Stand on Zanzibar

context (10)

THE BABY AND THE BATHWATER

“All right, I’ll grant you that it’s ridiculous to spend years training highly qualified medical personnel and psychologists and so on and then set them to a job that’s going to show no tangible results because the material they’re working with is hopeless from the beginning, like imbeciles. I’ll even concede the bit about such people having a nasty power complex and liking to lord it over helpless human vegetables, though that’s something I really need to be convinced about before I’ll swallow it entirely. And I certainly won’t contest the fact that there are too many of us—the news is evidence enough for me, what with all these famines they’re having in Asia and plague still cropping up in Latin America and the development of this seasonal nomadism in Africa because half the year the land won’t support the people who are on it. All this I’m giving you without argument.

“But are we adopting the right measures to cope? Look at haemophilia, for example; it didn’t stop victims of it being the crowned heads of Europe, and most of them showed up pretty well compared to some of the right bleeders who’d kept their thrones warm before the gene put in an appearance. You’re not going to tell me that Henry VIII of England or Ivan the Terrible was a descendant of Queen Victoria. Or take the way some of the states have banned people with web-fingers and web-toes; you’ll find plenty of doctors to argue that’s no more than an adaptation that got started in the days when men were beach-creatures inhabiting swamps and shallows and living mostly off weed and shell-fish.

“And how about schizophrenia? They’re still trying to settle it for sure whether the chemical symptoms are due to a stress reaction or whether they’re innate and some people are merely more prone to it but can be kept safe in the correct environment. I don’t believe there’s a genuine hereditary effect at all—I think it’s just that we tend to copy the behaviour-patterns of our family, and it’s one of these in-group extended responses like infanticide being higher among the children and grandchildren of bad, affectionless families regardless of their genotype. You have schizoid-prone parents, you learn the action pattern, and that’s that.

“And how about diabetes? It’s crippling, admittedly, and you have to lean on a chemical crutch. But—well, my own name’s Drinkwater, which almost certainly means that some of my ancestors, like French people named Boileau and Germans named Trinkwasser, must have been hereditary diabetic polydipsomaniacs.

“And if there’d been eugenic legislation back in the days when people were adopting surnames, they’d have been forbidden to have children and I wouldn’t be here now.

“Don’t you understand? I wouldn’t be here!”

continuity (9)

DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF

Like the monstrous shaped negative-plate of an explosive forming press the environment clamped itself on the personality of Donald Hogan, as a hand clenched around a lump of putty will leave the ridges between fingers, the imprint of the cuticular pattern. He felt his individuality squirt away from him into the darkness, carrying off in solution his power to conceive and act on decisions, reducing him to a reactive husk at the mercy of external events.

Some social theorists had argued that urban man was now at the point of unstable equilibrium; the camel’s back of his rationality was vulnerable to a straw. Gadarene swine rooting and grunting at the top of a hill overlooking the sea, people sensed this, said the theorists, and therefore when there was an option to do otherwise they did not venture to crowd themselves still further into the already crammed cities. In countries such as India there was no alternative; starvation was slower in an urban community because people were closer to the distribution points for subsistence rations, and mere lethargy induced by hunger reduced friction and outbursts of violence to a sporadic level. But comparatively well-nourished American and European populations might be tipped over the precipice with no more warning than the sort of aura of irritability for which one carried a pack of tranks.

The last coherent thought Donald was capable of formulating declared that it was one thing to have read of this risk, another altogether to watch it being proved real.

Then the world took over and he was lost.

* * *

FOCUS: the prowlie. White-painted, trapezoidal vehicle thirteen feet long by seven wide, its wheels out of sight underneath for protection against shots, dispersed around the flat slab tank of the fuel-cell powering it, its forward cabin for four men windowed with armour-glass and additionally screened with retractable wire grilles, its rear section designed for carrying off arrestees and if necessary the injured having a solid metal drop-down tailgate with stretcher rails and a sleepy-gas air-circulation system. On the nose, two brilliant white lights with a field of 150°, one extinguished because the driver had waited too long to roll up the wire screen and protect it; on each corner of the roof other lights with adjustable beam-spread; revolving in a small turret on the roof, a gas-gun shooting fragmenting glass grenades to a distance of sixty yards; under the skirt, for ultimate emergency use only, oil-jets that could flood the adjacent street with a small sea of fire to keep back attackers while the occupants waited out the period till help arrived, breathing through masks from a stored-air system. It was vulnerable to mines, to three successive hand-gun bolts striking within about two inches of each other on the shell, or to the collapse of a building, but to nothing else encountered during an average urban riot. However, its fuel-cell was inadequate to push out of the way either the stationary cab ahead, whose brakes were automatically set because its door was open, or the lamp-post dropped across its stern, which had now been wedged in position with much sweating and swearing against its own stump on the one side, and a well-anchored mailbox on the other.

FOREGROUND: materialised as though from air, crowding the sidewalk, scores—hundreds—of people, mostly Afram, some Puerto Rican, some WASP. One girl with an electronic accordion, fantastically loud at maximum volume, making windows rattle and eardrums hum, shrieking a song through a shouter which others took up and stamped to the rhythm of: “What shall we do with our fair city, dirty and dangerous, smelly and shitty?” Clang on the body of the prowlie whatever they could find to throw—lumps of concrete, garbage, bottles, cans. How long before the gas-gun and the flaming oil?

SETTING: the uniform twelve-storey faces of the buildings, each occupying a block or half a block, hardly punctuated by the canyon streets because the abandonment of cars within the city meant that a one-way lane for the use of official vehicles or cabs was enough. Buses ran only to the next corner left, two corners away right. The sidewalks were defined by four-inch concrete barriers, small enough to step over, high enough to prevent any legally passing vehicle from running into a pedestrian. On the face of almost every building, some sort of advertising display, so that spectators in upper rooms looked out of shabby oceans, the middle of a letter O, or the crotch of a receptive girl. A single exception to the cliff-wall nature of the street was formed by the adventure playground, like the intrusion of Einstein into the ordered world of Euclid.

DETAIL: the face of the building against which he cowered, opposite the playground, was ornamented more than the average of its neighbours, possessing both a broad stoop above street-level for access to the interior and a number of integral buttresses, flat-faced, arranged in pairs with a gap of about two feet between each, tapering from a thickness of two feet at the bottom to nothing at the level of the fourth floor. One of these embrasures sufficed to shield him from light, the passing and re-passing rioters, and the hurling of improvised missiles. Clanging of metal above made him look up. Someone was trying to get the retractable fire-escapes to angle outwards from the wall instead of straight down, so that from their vantage point things could be dropped on the roof of the trapped prowlie.

* * *

Fsst-crack. Fsst-crack. Whir-fsst-crack.

Gas-gun.

Grenades smashing against the walls of the buildings, each releasing a quart of sluggish vapour that oozed down into the narrow culvert of the street. The first victims coughed, howled and keeled over, having sucked in a full concentrated dose, and those lucky enough to be out of range of the first salvo ducked to the ground and hustled away crouching.

Fsst-crack. Whir-fsst-crack.

The girl whose mouth he had cut was staggering away from the middle of the street, coming towards him. Possessed of some vague impulse to help, Donald emerged from the shelter of the embrasure between the buttresses and called to her. She came because she heard a friendly voice, not seeing who spoke, and a clubbed arm slammed at the back of his left shoulder. From the corner of his eye he saw the hand was Afram. He ducked, dodged. The gas-gun crashed grenades on this side of the street now, and the first whiffs made breathing hateful. Those who had evaded gassing so far were taking to the skeletal branches of the playground like archetypal proto-man eluding a pack of wolves. The girl saw her brother, who had hit Donald, and together they hurried to the corner of the street, forgetting him. He followed because everyone was going away in one direction or another.

At the corner: late arrivals following a group of yonder-boys who had equipped themselves with sticks and big empty cans to make drums of, and howling with joy on seeing the stuck prowlie.

“Gas!”

The shouting faltered. There was a store across the road which had been open under automated supervision; the owner or manager had turned up and was hastily slamming the wire grilles over the display windows and the entrance, trapping three customers who seemed relieved rather than annoyed. An anonymous hand flung a rock through the last exposed window, which happened to have a liquor stand behind it. Cans and bottles thundered down, a heap of the former jammed the grille before it could rise and lock in place, and several of the crowd decided that was a better target than the prowlie.

Overhead a roaring noise. One of the tiny one-man copters capable of being manoeuvred between the tops of the high buildings and the Fuller Dome whose blushing underside formed Manhattan’s sky was scouting the scene to notify police headquarters of the extent of the disturbance. From a skylight somewhere away to the right there came a bang—an old-fashioned sporting gun. The copter wobbled and came down into the middle of the street, vanes screaming as the pilot fought for altitude. Mad with delight at having a fuzzy-wuzzy delivered into their hands the crowd went forward to greet him with clubs.

Donald fled.

On the next corner he found riot containment procedure already under way. Two water-trucks with hoses going were methodically washing people off the sidewalks into doorways. He turned at hazard in the opposite direction and shortly encountered sweep-trucks, paddywagons adapted with big snowplough-like arms on either side, serving the same purpose as the hoses but much less gentle. Keeping the crowd on the move was supposed to take away the chance of their organising into coherent resistance. Also another one-man copter droned down and started shedding gas-grenades into the street.

He was one of about fifty people being hustled and driven ahead of the official vehicles because they were off their own manor and had no place to go. He worked his way towards the wall of the building because some people, he saw, were dodging into hallways and vanishing, but at the first door he came close enough to to stand a fair chance of entering there were two Aframs armed with clubs who said, “You don’t live here, WASP—blast off before you get stung.”

At an intersection two hose-trucks and the sweep-truck he was running from coincided. A mass of people from all three streets was shoved into the fourth, taking them back towards the focus of the trouble. Now they were body to body, stumbling on each other’s heels and shrieking.

The prowlie was still stuck where it had been. Its driver sounded a blast of welcome to his colleagues in the sweep-truck. The gas had mostly dispersed, leaving victims choking and vomiting, but there was no end in sight to the riot. On the concrete arms of the playground men and women were still bellowing the song that the girl with the electronic accordion thundered out for them: “Find you a hammer and SMASH IT DOWN!” Virtually every window had been broken and glass crunched underfoot. The human beings were being shovelled together with the garbage into one vast rubbish pile, not only in the direction from which Donald was coming but from the other end of the street as well. The stock plan had been applied: close the area, keep ’em moving, jam ’em together and pack ’em off.

Adventurous mind-present youths jumped up on the arms of the sweep-truck as it passed the adventure playground and from there leapt to the security of the random concrete branches. Donald was too late to copy them; by the time he thought of it he had been forced on by.

Mindlessly he pushed and thrust and shouted like everyone else, hardly noticing whether it was a man or a woman he jostled, an Afram or a WASP. The gas-gun on the sweep-truck discharged grenades over his head and the booming music died in mid-chord. A whiff of the gas reached Donald’s nose and wiped away the last trace of rationality. Both arms flailing, careless of who hit him so long as he could hit back, he struggled towards the people from the opposite direction now impacting on the group he was enmeshed with.

Settling on the roofs with a howl of turbines: paddycopters to net and carry off the rioters, like some obscene cross between a spider and a vulture. He sobbed and gasped and punched and kicked and did not feel the answering blows. A dark face rose before his eyes and seemed familiar and all he could think of was the boy he had fired his Jettigun at, the one whose sister had attacked him in retaliation so that he struck her in the mouth and made her bleed. Terrified, he began to batter at the man confronting him.

“Donald! Stop it, Donald—stop it!”

More gas rained down from crunching grenades. He lost the energy needed to drive his fists and a modicum of sanity returned to him before he blacked out. He said, “Norman. Oh my God. Norman. I’m so—”

The apology, the recipient, the speaker, whirled together into nothing.

the happening world (7)

THE STATE OF THE ART

I saw scrawled on the corner of a wall scrawawawled on a wawawall caterwauled cattycorner on the wawall what did I see scrawled on the wawl I forget so it can’t be that important KNOW IN YOUR OWN HANDS WITH A POLY-FORMING KIT THE SENSATIONS OF MICHELANGELO AND MOORE OF RODIN AND ROUAULT let us analyse your metabolism and compound for you a mixture that’s yours and yours alone guaranteed to trip you higher further longer by cross-breeding the kaleidoscope with the computer we created the Colliderscope that turns your drab daily environment into a marvellous mystery HE THAT HATH EARS TO HEAR LET HIM HEAR ALL THERE IS IN THE RANDOM SOUNDS OF A WHYTE NOYSE® GENERATOR tomorrow’s architecture will be a thing of space volume introversion and compaction BEETHOVEN VIOLIN CONCERTO SOLOIST ERICH MUNK-GREEN when you’re redecorating don’t forget to consult us for original computer-created artworks to complement your colour-scheme rare exotic taste sensations from the most ordinary food if you dredge it with a little “Ass-salt” before cooking THE LATEST PLANETARY COLLISION SIZE SMASH OF THE EM THIRTY-ONES IS ON SPOOL EG92745 if you haven’t read it you haven’t celebrated your twenty-first “gives a totally new meaning to the term ‘novel’!” NETSUKE WAS NEVER LIKE THIS BEFORE THE TEXTURES THE FORMS ARE ENDLESSLY ABSORBING THOUGH NOT HABIT-FORMING (G’TEED) one of the great creative artists of our generation is responsible for clothes by “Gondola” MACBETH OF MOONBASE ZERO BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND HANK SODLEY freevent tonite pyrotechnics and ample opportunity for self-expression bring your own hatreds you mean you haven’t yet bought one of Ed Ferlingham’s time-boxettes? 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throw that old camera on the dreck-pile and get with the holographic trend LIMITED EDITION OF ONE MILLION NUMBERED COPIES we can re-programme your life to make an artistically rounded whole WHEN THEY SAY BOTTICELLI DO YOU THINK IT’S A CHEESE WELL AS OF TODAY IT IS AND GASTRONOMES ACKNOWLEDGE OUR ACHIEVEMENT School of Free Television presents a black blind journey into wherever is theme of freevent tomoro Museum of Last Week exhibition changes daily THE ART OF THE BLUE MOVIE LECTURE WITH REAL FILM NOT TAPED REPRODUCTIONS at last television’s potential is realised in the hands of a great creative artist how have your dreams been lately and it’s not your shrinker asking but the people who’ve taken the sleep-inducer the next logical step at last dress assumes its rightful status among the creative arts at the hands of A TRUE CREATIVE ARTIST IN THE FIELD OF COSMETIC SURGERY IS DR. don’t waste the chance to make your family a work of ART OF SUCCESS CALL AND INQUIRE you’ll appreciate not hate what the world offers when you VOLUNTEER DICTY FOR FREEVENT WITH 24-HOUR SENSORY INTERFERENCE decorative shells rocks relics LIVING NOVEL COME AND INTERACT WITH THE AUTHOR OF breaking apart is another aspect of the whole not art not life but experience match your pets to your personality genotype-moulded animals of all descriptions AT LAST THE STATUS OF TRUE CREATIVE ART IS CONFERRED ON rearrangement of your experience into a symmetrical pattern YOUR END TOO CAN BE A WORK OF ART CONCEIVED BY YOURSELF ALL TRADITIONAL FORMS OF EXECUTION AVAILABLE IN RIGOROUSLY ACCURATE HISTORICAL DETAIL EXPLOSION DROWNING PRECIPITATION FROM HEIGHT ALL WEAPONS SELF- OR OTHER-DIRECTED REASONABLE TERMS FROM TERMINATION INC. 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(ART A Friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., when I was about eleven years old. I’d be interested to hear from him. There are so many pseudos around taking his name in vain.

—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)

tracking with closeups (10)

SMOTHERLOVE

Stretched out on the couch naked, hair dyed the fashionable bronze shade that everyone said suited her so well, a screen protecting the majority of her body from the scan of the camera on the phone but bathing her in the blue-white of the sunshine lamps, Sasha Peterson did not look her forty-four years. Rounded enough for her skin to be full and firm everywhere, on the shoulders, on the breasts tipped with carnelian nipples, on the belly underlined with hair dyed to match her head (never overlook anything, never give away anything, never never never miss a trick), she weighed a little more than she should have done but not enough to matter.

“Not exactly suitable,” she said. “Of course, Philip was disappointed when I said so, but I don’t believe in secrets between mother and son, which is of course the most intimate of all human relationships, isn’t it? If I feel strongly about something I speak my mind on the subject and of course I expect Philip to do the same. Excuse me just a moment, Alice. Darling!”

Fully dressed in slightly conservative clothing of a cut that had been popular among young men ten years before, Philip looked up from his chair the other side of the room. He was a husky youth of twenty with pimples that even the most modern dermal treatments had not totally conquered.

“Bring me another whistler, will you?”

A hand tipped immaculately with chrome polish held out an empty Jacobean glass whose cut-crystal facets caught and shattered the light of the sunshine lamps into diamond brilliance.

“Do you mind if I fix myself another, too?”

“I think not, darling. You’ve had one already, and you’re not—ah—case-hardened like your old mum, are you?” As he took the glass: “So I don’t expect we’ll be seeing any more of Lucy. It’s a shame because in some ways she’s quite a nice girl, and no one could say she’s not intelligent. But she’s—not to be too mealy-mouthed—a bit common, don’t you think? And she’s almost three years older than Philip, and I feel it makes such a disproportionate amount of difference at that age, don’t you? I mean, considering it percentage-wise, with Philip being only twenty as he is. Ah, thanks a trillion, lovey!” With one hand she reached up and ruffled her son’s hair as he bent over her before accepting the glass and setting it beside her.

“And while you’re up, sugar-loaf, light me another of those Bay Golds, will you? Be sure not to inhale it, though, won’t you?”

Philip crossed the room, opened the reefer-box, applied a flame to the tip and wasted the first eighth of an inch dutifully on the unappreciative air.

“I’m going to be on my own tonight anyway, though—he’s going to see that nice boy Aaron he was in the same class with when he was doing … Goodness, it’s about time you left, isn’t it, plum-pudding?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“No, gracious! Of course I don’t mind! But you’ll be back as soon as you can, won’t you?” She accepted the reefer with those same metal-gleaming claws. “Kiss your old mum goodbye, then, and give Aaron my regards.”

Peck-peck.

“Ah, you’re mother’s boy, aren’t you, Philip? See you later, then. Oh, by the way, Alice, the reason I called: I seem to remember you saying you knew somebody in the department who sorted matters out when a draft notice came in for the Wilkins boy. Well, we’ve had the inevitable trouble at last, and though it’s a lot of nonsense of course I was wondering whether…”

“Yes, Sasha,” Philip said in answer to the question she had long forgotten.

continuity (10)

DUE PROCESS

A vast expanded hollow human void, arms belly legs like tunnels thrumming to the disgusting pulse of nausea. Bit by bit and painfully drawn together by spider’s-web frail links and assembled into …

Person. Vomit-prone, bruised, aching, Donald Hogan. He would rather have stayed in the nowhere of unconsciousness but there was a sharp cut-off with the sleepy-gas the police department used; the side-effects were carefully restricted to nausea and weakness, the most undermining sensations.

He rolled on one side and discovered that support ended. Terror of falling blind jolted his full awareness back. He looked and grabbed simultaneously, hand reaching a metal bar, eyes receiving a crazy insoluble mystery of shapes and lines.

He had almost rolled off something that was more of a shelf than a bunk, but if he had done so he would have fallen mere inches to the floor; he was on the lowest level. He saw through a steel grille a stacked layer of horizontal compartments, each containing a human body, and foggily deduced that on this side of the grille there must be other similar compartments, one holding himself. A man and a woman in police uniform activated the roller to retract a grille separating one bank of prisoners from the next and the metal shrieked as it cleared their way. They walked, holding a recorder for notes that they exchanged according to whether the next subject was male or female, to a point level with his vision and began to search one of the unconscious captives. The one on the corresponding shelf to his own, he saw, was a girl lying in a pool of her own vomit.

“Jet along,” the policewoman said. “Some of this lot only got a whiff and they may be shaking out of it any minute.”

“All right. This one’s ID says he’s—”

Donald tried stupidly to sit up and discovered he had only nine inches clearance, but banging his head on the underside of the next shelf made a noise and attracted their attention.

“See what I mean?” said the woman, and turned with a sigh to speak through the partition of mesh. “Lie down—your turn will come!”

Donald forced his feet and one arm to the floor and then his whole incredible weight into a standing position, his hand clutching the side of the fourth shelf up to steady him. He said, “What’s going on? Where is this place?”

In both directions, as far as he could see by poor shielded lamps, human bodies laid out as if in a mortuary.

“Ah, fasten it,” said the woman, and turned her back.

“Listen! You picked up all these rioters but it was the driver of the pseudo cab—”

“Ah, dreck!” The policeman stamped his foot, an incongruously camp gesture because he was over six feet tall, brawny and broken-nosed, but nowadays … “All right, messy-mouth, what is it?”

“The way the riot got started! Did you find the driver of the cab?”

“What cab?”

“I was trapped in a pseudo cab, and I managed to stop him closing the door because I was wearing a Karatand and jammed it, and—”

“Anything about a cab on this?” the man said to the woman, who shrugged.

“Do I have time to find out why they got brought in?”

“So shut up and wait, messy-mouth,” the man told Donald. “Or I’ll gas you again. Now this one,” he resumed, the woman raising the mike of the recorder to collect his words, “is—”

Donald, astonished, saw and recognised the man whose pockets the policeman was searching.

“A vice-president of General Technics, and you’ll hear a lot more about this!”

“What?”

“That’s Norman House of GT!” Stretched out like a wax dummy, eyes tiredly closed, hands tossed at random on his chest by whoever brought him in.

“Right,” the man said slowly, inspecting the ID he had discovered. “How do you know?”

“He’s my roomie.”

The man and woman exchanged glances. “Prove it,” the man said, holding out his hand.

Donald searched his own pockets, finding that the Karatand and the Jettigun had gone—of course—and ultimately locating his own ID. He thrust it awkwardly through the intervening grille.

“The address checks,” the policeman admitted reluctantly. “Better get them out of here, Syl—can’t afford to buck GT.”

The woman gave Donald a look of pure butch loathing and switched off the recorder. “The drecky bleeder,” she said. “As if we weren’t on a tight enough schedule. But okay.”

“Wait there,” the man said. “We can’t get to you without we go right around the end and come back.”

“What about this one?” asked the woman, pointing to Norman.

“Get a stretcher party. If there’s time before any more of them wake up and start causing trouble.”

Grilles whined and groaned as they retracted and slammed back, making a crazy metallic counterpoint to the footsteps of the pair while they retraced their path to the end of the line of cells. That was what he was in, Donald now realised, though the original layout had been overlaid with several alterations until now at last the limit had been reached and there was no more space unless you simply closed the prisoners into drawers like coffins and extracted them like solving a glass-puzzle.

They reached him eventually and he stumbled out ahead of them towards a tiled corridor where another woman took him in charge and showed him to an office without occupants.

“Wait here,” she said. “Someone will come to see you in a moment.”

The moment stretched. Donald sat on a hard chair and put his head in his hands, wondering if he was now going to throw up.

Behind his closed eyelids he saw a pattern of human bodies laid out under a mesh of wire.

* * *

“Your name Hogan?”

Donald started. A man with captain’s shoulder-badges had entered the room and was going around the corner of the central table to sit at its far side. He held a file of papers.

“Y-yes.”

“Apparently you know something about how the trouble got started tonight.” The captain opened a drawer of the table, pulled out the mike of a recorder and clicked over a switch. “Let’s have it.”

“I got in a psuedo cab and…” Wearily, recital of the details.

The captain nodded. “Yeah. We had a report there was one of those bleeders working the area—Christ knows why, you’d think they’d work an uptown district where people use cabs more, where they carry more cash or credit cards than they do down your manor.”

“It’s not my manor.”

“Then whatinole were you doing there?”

“I—uh—I’d been for a walk.”

“You what?” The captain looked at him unbelievingly. “Do you do this kind of thing often?”

“N-no. I just suddenly realised I’d got out of the habit of going out in the evenings unless I was going somewhere particular, like to call on people. So I—”

“Christ. Don’t make a habit of it, will you? We have enough trouble to handle without you adding to the pile.”

“Now look!” Donald was beginning to recover; indignation made his back straighten. “It’s not my fault if a pseudo—”

“No? Look at yourself, then!”

Confused, Donald glanced down at clothes smeared with the garbage that had been hurled into the street around the prowlie, and the sight made his nausea return in full force. He said weakly, “I’m a mess, but—”

“Mess has nothing to do with it. How many people did you see on that manor who were dressed like you? You were marked as an intruder at once. It didn’t have to be a pseudo cab that made you the spark for an explosion—it could have been an Afram yonderboy and his sparewheels making mock, or a mugger estimating you as prosperous, or anything. You did a damn-fool thing, and as a result my department has better than two hundred extra people in this building, which wasn’t meant to cope with half its present occupants!”

“I don’t see what right you have to talk to me like that!” Donald flared. “Have you caught the driver of the cab along with the couple of hundred innocent people you’ve swept up off the street?”

“You’re free with your figures, aren’t you?” the captain said in a soft voice. “A couple of hundred innocent people? I doubt it. The cabdriver may well be among them if he was slow in running, and that cuts it by one, you must admit that if no more. Also we have, I expect”—and he raised his hand to count finger by finger the groups he was listing—“the vandals and looters who smashed the window of a store and made off with most of its stock of liquor and reefers, plus the people who chopped down a street-light, plus the people who damaged one of my prowl cars, plus any number of people who flooded a street with decaying garbage and created a health hazard, and certainly several dozens who were excessively ready with assorted weapons, like a gun used to bring down one of my patrol copters and—the clubs with which the pilot was beaten to death. You were saying…?”

“They killed him?” Donald said slowly.

“You can’t do much to revive a man whose skull has been smashed open and his brains spilled on the street. Can you?”

“Oh my God,” Donald said.

“I don’t believe in God,” said the captain. “I wouldn’t care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to. Get the hole out of here before I charge you with incitement to riot.”

He turned off the recorder and dropped the mike back in its drawer, which he slammed shut. “And if I had time,” he concluded, “I believe I very well might do that!”

Donald forced himself to his feet, trembling. He said, “You mean a man can be forbidden to walk the streets of his own home town nowadays just because something might happen to him like happened to me?”

“You calculate the odds,” the captain said. “So far, we have evidence of one hundred per cent certainty that it does happen. Get out before I change my mind—and take your brown-nosed roomie along with you, please. He’s still in no state to get home by himself, but I’d appreciate the extra space to move around.”