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Gathering up his ball of taffy, which by now is growing quite cumbersome, Pirate passes Beaverboard Row, as it is known: comprising the offices of all the Committees, with the name of each stenciled above the doorway—A4 ... IG ... OIL FIRMS . . . LOBOTOMY . . . SELF-DEFENSE . . . HERESY . . .

"Naturally you're seeing this all through a soldier's eyes," she's very young, insouciant, wearing a silly small young-woman's hat of the period, her face clean and steady enough for the broad-shouldered, high-waisted, no-neck profile they're all affecting these days. She moves along beside him taking long and graceful steps, swings her arms, tosses her head—reaches over to grab some of his taffy, and touching his hand as she does so.

"For you it's all a garden," he suggests.

"Yes. Perhaps you're not such a stick after all."

Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious,

[Where did the swing band come from? She's bouncing up and down, she wants to be jitterbugged, he sees she wants to lose her gravity—]

I'll tell you it's just —out, —ray, —juss, Spirit is so —con, —tay, —juss, Nobody knows their a-ges ...

Walkin' through bees of hon —ney, Throwin' away —that —mon, —ney, Laughin' at things so —fun —ny, Spirit's comin' through —to, —you!

Nev —ver, —mind, whatcha hear from your car, Take a lookit just —how —keen —they are,

Nev —ver, —mind, —what, your calendar say, Ev'rybody's nine months old today! Hey,

Pages are turnin' pages, Nobody's in —their, — ca, —ges, Spirit's just so — con, —ta, —gious— Just let the Spirit —move, —for, —you!

The only office not physically touching the others on Beaverboard Row, intentionally set apart, is a little corrugated shack, stovepipe coming out the top, pieces of automobile lying around rusted solid in the yard, piles of wood under rain-colored and failing canvas, a house trailer with its tires and one wheel tilted forlorn in the spanging of the cold rain at its weathered outsides . . . devil's advocate's what the shingle sez, yes inside is a Jesuit here to act in that capacity, here to preach, like his colleague Teilhard de Chardin, against return. Here to say that critical mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning. It's a potent case Father Rapier makes here, not without great moments of eloquence, moments when he himself is clearly moved ... no need even to be there, at the office, for visitors may tune in from anywhere in the Convention to his passionate demonstrations, which often come in the midst of celebrating what hep humorists here are already calling "Critical Mass" (get it? not too many did in 1945, the Cosmic Bomb was still trembling in its earli-ness, not yet revealed to the People, so you heard the term only in the very superhepcat-to-hepcat exchanges). "I think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art to go on forever—though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us— well, why begrudge Them, when they're just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat, all under the same shadow . . . yes . . . yes. But is that really true? Or is it the best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?

"We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are their harvests. ...

"It must change radically the nature of our faith. To ask that we keep faith in Their mortality, faith that They also cry, and have fear, and feel pain, faith They are only pretending Death is Their servant— faith in Death as the master of us all—is to ask for an order of courage that I know is beyond my own humanity, though I cannot speak for others. . . . But rather than make that leap of faith, perhaps we will choose instead to turn, to fight: to demand, from those for whom we die, our own immortality. They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe They can still die from violence. If not, at least we can learn to withhold from Them our fear of Death. For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross. And at least the physical things They have taken, from Earth and from us, can be dismantled, demolished— returned to where it all came from.

"To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming Return. . . ." It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid. Pirate and the girl have been listening to him as they linger outside a hall Pirate would enter. It isn't clear if she will come in with him. No, he rather thinks not. It is exactly the sort of room he was afraid it would be. Jagged holes in the walls, evidently where fixtures have been removed, are roughly plastered over. The others, waiting for him it seems, have been passing the time with games in which pain is the overt commodity, such as Charley-Charley, Hits 'n' Cuts, and Rock-Scissors-and-Paper. From next door comes a sound of splashing water and all-male giggling that echoes a bit off of the tiles. "And now," a fluent wireless announcer can be heard, "it's time for? Drop — The Soap!" Applause and shrieks of laughter, which go on for a disagreeably long time.

"Drop the Soap?" Sammy Hilbert-Spaess ambles over to the thin dividing wall, puts his nose around the end of it to have a look.

"Noisy neighbors," remarks German film director Gerhardt von Göll. "Doesn't this sort of thing ever stop?"

"Hullo, Prentice," nods a black man Pirate doesn't recognize, "we seem to be old school tie." What is this, who are all these— His name is St.-Just Grossout. "For most of the Duration, the Firm had me trying to infiltrate the Schwarzkommando. I never saw anyone else trying to. It sounds a bit paranoiac, but I think I was the only one. ..." This forthright breach of security, if that's what it is, takes Pirate a little aback.

"Do you think you could—well, give me a sort of sitrep on all this?"

"Oh, Geoffrey. Oh, my." Here comes Sammy Hilbert-Spaess back from watching the shower-room frolic, shaking his head, pouched and Levantine eyes continuing to stare straight down his nose, "Geoffrey, by the time you get any summary, the whole thing will have changed. We could shorten them for you as much as you like, but you'd be losing so much resolution it wouldn't be worth it, really it wouldn't. Just look around you, Geoffrey. Have a nice look, and see who's here."

Pirate is surprised to find Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck more fit than he ever looked in his life. The man is actively at peace, in the way of a good samurai—each time he engages Them fully expecting to die, without apprehension or remorse. It is an amazing change. Pirate begins to feel hope for himself. "When did you turn?" He knows Sir Stephen won't be offended at his asking. "How did it happen?"

"Oh, no, don't let this one fool you?" who in the world is this, with this greasy pompadour combed nearly as high again as his face, through which shows the peened, the tenderized soul of a fighter who's not only taken dives, but also thought heavily about them all the way down. It is Jeremiah ("Merciful") Evans, the well-known political informer from Pembroke. "No, our little Stevie's not ready for sainthood quite yet, are we my fine chap?" Slapping him, playful, clubbing slaps on the cheek: "Eh? eh? eh?"

"Not if they've thrown me in wiv v' likes o' you," replies the knight, churlishly. But it's hard to say really who's provoking whom, for Merciful Evans now bursts into song, and a terrible singer he is, a discredit to his people, in fact—

Say a prayer for the common informer,

He came out of a quim, just like yoooou—

Yes be kind what you chortle,

For narks are as mortal

As any, Kilkenny to Kew ...

And the next time you sigh in your comfort,

Ask yourself how he's doing, today—

Is it worse being sold,

For those handfuls of gold,

Than to sigh all your real-life, away?

"I don't know that I'm going to like it in here," Pirate, an unpleasant suspicion growing on him, looking about nervously.

"The worst part's the shame," Sir Stephen tells him. "Getting

through that. Then your next step—well, I talk like an old hand, but that's really only as far as I've come, up through the shame. At the moment I'm involved with the 'Nature of Freedom' drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do ... regardless of what I believe, you see . . . I've been given the old Radio-Control-ImplantedTn-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over—as a kind of koan, I suppose. It's driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that's the whole point of it. And who knows what comes next? Good God. I don't find out, of course, till I break through this one. ... I don't mean to discourage you so soon—"

"No, no, I've been wondering something else—are all you lot my Group or something? Have I been assigned here?"

"Yes. Are you beginning to see why?"

"I'm afraid I am." With everything else, these are, after all, people who kill each other: and Pirate has always been one of them. "I'd been hoping for—oh, it's foolish, a bit of mercy . . . but I was at the all-night cinema, around the corner from Gallaho Mews, the intersection with the extra street, the one you can't always see because it comes in at such a strange angle ... I had a bad stretch of time to get through, poison, metallic time ... it smelled as sour as a burned pot ... all I wanted was a place to sit for a while, and they don't care who you are really, what you eat or how long you sleep or who—whom you get together with. ..."

"Prentice, really it's all right," it's St.-Just Grossout, whom the others call "Sam Juiced" when they want to shout him down, during the passages in here when there is nothing for it but a spot of rowdyism.

"I... just can't... I mean if it is true, then," a laugh it hurts him, deep in his windpipe, to make, "then I defected for nothing, didn't I? I mean, if I haven't really defected at all. ..."

The word reached him during a government newsreel. FROM CLOAK-AND-DAGGER TO CROAK-AND-STAGGER, the sequin title twinkled to all the convalescent souls gathered for another long night of cinema without schedule—shot of a little street-crowd staring in a dusty show-window, someplace so far into the East End that no one except those who lived there had ever heard of it ... bomb-tilted ballroom floor of the ruin slipping uphill behind like a mountain meadow, but dodgy as a trampoline to walk upon, conch-twisting stucco columns tilted inward, brass elevator cage drooping from the overhead. Right out in front was a half-naked, verminous and hairy creature, approximately human, terribly pale, writhing behind

the crumbled remains of plate glass, tearing at sores on his face and abdomen, drawing blood, scratching and picking with dirt-black fingernails. "Every day in Smithfield Market, Lucifer Amp makes a spectacle of himself. That's not so surprising. Many a demobilized soldier and sailor has turned to public service as a means of keeping at least body and soul together, if nothing else. What is unusual is that Mr. Amp used to work for the Special Operations Executive. ..."

"It's quite good fun, actually," as the camera moves in for a close-up of this individual, "only took me a week to pick up the knack of it. . . ."

"Do you feel a sense of belonging now, that you hadn't when you came, or—have they still not accepted you out here?"

"They—oh the people, the people have been just wonderful. Just grand. No, no problems there at all."

At which point, from the bishopwise seat behind Pirate, came an alcohol smell, and warm breath, and a pat on the shoulder. "You hear? 'Used to work.' That's rich, that is. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history—and no one ever will." It was an upper-class accent, one Pirate might have aspired to once in his rambling youth. By the time he decided to look back, though, his visitor was gone.

"Think of it as a handicap, Prentice, like any other, like missing a limb or having malaria . .. one can still live . .. one learns to get round it, it becomes part of the day—"

"Being ad—"

"It's all right. 'Being a—'?"

"Being a double agent? 'Got round'?" He looks at the others, computing. Everyone here seems to be at least a double agent.

"Yes . . . you're down here now, down here with us," whispers Sammy. "Get your shame and your sniffles all out of the way, young fellow, because we don't make a practice of indulging that for too long."

"It's a shadow," cries Pirate, "it's working under a shadow, forever."

"But think of the free-dom?" sez Merciful Evans. "I can't even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be? If he's to be sold out by anyone? even by himself you see?"

"I don't want that—"

"You don't have a choice," Dodson-Truck replies. "The Firm know perfectly well that you've come here. They'll expect a full report from you now. Either voluntary or some other way."

"But I wouldn't . . . I'd never tell them—" The smiles they are putting on for him now are deliberately cruel, to help him through it a bit. "You don't, you really don't trust me?"

"Of course not," Sammy sez. "Would you—really—trust any of us?"

"Oh, no," Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else's. But it's still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.

He is crying for persons, places, and things left behind: for Scorpia Mossmoon, living in St. John's Wood among sheet-music, new recipes, a small kennel of Weimaraners whose racial purity she will go to extravagant lengths to preserve, and husband Clive who shows up now and then, Scorpia living only a few minutes away by Underground but lost to Pirate now for good, no chance for either of them to turn again . . . for people he had to betray in the course of business for the Firm, Englishmen and foreigners, for Ion so naïve, for Gongy-lakis, for the Monkey Girl and the pimps in Rome, for Bruce who got burned . . . for nights up in partisan mountains when he was one with the smell of living trees, in full love with the at last undeniable beauty of the night... for a girl back in the Midlands named Virginia, and for their child who never came to pass . . . for his dead mother, and his dying father, for the innocent and the fools who are going to trust him, poor faces doomed as dogs who have watched us so amiably from behind the wire fences at the city pounds . . . cries for the future he can see, because it makes him feel so desperate and cold. He is to be taken from high moment to high moment, standing by at meetings of the Elect, witnessing a test of the new Cosmic Bomb —"Well," a wise old face, handing him the black-lensed glasses, "there's your Bomb . . ." turning then to see its thick yellow exploding down the beach, across the leagues of Pacific waves . . . touching famous assassins, yes actually touching their human hands and faces . . . finding out one day how long ago, how early in the game the contract on his own life was let. No one knows exactly when the hit will come—every morning, before the markets open, out before the milkmen, They make Their new update, and decide on what's going to be sufficient unto the day. Every morning Pirate's name will be on a list, and one morning it will be

close enough to the top. He tries to face it, though it fills him with a terror so pure, so cold, he thinks for a minute he'll pass out. Later, having drawn back a bit, gathering heart for the next sortie, it seems to him he's done with the shame, just as Sir Stephen said, yes past the old shame and scared now, full of worry for nothing but his own ass, his precious, condemned, personal ass. . . .

"Is there room here for the dead?" He hears the question before he can see her asking it. He isn't sure how she came into this room. From all the others now flow impressions of male jealousy, a gruff sort of women-on-ships-is-bad-luck chill and withdrawal. And here's Pirate left alone with her and her question. He holds out to her the ball of taffy he's been carrying, boobish as young Porky Pig holding out the anarchist's ticking bomb to him. But there's to be no sweetness. They are here instead to trade some pain and a few truths, but all in the distracted style of the period:

"Come now," what sort of idiotic trouble does she think she's in now? "you're not dead. I'll wager not even figuratively so."

"I meant, would I be allowed to bring my dead in with me," Katje explains. "They are my credentials, after all."

"I rather liked Frans van der Groov. Your ancestor. The dodo chap."

It's not quite what she meant by her dead. "I mean the ones who owe their deadness directly to me. Besides, if Frans were ever to walk in here you'd only stand around, all of you, making sure he understood just how guilty he was. The poor man's world held an inexhaustible supply of dodoes—why teach him about genocide?"

"'You could tell him a thing or two about that, couldn't you, girly?" sneers Evans, the tone-deaf Welsh stoolie.

Pirate is moving against Evans, forearms out from his sides saloon-fighter-style, when Sir Stephen intervenes: "There'll be talk like this all the time, Prentice, we're a case-hardened lot. You'd better start learning to make it work for you here. No telling how long we're in for, is there? The young woman has grown herself all the protection she needs, it seems to me. She doesn't want you to fight for her."

Well, he's right. She's put her warm hand on Pirate's arm, shaking her head twice with embarrassed small laughs, "I'm glad to see you anyway, Captain Prentice."

"No one else is. Think about it."

She only raises her eyebrows. It was a shitty thing to say. Remorse, or some late desire to be pure, rush into his blood like dope.

"But—" astonished to feel himself beginning to collapse, like a stack of rifles, around her feet, caught in her gravitation, distances abolished, waveforms unmeasurable, "Katje . . . if I could never betray you—"

He has fallen: she has lost her surface. She is staring at him amazed.

"Even if the price for that were . . . betraying others, hurting ... or killing others—then it wouldn't matter who, or how many, no, not if I could be your safety, Katje, your perfect—"

"But those, those are the sins that might never happen." Here they are bargaining like a couple of pimps. Do they have any idea what they sound like? "That's easy enough to pledge, doesn't cost you a thing."

"Then even the sins I did commit," he protests, "yes I'd do them over—"

"But you can't do that, either—so you get off just as cheap. Hm?"

"I can repeat patterns," more grim than she really wants him to be.

"Oh, think . . ." her fingers are lightly in his hair, "think of the things you've done. Think of all your 'credentials,' and all of mine—"

"But that's the only medium we've got now," he cries, "our gift for bad faith. We'll have to build everything with it... deal it, as the prosecutors deal you your freedom."

"Philosopher." She is smiling. "You were never like that."

"It must have come from always being in motion. I've never felt this stillness. ..." They are touching now, without urgency, still, neither of them, quite over the surprise. . . . "My little brother" (Pirate understands the connection she has made) "left home at 18.1 liked to watch him sleeping at night. His long eyelashes ... so innocent... I watched for hours. . . . He got as far as Antwerp. Before long he was loitering around parish churches with the rest of them. Do you know what I mean? Young, Catholic males. Camp followers. They got to depend on alcohol, many of them, at an early age. They would choose a particular priest, and become his faithful dog—literally wait all night at his doorstep in order to talk to him fresh from his bed, his linen, the intimate smells that had not yet escaped the folds of his garment . . . insane jealousies, daily jostling for position, for the favors of this Father or that. Louis began to attend Rexist meetings. He went out to a soccer field and heard Degrelle tell the crowd that they must let themselves be swept away by the flood, they must act, act, and let the rest take care of itself. Soon my brother was out in the street with his `broom, along with the other guilty sarcastic young men with their

brooms in their hands . . . and then he had joined Rex, the 'realm of total souls,' and the last I heard he was in Antwerp living with an older man named Philippe. I lost track of him. We were very close at one time. People took us for twins. When the heavy rocket attacks began against Antwerp I knew it could not be an accident. . . ."

Yes well Pirate's Chapel himself. "But I've wondered about the solidarity of your Church . . . you kneel, and she takes care of you . . . when you are acting politically, to have all that common momentum, taking you upward—"

"You never had that either, did you." She's been looking really at him—"none of the marvelous excuses. We did everything ourselves."

No, there's no leaving shame after all—not down here—it has to be swallowed sharp-edged and ugly, and lived with in pain, every day.

Without considering, he is in her arms. It isn't for comfort. But if he is to keep dragging himself up the ratchet's teeth one by one he does need to pause in human touch for a bit. "What did it look like out there, Katje? I saw an organized convention. Someone else saw it as a garden. . . ." But he knows what she'll say.

"There was nothing out there. It was a barren place. I'd been most of the day looking for a sign of life. Then at last I heard you all in here." So they have wandered to a balcony, a graceful railing, no one can see them from inside or out: and below them in the streets, streets they have both lost now, are the People. There passes for Pirate and Katje a brief segment of a much longer chronicle, the anonymous How I Came to Love the People. "Her name was Brenda, her face was the bird under the protecting grin of the car in the rain that morning, she knelt and performed fellatio on me, and I ejaculated on her breasts. Her name was Lily, she was 67 last August, she reads off the labels of beer bottles to herself out loud, we coupled in the standard English position, and she patted me on the back and whispered, 'Good friend.' His name was Frank, his hair curled away from his face, his eyes were rather sharp but pleasant, he stole from American Army depots, he bum-fucked me and when he came inside me, so did I. Her name was Frangibella, she was black, her face was broken out, she wanted money for dope, her openness was a viper writhing in my heart, I performed cunnilingus upon her. His name was Allan, his buttocks were tanned, I said, where did you find the sun, he answered, the sun is just around the corner, I held him over the pillow and buggered him and he cried with love till I, my piston pungently greased, exploded at last. Her name was Nancy, she was six, we went behind a wall near a crater full of ruins, she rubbed and rubbed against me, her milky little thighs reaching in and out of my own, her eyes were closed, her fair little nostrils moved upward, backward forever, the slope of debris rushed down, steeply, just beside us, we teetered at the edge, on and on, exquisitely. Her name was—" well, all these and many more pass for our young couple here, enough to make them understand that horny Anonymous's intentions are nothing less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every individual one of the People in the World—and that when every one, somewhat miraculously, is accounted for at last, that will be a rough definition of "loving the People."