Streets twisted and suddenly opened onto others. Many stopped dead as though their builders had tired of the effort of continuing. Large empty lots stood next to stores in which customers fought to get at the merchandise.
The people strutted, capered, hobbled, marched, and walked backward on both hands and feet through the streets, in the stores, across the tops of a hundred different styles of transportation.
Themus snapped his dictobox on and spoke “Record” into it. Then he walked slowly down one street, up the next, into an office building, through doors, past knots of people, dictating anything and everything. Occasionally he would see a fellow Watcher and they would exchange salutes, eyes never leaving their wards.
The Crackpots seemed oblivious to his presence. No conversation would slow or halt at his approach, no one would move from his path, all seemed to accept him somehow.
This bothered Themus.
Why aren’t they angry at our eavesdropping? he wondered. Why do they tolerate us so? Is it fear of the Kyben might? But they are Kyben, too. They call us Stuffed Shirts, but they are still Kyben. Or were once. What happened to the Kyben might that was born into each of them?
His thoughts were cut off by sight of an old woman, skin almost yellow-white from age, rapidly wielding a three-pronged pickax at the cement of a gutter. He stopped, began dictating, and watched as she broke through the street, pulling out huge gouts of cement work and dirt from underneath. In a moment she was down on hands and knees, feverishly digging with her gnarled old hands at the dirt.
After thirty-nine minutes, her hands were raw and bleeding, the hole was quite four feet deep, and she kneeled in it, dirt arcing away into the air.
The fifty-minute mark brought her to a halt. She climbed laboriously out of the six-foot hole, grabbed the pickax and leaped back in. Themus moved nearer the edge. She was hacking away madly at a sewer pipe some three feet thick.
In a few moments she had driven a gaping hole in the side of the pipe. She reached into her bodice and brought out a piece of what looked like dirty oilcloth, strung with wires.
Themus was astounded to see both clear water and garbage running out of the pipe. Both were running together. No, they looked as though they were running together, but the flow of clean water came spurting out in one direction, while the muck and garbage sprayed forth from the opposite direction. They were running in opposite directions in the same pipe!
She clamped the oilcloth onto the pipe, immediately stopping the escape of the water and refuse, and began filling the hole in. Themus watched her till the hole was neatly packed in, only slightly lower than the street level. She had thrown dirt haphazardly in all directions, and some of it was still evident on car tops and in doorways.
His curiosity could be contained no longer.
He walked over to the old woman, who was slapping dirt off her polka-dotted dress, getting spots of blood on it from her rawed hands. “Excuse me —” he began.
The old woman’s face suddenly assumed “Oh no, here they are again!” as its message in life.
“Garbage runs with the drinking water?” He asked the question tremulously, thinking of all the water he had drunk since his arrival, of the number of deaths from botulism and ptomaine poisoning, of the madness of these people.
The old woman muttered something that sounded like “Cretinous Stuffed Shift,” and began to pick up a bag of groceries obviously dumped in a hurry before the excavating began.
“Are there many deaths from this?” Themus asked, knowing it was a stupid question, knowing the figures must be staggering, wondering if he would be one of the statistics.
“Hmmph, man, they don’t even bother up and back to flow that way in negative polarization of the garboh, let me away from this maniac!” And she stalked off, dirt dropping in small clots from her polka-dotted dress.
He shook his head several times, trying to clear it, but the buzzing of his brains trying to escape through his ears prevented any comfort. He communicated her passage out of his sight through the Communicator-Attachment, received the word she had been picked up by someone else, and started to make his rounds again.
He stopped in mid-stride. It dawned on him suddenly: why hadn’t that bit of oilcloth been squirted out of the hole from the pressure in the pipe? What had held it on?
He felt his tongue begin to swell in his mouth, and he realized it had all been deceiving. There had been wires attached to that scrap of oilcloth, they had served some purpose. Undoubtedly, that was it. Undoubtedly.
His fine Kyben mind pushed the problem aside.
He walked on, watching, recording. With a sudden headache.
The afternoon netted a continuous running commentary on the ordinary mundane habits of the Crackpots (biting each other on the left earlobe, which seemed to be a common activity; removing tires from landcars and replacing them with wadded-up articles of clothing; munching loaves of the spiral Kyben bread on the streets; poking long sticks through a many-holed board, to no visible purpose), and several items that Themus considered offbeat even for these warped members of his race:
Item: a young man leaped from the seventeenth story of an office building, plummeted to the third, landed on an awning, and after bouncing six times, lowered himself off the canvas, through the window, into the arms of an attractive blond girl holding a stenographic pad, who immediately threw the pad away and began kissing him. He did not seem to be hurt by the fall or the abrupt landing. Themus was not sure whether they had been total strangers before the leap, but he did record a break in their amours when his Audio Pickup caught her panting, “What was the name?”
Item: a blind beggar approached him on the street, crying for alms, and when he reached into a pocket to give the fellow a coin, the beggar drew himself taller than Themus had thought he could, and spat directly onto Themus’s jump-boots. “Not that coin, you clod, not that coin. The other one.” Themus was amazed, for he had but two coins in his pocket and the one intended had been a silver half-kyle and the one the beggar seemed to want was a copper nark. The beggar became indignant at the delay and hurried away, carefully sidestepping a group of men who came hurrying out of an alley.
Item: Themus saw a woman in a televiz booth, rapidly erasing the wall. Viz numbers left there by a hundred occupants suddenly disappeared under the woman’s active hands. When she had the walls completely bare she reached into a bag at her feet and brought out a tube of spray paint.
In a few minutes the booth was repainted a cherry pink, and was completely dry.
Then she began writing new numbers in. After an hour and a quarter, she left, and Themus did too.
Item: a young woman lowered herself by her legs from the sign above a bar-and-grill, swinging directly into Themus’s path.
Even upside down she looked good to Themus. She was wearing a pretty print dress and lavender lace undies. Themus averted his eyes and began to step around her.
“Hello,” she said.
Themus stopped and found himself looking up at her, hanging by her knees from the wooden sign that said, YOU CAN EAT HERE TOO!
She was a beautiful girl, indeed; bright blue hair, a fair golden complexion, high cheekbones, lovely legs, delightful —
He drew himself to attention, turning his eyes slightly away from her, “Watcher Themus at your service, Miss.”
“I like you,” she said.
“Ummm?” asked Themus, not quite believing he had heard her correctly.
“Do I stutter?”
“Oh — no — certainly not! ”
“Then you heard what I said.”
“Well, yes, I suppose I did.”
“Then why ask me to repeat it?”