It wasn't fair. But all Rafferty could do when Girty went out of the office was to stare after him for a second, with his own hot, black heart showing in his eyes, and try to rush through handing out the payroll.
'You're a coward, Girty," he said without a sound, and handed a fat yellow envelope of Project-vouchers and Project-slugs to Ellen Sandburg.
"You know that I hate your guts, so you run away," he said. "But it won't help you, cow. You can run away. But I can catch you."
Fifteen minutes start John Girty had. No more. But it took Rafferty over an hour to make it up. An hour of looking in all the expensive, free-market restaurants where Girty might be, pressing his forehead against the glass like an urchin on Christmas day, only with the blackness coming out of no urchin's eyes.
The streets were packed, and crowds bumped against Rafferty, some careless and impolite, some doddering and apologetic, and once or twice a man as bleak and frozen as Rafferty himself.
It was weekend going-out night, and every street comer had its Mudgins Demonstrator on his flag-draped platform, frightening the passersby with prophecies of the return of Unemployment and the Machine. Rafferty noticed that he was hungry, but he didn't have time to eat, not while he was looking for fat John Girty and while the letter opener was secretly fondled in his pocket.
And then at the end of the search, to see John Girty just as he was coming out of the biggest free-market restaurant of all and get into a taxicab. A taxicab, that cost real money. And there was Rafferty, with two dollar bills of real money in his pocket, hoarded over months, and a pocketful of Project-vouchers and Project-slugs.
He did it. He took another cab to follow Girty, but he sat with his heart in his mouth behind the cab driver, watching the clicking black numbers on the meter and doing something that was close to praying. But of course it wasn't really praying, under the New Way.
Rafferty snarled voiceless curses at the cab driver, who had looked so openly suspicious of his Project suit and his panther's eyes, and so contemptuous of Rafferty's fumbling directions as he tried to keep them on the trail of the fat man in the cab ahead.
"I ought to kill you, too," Rafferty told the driver, but silently. "I ought to cut your throat the way I'm going to cut the fat cow's throat with what I have hidden here."
The driver sat on his little bucket seat, where they had ripped out the automatic control apparatus to make room foil a human driver under the New Way, and never knew than murder was right behind him. But it was only a short ride— fortunately for Rafferty's two dollars. The meter said forty cents.
"I ought to kill you," Rafferty said again, not looking at the driver who was fumbling for change but staring at the enormous white Old Way building Girty had gone into. "You deserve to be killed. I'll give you a tip, and you'll go and tell the Mudgin's police that I'm following Girty to cut his throat. Take my money and tell the police, that's what you'll do." He picked up the half dollar from the driver's palm and left the dime. "I ought to kill you, too."
But the driver couldn't tell them what he didn't know, so Rafferty bought a newspaper at a stand and stood looking at the headlines obstinately until he heard the cab drive away. The headlines on the news stories said Liquidation of 80,000 Wilfully Unemployed and Legislators Hail Mudgins Way and Project Kitchens to Get New Wonder Yeast Meal, but it had been a long time since Rafferty had read even a headline in a newspaper, and he didn't read them now. He only looked at them unseeing until the cab was gone, and then he looked up at the big white building. It was a Turkish bath.
"Fat old cow," Rafferty laughed silently. "So fat you go to a place like this to die."
Rafferty tore the newspaper in half and threw it on the street, and then he went in, one hand on the thing in his pocket, although the man in the lobby looked at him oddly.
He had to pay a dollar, real money, to get in, and that left him with 45 cents and the Project-vouchers, the useless Project-vouchers that they wouldn't take in a free-market place like this. But he didn't need even 45 cents, not for what he had in mind.
But there was a problem. He had to put all his clothes in a locker, all of them. He stood there naked, a lean, bent man with panther's eyes, wishing he had a pocket. But there was no pocket in his skin, and he had to leave the long, sharp letter opener in the locker.
Once upon a time, it seemed to Rafferty, a long, long time ago someone who then had been that which was Rafferty now had been in a place like this. That was during what they called the "Old Way," although it seemed to Rafferty, they hadn't called it that then. There was something there that did no add up neatly in his mind, but he was walking through a hot, steamy corridor of tile, and he didn't bother about that any more. It was damp underfoot, and there were splashing showers alongside. He stepped into a shower and let the water thunder on him.
And he turned his face up into the stream and cowered back, out of sight, as fat old John Girty puffed pinltly past.
Girty was naked as a newborn, soft as a moulted crab, flabby as a pink harem eunuch. "I spit," Rafferty soundlessly told the roaring water. "Fat, soft thing. You're dirty, cow.
"Fat and dirty—
"I'll kill you, Girty."
Rafferty stood in the steam room, peering across the corridor at the massage tables where fat Girty was presenting his flabby pink flesh to be thumped. Rafferty couldn't see through the clouded glass and so he had to keep opening the door, and every time he opened it steam billowed out and drafts knifed in on the men who sat naked on wooden benches in the steam. The metal door burned Rafferty's hand, he noticed, but it was a cool thing compared to the black heat that stung his throat inside him.
Girty was still waddling and puffing around the massage table, talking to the rubber. Rafferty let the door to the steam room close on him, and squinted around the little cube of hell he was in. There were dim, loose shapes sprawled around the walls. Some were fat and many were old, but none was as flabby as John Girty.
There were three lights on the wall of the steam room, head-high, candle-pale. There was a fourth light that was burned out, and Rafferty sat down in the little dark under it, waiting until it was time.
"I have a knife to kill you with," he crooned soundlessly. "Fat cow. I have a knife to cut you with and stab you with. I'll kill you, Girty."
Rafferty sat there with patient violence, like an avalanche waiting on cue in the wings of a spectacular drama. He was in no hurry; he might perhaps move very fast indeed, fast as lightning or the star rays that shoot across the void, but he would not be hurrying.
There was no time for such as Rafferty, and no longing for waiting to come to an end, and no regret for time lost. Though perhaps there once had been, before Mudgins, and the New Way, and the machines that taught Rafferty and those like Rafferty how to do the work of machines.
It was time to look out the door again, and he got up, squinting his white-hot eyes against the steam, and walked over. In the massage room Girty was on the table now, with a while towel over his ugliness. A tall, brown man in trunks clapped goggles to Girty's eyes and pressed a switch that lit a shimmering violet light overhead.
"Close the door, damn it!" One of the dim white shapes behind Rafferty was sitting up and swearing at him.
"Your mother loved hogs," Rafferty said without voice, but he closed the door and walked out.
This was the part that was hard to do. He walked backward and sidewise like a crab, keeping his face hidden from even the closed, goggled eyes of Girty. He climbed onto a slab next to Girty and lay down with his head turned away.