pried into people’s minds to find their real troubles and set ‘em straight. That’s psychers’ work, my lad, and you can’t blame that august profession for resenting your competition and having you terminated.”

“I helped the people I talked to,” I countered stubbornly. ‘1 couldn’t have talked to them at all, Tom, if I hadn’t something solid to say.“

“I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that,” Tom said. “Solid!”

“I don’t worry ‘em or push any of their desperation buttons, though I glimpsed banks of those,” I protested on. “I just encouraged ’em to widen their minds and feelings a little and get some of the comic side-wash of others’ troubles and cheer up naturally.”

“There you’ve hit the nub of it,” Tom asserted, wagging a ringer in my face. “You tried to deliver more than your job called for, instead of learning to do it with a minimum of effort and finding another job to go with it, to swell your income—and then another after that.”

He gave a quick look around—to make sure Ma hadn’t come back, I soon realized—and then, leaning forward, said with a confidential hush, “Oh, Meaghan, my boy, I’ve learned so much of the world since I got away from here and Ma’s no longer firing me with resentments and wild ambitions. The world’s a very tidy comfortable place if only you’ll remember there are three billion other lunatic climbers in it— and do no more than you’re told and watch the smiles and frowns of your superiors and keep your eyes open and your nostrils flared for flicker or scent of another chance to make money. Step fast, keep adding one little job to the next like beads on a necklace, and forget Ma and her wild dreams. Oh, and did I tell you my Katie’s got two jobs herself now too?—and never a one she’d have had with Ma around to hold her down.”

“Ma’s all right,” I told him sharply. “She’s got more courage and determination and vision than the four of us’ll ever have together. And such a fierce self-punishing drive I wonder she’s still alive. How would you ever have got out of here to a place of your own without Ma booting you?”

“True, true,” he agreed. “Nevertheless, Ma’s a hopeless romantic. She wants her four sons to be Dukes of the World, lording it over all.”

I couldn’t help chuckling at that. “When I was still street-smiling,” I confided, “a little man, who thought he was a great romantic, opened his mind to me wanting only to escape from the prison of his life and aim a flashing sword at other men and capture with love their women—and corral all the single girls going around loose, too. After we both looked at this stirring picture a while, we realized that what he really wanted was to have all women mother him and puff him up and lead him through life like a great bobbing red balloon.”

“That’s the way with all romantics, including Ma,” Tom said, taking advantage of me straightway. “She

wants her sons to be princes and kings, or board chairmen at all events, not realizing there’s a billion others starting up the success ladder with them—and not one with a genuine ion drive. Not realizing that the competition’s too stiff for any man to dream of being more than an eight-job statistic with his peers. Or ten at most.”

The TV now was sailing over a great pile of gently crumpled bedclothes, which struck me as most pleasant and unlikely. Then I realized it was orbiting the Earth high above the clouds and there low in the foreground were the backs of beautifully barbered heads and now a sign flashing across the clouds: “Vacation Jaunts through Space for Nine-Job Heroes of Democracy.”

“You’re right about the competition,” I agreed quickly with Tom. “I’m no enemy of democracy, I’m one of its darlingest friends, but there’s no question it’s upped the competition more than ever it was in Earth’s history. We’ve got more machines, more health, more freedom of movement, more education, more leisure, more time for making money in our spare time, more almost equal people, and more incentives, more quick showy rewards for the quickly successful—with the result that the competition burns us out fast enough to equalize all the longevity created by medical advance.”

“It doesn’t seem to be burning you out,” Tom observed.

“Now listen here, Tom my boy,” I continued, warming to my subject. “Isn’t there something altogether crazy about a world that wants to turn everyone into merchants no matter what their natural psychological class—a world that’s turned even scientists and poets and adventurers and soldiers and priests into merchants busy selling themselves—a world that’s feared so much that the machine would take away all jobs that it’s gone ape creating jobs and financial ventures by the billions. With each reduction in working hours paralleled by an equal or greater increase hi tune spent on a part-tune and sideline jobs—a world that’s so money-conscious that a man who takes his eyes off the dollar for a month or a day or even ten seconds—”

“Your eyes don’t look red with squinting at silver,” Tom observed like a lemon. “Besides, you’re deafening me.”

Just then Ma came lumbering daintily in again and asked Tom, “What’s this wondrous job you’ve got for Meaghan? I can’t wait any longer to hear.” Just as if she hadn’t been hearing every word and writhing at my negativisms.

I groaned as if on the verge of defeat. Tom laughed and said, “I was forgetting about that. What with Mea talking of billions of jobs, my one got lost hi the stampede. Well, it seems that the repair robots are getting unpredictable everywhere, spending too much time on some jobs and not enough on others, and passing up still others altogether. One repaired a leak so well it built an armor wall six feet thick around the leak and himself— Fortunata, they called that one. Another found a leak and did nothing but start making identical leaks in all the pipes he followed—until thousands of them were squirting behind him. A demolition robot started shooting rocks at a new-risen glastic building. Yet the circuits of these robots

are in perfect order and they always behave properly under factory tests. So what must be done is to have a man follow each metal trouble-shooter and note every move he makes, watch his behavior day after day—taking weeks if necessary so the robot will get used to his presence and not vary his behavior to please or confuse or harm the watcher. Oh, it’s a fine sort of job—no work at all—sort of like what they called Sidewalk Inspecting back in the depths of history.”

I said, “I suppose the robots they’re having the most trouble with are the ones that repair heat-tunnels and sewers and other delightful underground conduits.”

“How did you know that?” Tom asked me very quickly. “Old sunken spillways and aqueducts and chimneys too, though—some of the last poking thousands of feet high into the clear heady air. A most healthful job, my boyo—a regular mountain-climbing and spelunking vacation.”

I said softly, “I think I’d rather drown parboiled in this coffee cup than play psychiatric aide to a manic genius robot with a breakneck wander-urge who’s waiting for his metal consciousness to brighten with its first jeweled unhuman pictures and electricity-loving impulses. The machines are coming awake, did you know that, Tom? All the machines—”

“No, it’s but one machine,” a softer dreamier voice, mournful as a breeze through dead leaves, cut in on me. The adolescent wraith with hair like blond spiderweb, who was Ma’s poet genius and my youngest brother Harry, came drifting in from the bed-closets as if blown rather than walking. I could tell from the light-year look in his blue eyes that he’d conned his remedial psycher out of some pills.

He went on, ‘The whole Earth is one great metal machine, a dull steel marble amongst the aggies and glassies of the other planets. If anyone ever went out there with earth-eyes and not a spaceman’s, he’d see it rolling along, over and over, like a great silver shop-made tumblebug spotted with cities and wet here and there with oceans, blinking the eyes of its ice-caps and smoking its volcanos and folding and unfolding its harrow-footed space-crazy legs in time with the phases of the moon. And if you looked real close you’d see millions of fleas jumpin’ off it and beginning the long fall to the nadir.“

At that moment the TV jumped to a 24-hour satellite starward of Terra and showed us the whole moonlit Earth backed by the Milky Way, as if snared by a diamond-dewy spiderweb. Ma squeaked a proud sigh at Harry’s words thus coming out illustrated.

“Will you take the job?” Tom rasped at me.

“Tomorrow I will for sure,” I told him. “And that’s all the answer you’ll ever get from me—tomorrow or any other day.”

Ma tapped her hoof and flashed a rageful eye at me. “Tom,” she said to him, “if Meaghan scorns it, how about Harry? Think of it, Harry, you always claim you want to be alone. Roaming those cool tunnels and sewers all by yourself except for some witless machine you’ll catch onto in ten minutes. You’ll have all the time and quiet in the world to create your poetry. Why, underground your poetry will sprout like roots, I’m sure, and run fast as crabgrass.”

“Ma,” Harry said, “sooner than take that job I’d head for Beats-ville today rather than tomorrow.”

“You wouldn’t do that, Harry,” Ma wailed menacingly. ‘Tell me you wouldn’t.“ Ma’s always prided herself that no matter how slum-tike we live and close to Beatsville, we’d never get there. In Beats-ville they pretend even worse than in the suburbs, pretend to be supermen and pretend to be animals, and creep each night to the electrified boundary to pick up the food and drink left for them.

But Harry nodded again and then Ma began yelling at Tom that he was trying to break up what was left of her family, having splintered himself off first. Whitey came alive and flapped his hands at her cautiously, like a torero ready to jump the fence. I slitted my eyes as if I were falling asleep. Tom got red as Ma and said the hell with us, he was going for good. So Ma stamped this way and that, now roaring at Harry and me for our sloth, now bellowing at Tom for his disloyalty. Then she lifted her arms to heaven and froze.

At that instant the beetle-man popped into the doorway and pointed his antennae at her. No one saw him but me.

Tom’s face grew redder and he gave a snort and turned on his heel toward the door just as the beetle- man ducked out of sight. Tom had no sooner stamped out than the beetle-man popped in again be-hind him, waving a gray-black transparency he’d whipped from his black belly-box.

“Mrs. Henley,” he piped rapidly, “I got a perfect shot of all your insides, but that’s all that’s perfect about it. You must come to the clinic right away with me. Your heart’s like a watermelon and your aorta and pulmonary like summer squash.” He waggled a finger at me. “Diagnosis by a medspector is permissible hi dire emergencies.”

Ma’s face went purple. At that instant I felt the building quiver from the top down and a heartbeat later something burst through the awning and struck Tom as if he were a very thick spike and it a hammer driving him into the ground.

Ma screamed a great single scream and took a step forward and then stiffened and fell back, and I caught her in my arms and lowered her to the floor and pillowed her head. Outside I could hear the beetle-man buzzing into his neckphone for an ambulance like the fool he was—for Tom’s head was smashed to the neck. Then I was wondering how Tom’s blood could have got on Ma, for there was blood on her chest and then more and more of it, like a bull fallen from the final thrust and pumping his heart out, and then I realized it was Ma’s blood from her lungs, gurgling with her Cheyne-Stokes breathing.

Whitey came fluttering down at her other side.

Harry was standing looking at us and he was trembling, and then we heard the siren far off, and then another, and then the two of them coming closer fast, and as they came closer and their angry wailing grew louder, Harry began to tremble more, and as their sound burst into the open of the razed blocks, he cried, “I’m off to Beatsville,” and he was sprinting by the time he went through the door.

I knew what was coming, although there was nothing I could do but hold Ma. Then I knew that what was coming had come, for there was a shout and a great squealing of brakes and a scream and a thud and the brakes still squealing.

Then Ma stopped breathing, but she still looked angry.

It was a long time before anyone came in. I went on holding Ma and wiping her face clean, though it stayed red for all that. I heard one ambulance leave and then the other. Finally a doctor came in, and the beetle-man too, and the doctor looked at Ma and shook his head and said that if only she’d been med- checked regularly it need never have happened, but I told him, “You didn’t know Ma.” And the beetle- man buzzed into his neckphone for an ambulance back.

I said chokily, “She died brave, charging the muleta dead on, and I’m damned if I’ll award society a single hoof of her, let alone the horns or the tail.” No one got it. The beetle-man eyed me and took a surreptitious note.

Then for a while I was signing papers and listening to this and that, but finally they were all gone, the living and dead, and I was alone with Whitey and I remembered we ought to tell Dick.

The TV was showing a great musical review with hundreds of highly talented actors and actresses, all of them seven-job folk and this the eighth job for all of them. Flights of smiles were going back and forth across the screen, like seagulls wheeling at sunset.

The concrete cornflakes were still pattering on the awning. I marched us straight under the hole the rock had made that killed Tom, and they pelted on our hair and shoulders and necks like feathery hail.

We climbed the flake-drift and I paused and turned around. The giant centipedes were busily crawling back and forth, the one swinging aside most cleverly to let the other pass. They’d chewed their way here and there down to the second floor.

I looked down to our shadowed doorway with the faintest flicker of TV still coming out of it, and I thought I’d like to drive a nail a mile long down through the center of that room, pinning it there forever, and engrave in the head of the nail, in letters a foot deep, “A Family Lived Here.”

But that was a little beyond the scope of my engineering, so, pushing Whitey ahead of me, off I went to tell Dick, laughing and crying.