We Can Build You

10

At that point we managed to call a halt for the night.

"Nice meeting you, Mr. Barrows," I said, holding out my hand to him.

"Likewise." He shook hands with me, then with Maury and Pris. The Lincoln stood a little apart, watching in its sad way... Barrows did not offer to shake hands with it, nor did he say goodbye to it.

Shortly, the four in our group were walking back up the dark sidewalk to MASA ASSOCIATES, taking in deep breaths of clear cold night air. The air smelled good and it cleansed our minds.

As soon as we were back in our office, without the Barrows crew anywhere around, we got out the Old Crow. Using Dixie cups, we poured ourselves bourbon and water.

"We're in trouble," Maury said.

The rest of us nodded.

"What do you say?" Maury asked the simulacrum. "What's your opinion about him?"

The Lincoln said, "He is like the crab, which makes progress forward by crawling sideways."

"Meaning?" Pris said.

"I know what he means," Maury said. "The man has forced us down so far we don't know what we're doing. We're babes. Babes! And you and I--" He gestured at me. "We call ourselves salesmen. Why, we've been taken to the cleaners; if we hadn't adjourned he'd have the place, lock, stock and barrel right now."

"My dad," I began.

"Your dad!" Maury said bitterly. "He's stupider than we are. I wish we never had gotten mixed up with this Barrows. Now we'll never get rid of him--not until he gets what he wants."

"We don't have to do business with him," Pris said.

"We can tell him to go back to Seattle," I said.

"Don't kid me! We can't tell him anything. He'll be knocking at the door bright and early tomorrow, like he said. Grinding us down, hounding us--" Maury gaped at me.

"Don't let him bother you," Pris said.

I said, "I think Barrows is a desperate man. His vast economic venture is failing, this colonizing the Moon; don't you all feel that? This is not a powerful, successful man we're facing. It's a man who put everything behind buying real estate on the Moon and then subdividing it and building domes to hold in heat and air, and building converters to turn ice into water--and he can't get people to go there. I feel sorry for him."

They all regarded me intently.

"Barrows has turned to this fraud as a last-ditch effort," I said, "this fakery of setting up villages of simulacra posing as human settlers. It's a scheme hatched out of despair. When I first heard it I thought possibly I was hearing another one of those bold visions that men like Barrows get, that the rest of us never have because we're mere mortals. But now I'm not sure at all. I think he's running scared, so scared that he's lost his senses. This idea isn't reasonable. He can't hope to fool anyone. The Federal Government would catch on right away."

"How?" Maury asked.

"The Department of Health inspects every person who intends to emigrate. It's the Government's business. How's Barrows even going to get them off Earth?"

Maury said, "Listen. It's none of our business how sound this scheme of his is. We're not in a position to judge. Only time will tell and if we don't do business with him even time won't tell."

"I agree," Pris said. "We should confine ourselves to deciding what's in it for us."

"Nothing's in it for us if he's caught and goes to prison," I said. "Which he will. Which he deserves to be. I say we've got to disengage, not do business with this man of any kind. It's shaky, risky, dishonest, and downright stupid. Our own ideas are nutty enough."

The Lincoln said, "Could Mr. Stanton be here?"

"What?" Maury said.

"I think we would be advantaged if Mr. Stanton were here and not in Seattle, as you tell me he is."

We all looked at one another.

"He's right," Pris said. "We ought to get the Edwin M. Stanton back. He'd be of use to us; he's so inflexible."

"We need iron," I agreed. "Backbone. We're bending too much."

"Well, we can get it back," Maury said. "Tonight even. We can charter a private plane, fly to the Sea-Thc Airfield outside Seattle, drive into Seattle and search until we find it and then come back here. Have it tomorrow morning when we confront Barrows."

"But we'd be dead on our feet," I pointed out, "at best. And it might take us days to find it. It may not even be in Seattle, by now; it may have flown on to Alaska or to Japan-- even taken off for one of Barrows' subdivisions on the Moon."

We sipped our Dixie cups of bourbon morosely, all but the Lincoln; it had put its aside.

"Have you ever had any kangaroo tail soup?" Maury said.

We all looked at him, including the simulacrum.

"I have a can around here somewhere," Maury said. "We can heat it up on the hotplate; it's terrific. I'll make it."

"Let me out," I said.

"No thanks," Pris said.

The simulacrum smiled its gentle, wan smile.

"I'll tell you how I happened to get it," Maury said. "I was in the supermarket, in Boise, waiting in line. The checker was saying to some guy, 'No, we're not going to stock any kangaroo tail soup anymore.' All of a sudden from the other side of the display--it was boxes of cereal or something-- this hollow voice issues: 'No more kangaroo tail soup? Ever?' And this guy comes hurrying around with his cart to buy up the last cans. So I got a couple. Try it, it'll make you all feel better."

I said, "Notice how Barrows worked us down. He calls the simulacra automatons first and then he calls them gimmicks and then he winds up calling them dolls."

"It's a technique," Pris said, "a sales technique. He's cutting the ground out from under us."

"Words," the simulacrum said, "are weapons."

"Can't you say anything to him?" I asked the simulacrum. "All you did was debate with him."

The simulacrum shook its head no.

"Of course it can't do anything," Pris said. "Because it argues fair, like we did in school. That's the way they debated back in the middle of the last century. Barrows doesn't argue fair, and there's no audience to catch him. Right, Mr. Lincoln?"

The simulacrum did not respond, but its smile seemed-- to me--to become even sadder, and its face longer and more lined with care.

"Things are worse now than they used to be," Maury said. But, I thought, we still have to do something. "He may have the Stanton under lock and key, for all we know. He may have it torn down on a bench somewhere, and his engineers are making one of their own slightly redesigned so as not to infringe on our patents." I turned to Maury. "Do we actually have patents?"

"Pending," Maury said. "You know how it works." He did not sound encouraging. "I don't doubt he can steal what we have, now that he's seen our idea. It's the kind of thing that if you know it can be done, you can do it yourself, given enough time."

"Okay," I said, "so it's like the internal combustion engine. But we've got a headstart; let's start manufacturing them at the Rosen factory as soon as possible. Let's get ours on the market before Barrows does."

They all looked at me wide-eyed.

"I think you've got something there," Maury said, chewing his thumb. "What else can we do anyhow? You think your dad could get the assembly line going right away? Is he pretty fast on converting over, like this?"

"Fast as a snake," I said.

Pris said derisively, "Don't put us on. Old Jerome? It'll be a year before he can make dies to stamp the parts out with, and the wiring'!! have to be done in Japan--he'll have to fly to Japan to arrange for that, and he'll want to take a boat, like before."

"Oh," I said, "you've thought about it, I see."

"Sure," Pris said sneeringly. "I actually considered it seriously."

"In any case," I said, "it's our only hope; we've got to get the goddam things on the retail market--we've wasted enough time as it is."

"Agreed," Maury said. "What we'll do is, tomorrow we'll go to Boise and commission old Jerome and your funny brother Chester to start work. Start making die stampers and flying to Japan--but what'll we tell Barrows?"

That stumped us. Again we were all silent.

"We'll tell him," I announced, "that the Lincoln busted. That it broke down and we've withdrawn it from market. And then he won't want the thing so he'll go back home to Seattle."

Maury, coming over beside me, said in a low voice, "You mean cut the switch on it. Shut it off."

I nodded.

"I hate to do that," Maury said. We both glanced at the Lincoln, which was regarding us with melancholy eyes.

"He'll insist on seeing it for himself," Pris pointed out. "Let him back on it a couple of times, if he wants to. Let him shake it like a gum machine; if we have to cut it off it won't do a thing."

"Okay," Maury agreed.

"Good," I said. "Then we've decided."

We shut off the Lincoln then and there. Maury, as soon as the deed was done, went downstairs and out to his car and drove home, saying he was going to bed. Pris offered to drive me to my motel in my Chevvy, taking it home herself and picking me up the next morning. I was so tired that I accepted her offer.

As she drove me through closed-up Ontario she said, "I wonder if all wealthy, powerful men are like that."

"Sure. All those who made their own money--not the ones who inherit it, maybe."

"It was dreadful," Pris said. "Shutting the Lincoln off. To see it--stop living, as if we had killed it again. Don't you think?"

"Yes."

Later, when she drew up before my motel, she said, "Do you think that's the only way to make a lot of money? To be like him?" Sam K. Barrows had changed her; no doubt of that. She was a sobered young woman.

I said, "Don't ask me. I draw seven-fifty a month, at best."

"But one has to admire him."

"I knew you'd say that, sooner or later. As soon as you said but I knew what was going to follow."

Pris sighed, "So I'm an open book to you."

"No, you're the greatest enigma I've ever run up against. It's just in this one case I said to myself, 'Pris is going to say but one has to admire him' and you did say it."

"And I'll bet you also believe I'll gradually go back to the way I used to feel until I leave off the 'but' and just admire him, period."

I said nothing. But it was so.

"Did you notice," Pris said, "that I was able to endure the shutting down of the Lincoln? If I can stand that I can stand anything. I even enjoyed it although I didn't let it show, of course."

"You're lying to beat hell."

"I got a very enjoyable sense of power, an ultimate power. We gave it life and then we took the life right back--snap! As easy as that. But the moral burden doesn't rest on us anyhow; it rests on Sam Barrows, and he wouldn't have had a twinge, he would have gotten a big kick out of it. Look at the strength there, Louis. We really wish we were the same way. I don't regret turning it off. I regret being emotionally upset. I disgust myself for being what I am. No wonder I'm down here with the rest of you and Sam Barrows is up at the top. You can see the difference between him and us; it's so clear."

She was quiet for a time, lighting a cigarette and sitting with it.

"What about sex?" she said presently.

"Sex is worse yet, even than turning off nice simulacra."

"I mean sex changes you. The experience of intercourse."

It froze my blood, to hear her talk like that.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"You scare me."

"Why?"

"You talk as if--"

Pris finished for me, "As if I was up there looking down even on my own body. I am. It's not me. I'm a soul."

"Like Blunk said, 'Show me.'

"I can't, Louis, but it's still true, I'm not a physical body in time and space. Plato was right."

"What about the rest of us?"

"Well, that's your business. I perceive you as bodies, so maybe you are; maybe that's all you are. Don't you know? If you don't know I can't tell you." She put out her cigarette. "I better go home, Louis."

"Okay," I said, opening the car door. The motel, with all its rooms, was dark; even the big neon sign had been shut off for the night. The middle-aged couple who ran the place were no doubt tucked safely in their beds.

Pris said, "Louis, I carry a diaphragm around in my purse."

"The kind you put inside you? Or the kind that's in the chest and you breathe in and out by."

"Don't kid. This is very serious for me, Louis. Sex, I mean."

I said, "Well, then give me funny sex."

"Meaning what?"

"Nothing. Just nothing." I started to shut the car door after me.

"I'm going to say something corny," Pris said, rolling down the window on my side.

"No you're not, because I'm not going to listen. I hate corny statements by deadly serious people. Better you should stay a remote soul that sneers at suffering animals; at least--" I hesitated. But what the hell. "At least I can honestly soberly hate you and fear you."

"How will you feel after you hear the corny statement?" I said, "I'll make an appointment with the hospital tomorrow and have myself castrated or whatever they call it."

"You mean," she said slowly, "that I'm sexually desirable when I'm cruel and schizoid, but if I become MAUDLIN, THEN I'm not even that."

"Don't say 'even.' That's a hell of a lot."

"Take me into your motel room," Pris said, "and screw me."

"There is, somehow, in your language, something, which I can't put my finger on, that somehow leaves something to be desired."

"You're just chicken."

"No," I said.

"Yes."

"No, and I'm not going to prove it by doing so. I really am not chicken; I've slept with all sorts of women in my time. Honest. There isn't a thing about sex that could scare me; I'm too old. You're talking about college-boy stuff, first box of contraceptives stuff."

"But you still won't screw me."

"No," I agreed, "because you're not only detached, you're brutal. And not with just me but with yourself, with the physical body you despise and claim isn't you. Don't you remember that discussion between Lincoln--the Lincoln simulacrum, I mean--and Barrows and Blunk? An animal is close to being man and both are made out of flesh and blood. That's what you're trying not to be."

"Not _trying_--am not."

"What does that make you? A machine."

"But a machine has wires. I have no wires."

"Then what?" I said. "What do you think you are?"

Pris said, "I know what I am. The schizoid is very common in this century, like hysteria was in the nineteenth. It's a form of deep, pervasive, subtle psychic alienation. I wish I wasn't, but I am... you're lucky, Louis Rosen; you're oldfashioned. I'd trade with you. I'm worried that my language regarding sex is crude. I scared you off with it. I'm very sorry about that."

"Not crude. Worse. Inhuman. You'd--I know what you'd do. If you had intercourse with someone--if you've had." I felt confused and tired. "You'd observe, the whole goddam time; mentally, spiritually, in every way. Always be conscious."

"Is that wrong? I thought everyone did."

"Goodnight." I started away from the car.

"Goodnight, coward."

"Up yours," I said.

"Oh, Louis," she said, with a shiver of anguish.

"Forgive me," Isaid.

Sniffling, she said, "What an awful thing to say."

"For christ's sake, forgive me," I said, "you have to forgive me. I'm the sick one, for saying that to you; it's like something took hold of my tongue."

Still sniffling, she nodded mutely. She started up the motor of the car and turned its lights on.

"Don't go," I said. "Listen, you can chalk it up to a demented subrational attempt on my part to reach you, don't you see? All your talk, your making yourself admire Sam Barrows even more than ever, that drove me out of my mind. I'm very fond of you, I really am; seeing you open up for a minute to a warm, human view, and then going back--"

"Thanks," she said in a near whisper, "for trying to make me feel better." She shot me a tiny smile.

"Don't let this make you worse," I said, holding onto the door of the car, afraid she would leave.

"It won't. In fact it barely touched me."

"Come on inside," I said. "Sit for a moment, okay?"

"No. Don't worry--it's just the strain on us all. I know it upset you. The reason I use such crude words is that I don't know any better, nobody taught me how to talk about the unspeakable things."

"It just takes experience. But listen, Pris, promise me something, promise me you won't deny to yourself that I hurt you. It's good to be able to feel what you felt just now, good to--"

"Good to be hurt."

"No, I don't mean that; I mean it's encouraging. I'm not trying merely to make up for what I did. Look, Pris, the fact that you suffered so acutely just now because of what I--"

"The hell I did."

"You did," I said. "Don't lie."

"All right, Louis, I did; I won't lie." She hung her head.

Opening the car door I said, "Come with me, Pris."

She shut off the motor and car lights and slid out; I took hold of her by the arm.

"Is this the first step in delicious intimacy?" she asked.

"I'm acquainting you with the unspeakable."

"I just want to be able to talk about it, I don't want to have to do it. Of course you're joking; we're going to sit side by side and then I'll go home. That's best for both of us, in fact it's the only course open."

We entered the dark little motel room and I switched on the light and then the heat and then the TV set.

"Is that so no one will hear us panting?" She shut off the TV set. "I pant very lightly; it isn't necessary." Removing her coat she stood holding it until I took it and hung it in the closet. "Now tell me where to sit and how. In that chair?" She seated herself in a straight chair, folded her hands in her lap and regarded me solemnly. "How's this? What else should I take off? Shoes? All my clothes? Or do you like to do it? If you do, my skirt doesn't unzip; it unbuttons, and be careful you don't pull too hard or the top button will come off and then I'll have to sew it back." She twisted around to show me. "There the buttons are, on the side."

"All this is educational," I said, "but not illuminating."

"Do you know what I'd like?" Her face lit up. "I want you to drive out somewhere and come back with some kosher corned beef and Jewish bread and ale and some halvah for dessert. That wonderful thin-sliced corned beef that's twofifty a pound."

"I'd like to," I said, "but there's no place within hundreds of miles to get it."

"Can't you get it in Boise?"

"No." I hung up my own coat. "It's too late for kosher corned beef anyhow. I don't mean too late in the evening. I mean too late in our lives." Seating myself across from her I drew my chair close and took hold of her hands. They were dry, small and quite hard. From all her tile-cutting she had developed sinewy arms, strong fingers. "Let's run off. Let's drive south and never come back, never see the simulacra again or Sam Barrows or Ontario, Oregon."

"No," Pris said. "We're compelled to tangle with Sam; can't you feel it around us, in the air? I'm surprised at you, imagining that you can hop in the car and drive off. It can't be evaded."

"Forgive me," I said.

"I forgive you but I can't understand you; sometimes you seem like a baby, unexposed to life."

"What I've done," I said, "is I've hacked out little portions of reality here and there and familiarized myself with them, somewhat on the model of a sheep who's learned a route across a pasture and never deviates from that route."

"You feel safe by doing that?"

"I feel safe _mostly_, but never around you."

She nodded. "I'm the pasture itself, to you."

"That expresses it."

With a sudden laugh she said, "It's just like being made love to by Shakespeare. Louis, you can tell me you're going to crop, browse, graze among my lovely hills and valleys and in particular my divinely-wooded meadows, you know, where the fragrant wild ferns and grasses wave in profusion. I don't need to spell it out, do I?" Her eyes flashed. "Now for christ's sake, take off my clothes or at least make the attempt to." She began to pull off her shoes.

"No," I said.

"Haven't we gotten through the poetry stage long ago? Can't we dispense with more of that and get down to the real thing?" She started to unfasten her skirt, but I took hold of her hands and stopped her.

"I'm too ignorant to proceed," I said. "I just don't have it, Pris. Too ignorant and too awkward and too cowardly. Things have already gone far beyond my limited comprehension. I'm lost in a realm I don't understand." I held on tightly to her hands. "The best I can think of to do, the best I can manage at this time, would be to kiss you. Maybe on the cheek, if it's okay."

"You're old," Pris said. "That's it. You're part of a dying world of the past." She turned her head and leaned toward me. "As a favor to you I'll let you kiss me."

I kissed her on the cheek.

"Actually," Pris said, "if you want to know the facts, the fragrant wild ferns and grasses don't wave in profusion; there's a couple of wild ferns and about four grasses and that's it. I'm hardly grown, Louis. I only started wearing a bra a year ago and sometimes I forget it even now; I hardly need it."

"Can't I kiss you on the mouth?"

"No," Pris said, "that's too intimate."

"You can shut your eyes."

"Instead, you turn off the lights." She drew her hands away, rose and went to the wall switch. "I'll do it."

"Stop," I said. "I have an overwhelming sense of foreboding."

At the wall switch she stood hesitating. "It's not like me to be indecisive. You're undermining me, Louis. I'm sorry. I have to go on." She switched off the light, the room disappeared into darkness. I could see nothing at all.

"Pris," I said, "I'm going to drive to Portland, Oregon, and get the kosher corned beef."

"Where can I put my skirt?" Pris said from the darkness. "So it won't get wrinkled."

"This is all some crazed dream."

"No," Pris said, "it's bliss. Don't you know bliss when it runs into you and butts you in the face? Help me hang up my clothes. I have to go in fifteen minutes. Can you talk and make love at the same time or do you devolve to animal gruntings?" I could hear her rustling around in the darkness, disposing of her clothes, groping about for the bed.

"There is no bed," I said.

"Then the floor."

"It scrapes your knees."

"Not my knees; yours."

"I have a phobia," I said. "I have to have the lights on or I get the fear I'm having intercourse with a thing made out of strings and piano wire and my grandmother's old orange quilt."

Pris laughed. "That's me," she said from close by. "That perfectly describes my essence. I almost have you," she said, banging against something. "You won't escape."

"Stop it," I said. "I'm turning on the light." I managed to find the switch; I pressed it and the room burst back into being, blinding me, and there stood a fully-dressed girl. She had not taken off her clothes at all, and I stared at her in astonishment while she laughed silently to see my expression.

"It's an illusion," she said. "I was going to defeat you at the final moment, I just wanted to drive you to a pitch of sexual desire and then--" She snapped her fingers. "Gooooodnight."

I tried to smile.

"Don't take me seriously," Pris said. "Don't become emotionally involved with me. I'll break your heart."

"So who's involved?" I said hearing my voice choke. "It's a game people play in the dark. I just wanted to tear off a piece, as they say."

"I don't know that phrase." She was no longer laughing; her eyes were no longer bright. She regarded me coolly. "But I get the idea."

"I'll tell you something else. Get ready. They do have kosher corned beef in Boise. I could have picked it up any time with no trouble."

"You bastard," she said. Seating herself she picked up her shoes and put them on.

"There's sand coming in the door."

"What?" She glanced around. "What are you talking about?"

"We're trapped down here. Somebody's got a mound going above us, we'll never get out."

Sharply she said, "Stop it."

"You never should have confided in me."

"Yes, you'll use it against me to torment me." She went to the closet for her coat.

"Wasn't I tormented?" I said, following after her.

"Just now, you mean? Oh heck, I might not have run out, I might have stayed."

"If I had done just right."

"I hadn't made up my mind. It depended on you, on your ability. I expect a lot. I'm very idealistic." Having found her coat she began putting it on; reflexively I assisted her.

"We're putting clothes back on," I said, "without having taken them off."

"Now you regret," Pris said. "Regrets--that's all you're good for." She gave me a look of such loathing that I shrank back.

"I could say a few mean things about you," I said.

"You won't, though, because you know if you do I'll come back so hard with a reply that you'll drop dead on the spot."

I shrugged, unable to speak.

"It was fear," Pris said. She walked slowly down the path, toward her parked car.

"Fear, right," I said accompanying her. "Fear based on the knowledge that a thing like that has to come out of the mutual understanding and agreement of two people. It can't be forced on one by the other."

"Fear of jail, you mean." She opened the car door and got in, to sit behind the wheel. "What you ought to have done, what a real man would have done, would be to grab me by the wrist, carry me to the bed and without paying any attention to what I had to say--"

"If I had done that, you would never have stopped complaining, first to me, then to Maury, then to a lawyer, then to the police, then in a court of law to the world at large."

We were both silent, then.

"Anyhow," I said, "I got to kiss you."

"Only on the cheek."

"On the mouth," I said.

"That's a lie."

"I remember it as on the mouth," I said, and shut the car door after her.

Rolling down her window she said, "So that's going to be your story, that you got to take liberties with me."

"I'll remember it and treasure it, too," I said. "In my heart." I put my hand to my chest.

Pris started up the motor, switched on the lights and drove away.

I stood for a moment and then I walked back down the path to my motel room. We're cracking up, I said to myself. We're so tired, so demoralized, that we're at the end. Tomorrow we've got to get rid of Barrows. Pris--poor Pris is getting it the worst. And it was shutting off the Lincoln that did it. The turning point came there.

Hands in my pockets I stumbled back to my open door.

The next morning there was plenty of warm sunlight, and I felt a good deal better without even getting up from my bed. And then, after I had gotten up and shaved, had breakfast at the motel cafe of hotcakes and bacon and coffee and orange juice and had read the newspaper, I felt as good as new. Really recovered.

It shows what breakfast does, I said to myself. Healed, maybe? I'm back in there a whole, well man again?

No. We're better but not healed. Because we weren't well in the first place, and you can't restore health where there wasn't any health to begin with. _What is this sickness?_

Pris has had it almost to the point of death. And it has touched me, moved into me and lodged there. And Maury and Barrows and after him all the rest of us until my father; my father has it the least.

Dad! I had forgotten; he was coming over.

Hurrying outside, I hailed a taxi.

I was the first to reach the office of MASA ASSOCIATES. A moment later, from the office window, I saw my Chevrolet Magic Fire parking. Out stepped Pris. Today she wore a blue cotton dress and a long-sleeved blouse; her hair was tied up and her face was scrubbed and shiny.

As she entered the office she smiled at me. "I'm sorry I used the wrong word last night. Maybe next time. No harm done."

"No harm done," I said.

"Do you mean that, Louis?"

"No," I said, returning her smile.

The office door opened and Maury entered. "I got a good night's rest. By god, buddy boy, we'll take this nogoodnik Barrows for every last cent he's got."

Behind him came my dad, in his dark, striped, trainconductur's suit. He greeted Pris gravely, then turned to Maury and me. "Is he here, yet?"

"No, Dad," I said. "Any time now."

Pris said, "I think we should turn the Lincoln back on. We shouldn't be afraid of Barrows."

"I agree," I said.

"No," Maury said, "and I'll tell you why. It whets Barrows' appetite. Isn't that so? Think about it."

After a time I said, "Maury's right. We'll leave it off. Barrows can kick it and pound it, but let's not turn it back on. It's greed that motivates him." And, I thought, it's fear that motivates us; so much of what we've done of late has been inspired by fear, not by common sense .

There was a knock at the door.

"He's here," Maury said, and cast a flickering glance at me.

The door opened. There stood Sam K. Barrows, David Blunk, Mrs. Nild, and with them stood the somber, dark figure of Edwin M. Stanton.

"We met it down the street," Dave Blunk boomed cheerfully. "It was coming here and we gave it a lift in our cab."

The Stanton simulacrum looked sourly at all of us.

Good lord, I said to myself. We hadn't expected this-- does this make a difference? Are we hurt and if so how bad?

I did not know. But in any case we had to go on, and this time to a showdown. One way or the other.