An incident occurred before they reached the crowded street and the dazzling sun. As they left the courtroom, just at the crystal barrier, they saw a commotion in the spectators' gallery. The queer old man who didn't seem to know what he wanted to do had found a new way of making a disturbance. He was sprawled across two seats, while white-jacketed Health Service emergency corpsmen were administering oxygen to him. He waved his arms and tried to talk, his eyes glowering at Castor through the glass, but the oxygen mask made him mute. Castor laughed out loud. "What a nut," he remarked, and the policewoman frowned.
"You are speaking of Fung Bohsien," she reproved him, "a famous scientist and high party member! You must show more respect." Then, relenting, "But it's true, Manyface should stay in his laboratories. Every time he leaves there is trouble."
"What kind of trouble?" Castor began to ask, interestedly, but they were out of the building by then and had the street to cross. If anything it was worse than any before in his experience, because it was the height of the working day and all the vehicles were desperate to get where they were going before any other. What Castor wanted to do was hold the inspector's hand as they crossed. Pride did not allow that—even if she would have—and his heart was pounding by the time they reached the opposite curb.
The restaurant, however, soothed all hurts. The smells were marvelous! They found two seats at a great round table in a corner of the room, overlooking the busy street. All the other seats were occupied, but each party confined its attention to itself as waiters and waitresses brought steaming tureens and plates of sizzling-hot fried fish and crisp green vegetables and tall half-liter bottles of beer and orange soda. Tsoong Delilah, seeing that Castor was indeed starving, allowed him to feed his young metabolism without talking while she picked at her food. Finally, after his second helping of crisp chicken wings and third bowl of rice, he asked, "Who is this 'Manyface'?"
"You are not to call him that," she commanded. "To you he is Professor Fung Bohsien, as well as a number of other names—etcetera, as you would say in English."
'"Et cetera' isn't English," he pointed out, with his mouth full.
"Oh, what a scholar it is! In any case, Manyface is no concern of yours." Castor shrugged, eyeing the platters of fresh fruit that the waiters were just depositing on the revolving lazy Susan in the center of the table. To make conversation while he was helping himself to the dessert, he asked, "How did you know to go to the cattle collective?"
"Simply good police work," said Tsoong Delilah sternly, "and you must not discuss the case until the inquest is complete." Then she thought for a moment and added, "However, perhaps you can be of some help."
"It is a citizen's duty to assist the police in their work, Inspector," he said formally.
"Oh, Scholar! How sarcastic you are! Have you been treated so badly, then?"
"I was not admitted to the university," he said, as though that answered everything.
"Yes, I am aware of that. But I am aware, too, that you did in fact then proceed to educate yourself through the teaching machines, and in such curious subjects! Astronomy. Mathematics. History—and, of course, your admirable command of the high tongue; is being an autodidact so much worse than a college degree?"
He shrugged, impressed not only by her use of words like "autodidact"—he had never heard it spoken in a conversation before, though perhaps that was not surprising on a rice farm—but by her detailed knowledge of his studies. "I suppose," he conceded, "that I lost very little, really."
"And have you been mistreated here? Made to sleep with pigs?"
There was enough country bumpkin left in Castor to make his eyes sparkle. "I guess not," he admitted and, with a rush, "Actually, the hotel is grand! If only they'd fed me—But I have in my room my own toilet and shower! And a screen that gets fifty-one channels, including the Indian programs!"
"Han is not good enough for you?" she joked. Then, coming to the point, "So it is fair for me to ask you for your special knowledge, then. Tell me, have you had much contact with the cattle collective?"
"Not really. Oh, we see them, now and then. At dances and rallies, mostly, and my cousin Patrick's son married a girl from there—but I don't really know her, because they volunteered for reassignment in Texas. She didn't like our village, I guess."
"Tell me what you do know, at least," Tsoong Delilah commanded, and obediently Castor searched his memory while they dawdled over their tea. The River of Pearl Cattle Collective got its name from its origins. The first group of settlers had once been tourists, caught browsing the shops of Hong Kong when the war broke out. When it was over they had a real problem. They couldn't stay in China, because there was no way for China to feed even its own people, much less bourgeois jet-setters who had no real right to be there in the first place. The tourists couldn't go home, because most of them didn't have any homes left to go to. For three or four months they were tossed around from camp to camp, always hungry, as psychically shaken by the war as any and even more despairing than most. When at last they were offered transportation back to America on condition that they start a livestock farm in the least ruined parts of what had once been Alabama, they jumped at the chance. Not with pleasure; simply because all the alternatives were worse. As, mostly, retired English teachers and vacationing mutual-fund salesmen, they were not very good at slopping hogs and birthing calves. It didn't matter. Most of them did not survive the cruelly hard conditions very long, anyway. It was the handful of younger American tourists who had survived to build the collective, supplemented as the years went by with drafts of undesirables from the cities. Many of the new recruits were Overseas Chinese— third- and fourth-generation Chinese-Americans, who found the Han colonists who arrived to repopulate the devastated continent even harder to take than did their Anglo compatriots. So River of Pearl had more than its share of malcontents. Their neighbors had built up a tradition of leaving them alone.
When he saw the policewoman consulting her watch Castor realized he had told her as much as she wanted to know about the River of Pearl Collective. "What should I do now?" he asked. "Am I supposed to go back to the village?"
She looked astonished. "Now? Before the inquest is over? Certainly not. Any witness may be recalled; you'll be told when you may leave. And anyway," she said, grinning, as she waved to a waiter for the check, "this afternoon will be especially interesting for you, I think!"
There had been time to draw his witness fees and expenses after all. Castor turned the green-edged Renmin currency over in his fingers curiously as he waited for the afternoon session to begin. The spectators' gallery was fuller than before, though the queer old man called Manyface was not among them as far as Castor could see. Inspector Tsoong Delilah had not rejoined him. She was seated once more in the front row, along with three other police. All four of them seemed intently poised for something special.
The first witness had barely begun to testify when Castor lost interest in the other spectators and jammed his money back into his pocket. The witness was a police technician, a white-haired man whose ease and control suggested many hours in court. The questions and answers were quick and direct:
"Were you assigned the task of identifying the deceased?"
"I was. Through cell typing and analysis of the hair patterns at the base of the skull, the deceased was identified as Feng Avery, seventeen years old, citizen of the Bama Autonomous Republic, apprentice slaughterer at the River of Pearl Livestock Collective. Apprentice Feng was an Overseas Chinese, of pure strain for six generations."