"Maybe if I ... " Trevnik sat down again. "Maybe if I told them how he'd been following me and all and ... and ... taunting me, they'd understand."
Elsie Stogumber let him talk on, convincing himself, committing himself.
"I am sure nobody on earth would blame you," she said eventually. "He is trying to — well, interfere — with you. That's almost an offence in itself."
Trevnik smiled happily for the first time in a long while. "You're right, Mrs. Stogumber," he said. "You're sure as hell right."
Again the plump man waiting on the far pavement; again the thunder down the rotting wooden stairs. Jolo Trevnik emerged and turned to lock the door. Hejar shifted his weight from one foot to another, anxious to be away.
Trevnik turned from the door and looked straight at Hejar. Then he started across the road. Hejar was suddenly afraid. He sought desperately for another purpose to give to his presence.
"That building," he said before Trevnik could reach him. "Doesn't look too safe. It could fall down any time."
"Is that why you keep following me?" Trevnik mounted the curb. "Because you're afraid I'll go down with it? I'm not much use to you crushed, am I?"
"No ... no. We — my department — we wanted to find out where you live, where you eat, your transportive habits, so we can site your replacement office accordingly ... "
"Rubbish," said Trevnik.
"No, I assure you ... "
Trevnik hit him first on the nose, drawing blood. "See a little of your own," he said pleasantly.
Then he sank his right fist deep into Hejar's solar plexus and followed it with his left. He began to enjoy the way the stout man yielded and swayed before him; the way the flesh gave beneath his knuckles.
He began a methodical destruction, aware that he was going beyond his brief, but somehow no longer able to call back his massive fists.
He chopped down on the nerve centres inside Hejar's collarbones.
"Grave-robber," he said without expression. "My, how you little pink people love to get blood on your hands."
He hit Hejar twice more in the stomach, and the man was there, jack-knifed in front of him.
His knees spoke to him. Use us. Smash him. But he controlled them. If he used anything but his fists in this, it would no longer be fair, would no longer carry a justification.
Hejar folded slowly to the ground. Trevnik's feet spoke. Let us finish him. Please.
"No," Trevnik shouted. He turned Hejar face upwards then, and with tears streaming down his face, he walked away.
Hejar, his senses reeling, his mouth salty and crowded, saw roofs tipping at him and tried to twist out of their downward path. But he could not move.
A shadow lingered above him. His flooded nostrils barely caught a woman's scent before a smell he knew only too well, a smell of ancient perspiration.
The woman pushed back his damp hair and then seemed to be going through his pockets.
Hejar closed his eyes. Get on with it, he thought through a blood-red mist. Take my wallet and go.
The woman spoke. "Mr. Hejar." The voice had a familiarity but it defied identification as the torrents of imbalance raged against his ear-drums.
He opened his eyes. The woman bent towards him. Something glinted in her hand.
He tried to scream but choked on his own blood, his own overpowering smell.
"A widow has to make a living somehow," said Elsie Stogumber. Then she brought the stamp down right between his eyes.
The astonishing prospect (as I write — half an election year before publication, remember) is that the worst might not happen. The flashes of light on several (new and old) horizons are just frequent enough to give an illusion, at leasts of predawn.
One streak of illumination was a collaboration between two astronomers making an excellent case for the existence of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden Day, 1966) — or at least on Earth. The book is knowledgeable, imaginative, literate, entertaining, instructive and also (doubly) opinionated. In the preface, Carl Sagan, of Harvard and the Smithsonian, says of his colleague I. S. Shklovskii, of the Sternberg Institute and Soviet Academy:
... Since he does not travel out of the Soviet Union and I have never traveled to the Soviet Union, we have been unable to discuss the present edition in person. "The probability of our meeting is unlikely to be smaller than the probability of a visit to the Earth by an Extra-terrestrial cosmonaut," he once wrote ... As the reader might expect ... there are occasional differences. I have not tried to avoid these problems ... I do not think the reader will be distressed by the occasional appearance of a dialogue.
What with Alliluyeva and Glassboro, too, the Soviet-American dialogue gets steadily more sociable, if not more sensible. Even the Orange (Yellow/Red) Menace looms less lurid in the light of popular dissatisfaction, dissent, and spasmodic riot and rebellion, in the provinces of China as in the cities of America. And then there was The Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (Dial, 1967).
1967 was a big year all around for reports and most of those not concerned with Vietnam or the Kennedy assassination seemed to concentrate on the year 2000 (perhaps the influence of RAND's 'Delphi' predictions; or the — again — imminent release of the Clarke-Kubrick film 2001?), including the extraordinary (February 1967) '2001+' issue of Architectural Design. Along with broad forecasts and detailed technical prospectuses, it reprinted a speech on 'The Year 2006' by Buckminster Fuller:
... In ten years from now we will have changed so completely that no one will say you have to demonstrate your right to live, that you have to earn a living ... It will be normal for a man to be successful ... Politics will become obsolete. ...
There will be a rediscovery of what Einstein described in 1930, in an article on the 'cosmic religious sense' ... We are going to have an increasing number of human beings as scientists and philosophers thinking about the total significance of human experience and ... of man's development. An era of extraordinary integrity might ensue.
The 'cosmic religious sense' and the integrity potential of man are the dominant themes of the most readably provocative theological s-f since A Canticle for Leibowitz — R. A. Lafferty's first novel, The Past Master (Ace, 1968). Here he offers a report on scientists and philosophers and the PTA and things.
The Primary Education of the Camiroi
R. A. Lafferty
ABSTRACT FROM JOINT REPORT TO THE GENERAL DUBUQUE PTA CONCERNING THE PRIMARY EDUCATION OF THE CAMIROI, Subtitled Critical Observations of a Parallel Culture on a Neighbouring World, and Evaluations of THE OTHER WAY OF EDUCATION.
Extract from the Day Book:
"Where," we asked the Information Factor at Camiroi City Terminal, "is the office of the local PTA?"
"Isn't any," he said cheerfully.
"You mean that in Camiroi City, the metropolis of the planet, there is no PTA?" our chairman Paul Piper asked with disbelief.
"Isn't any office of it. But you're poor strangers, so you deserve an answer even if you can't frame your questions properly. See that elderly man sitting on the bench and enjoying the sun? Go tell him you need a PTA. He'll make you one."