"Put goggles on me, you filthy pig," he soundlessly ordered the rubber. "Hide my face before Girty looks this way." His averted eyes saw a sign on the walclass="underline"
Swedish Rub..............................................................$1.00
.75 1.50
Salt Rub ....................
Sun Lamp & Massage
Rafferty had a 25-cent-piece and two dimes. And the Project-vouchers, of course, but not for here. The rubber, came then, and covered Rafferty. He looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before he spoke, but all he said was: "Good evening, Sir. Swedish rub today?"
Rafferty nodded, looking expressionlessly into the rubber's coarse, tanned face. He could not speak out loud, so close to Girty's fat but listening ears, but he only had to nod. "Anything, filthy pig," he said soundlessly. "One dollar is nothing. Perhaps I will pay you with the same knife I pay Girty with."
The rubber assembled his greases and cloths and Rafferty waited until it was time. He thought about the one dollar of real money that someone in this place would expect him to pay, but of course he would have paid all his bills in full, forever, before he came to the cashier's window again. He thought of the letter opener, lost to him in the locker down below. But the knife was better, eight inches long and carefully honed, with a thin blade that would slash a throat or go between two ribs.
"It will make meat out of Girty," he told the unhealing rubber. "Perhaps it will make meat out of you. I know it will make meat out of me, too, but not until I have finished with fat Girty."
It was good that the knife was there, to solve all his problems at once. He waited until it was time.
Girty's lamp went out, and his rubber rolled him over, and Girty immediately began talking to the man. Rafferty could hear the hard-muscled, cupped-hand slaps on the sagging pink flesh, and Girty's wheezing, jolting voice.
"I'll kill you, Girty," he said, and it was like a hymn. "I'll kill you, Girty," he said without sound.
Girty was saying proudly, "Hell, I've—ugh—worked with Mudgins just like—ugh—that. Ever since the old Fifth—ugh —Precinct days. He and I—"
Rafferty wasn't listening, not exactly. He was letting the words flow over him as unnoticed as his rubber's attentions, waiting for it to be time. There would be some sort of signal, it seemed to him, and then he would make meat out of Girty.
Not exactly listening, he caught a sudden change in Girty's voice and for a second he tensed, thinking perhaps it was the signal. "Easy, sir," said his rubber, thinking he had hit a sore spot.
But Rafferty didn't relax until he realized that the change in Girty's voice was because he was greeting a friend. Rafferty peered and saw another man, as pink as Girty but nothing like as fat, as old but not nearly as flabby, advancing as bare as a baby and talking to Girty.
"Lay down with dogs, you fool," said Rafferty venomously, not making a sound, "and you get up with fleas. I warn you, Girty-lover. I'll kill you, too, with a knife that will hack your heart out before you even see it. Cows."
Rafferty's rubber flopped him over then, and for a plunging moment it seemed to Rafferty the man would surely see the knife. But he didn't say anything, only: "Easy, sir. Let me know if I'm too brisk."
Rafferty lay face down on the slab, watching his fingers crawl across the cloth beside his face. "The hands can kill you, Girty," he said voicelessly. "But the knife is better. Go and run, with your Girty-loving friend. Wherever you go, IH be there."
They were talking, Girty and the Girty-lover, and Rafferty reached out to taste the conversation. The friend was complaining, while another masseur eased the kinks out of his shoulders. The friend was saying, "Sixty hours? That's a good long workweek, yes. And it keeps them out of trouble, I'm not denying it. But there's a fatigue factor, John. After sixty hours a worker is bound to make mistakes."
Girty said: "Not if he's been disciplined. Give them the New Way treatment, that's all." He laughed, like a pig's squeal. "I'd like to see them make mistakes then."
His friend said: "I don't hold with the treatments."
Girty said, after a moment, in a voice that was still a cow's voice, but the voice of a shocked and stern cow: "Are you against Mudgins?"
Rafferty stopped feeling the texture of the conversation then, because what did it matter to him? The Girty-lover was defensive and overemphatic, and Girty himself was hostile and only slowly allowed himself to be soothed. They were talking about full employment and the horrors of the Old Way and the Machines, and the Girty-lover was petulantly insisting that the machine-education treatments had—unspecified—faults.
Rafferty didn't listen. The New Way treatments were machines droning and flashing in your ears and hammering, hammering, hammering at you until you couldn't make a mistake, not in the things they taught you to do. Because you were half machine yourself, by the time they finished fluxing and forging your mind. And full employment was overtime at the Project and an end to the—the studio, or whatever the word was, that once had meant something back in the days of the Machine and—and Ait, whatever that word was.
But what did it matter to Rafferty, that he should listen? Better to lie there with the secret knowledge of eight inches of honed steel, waiting.
John Girty was saying in his hoarse cow's rumble, "I tell you, Mudgins saved us from going to hell in a handbasket! You don't remember the Old Way. Love. Churches. And crackpots making speeches—about anything. Voting—for anybody, anybody you liked. Mudgins cleaned all that up. 'Keep them busy,' he said, 'and you'll keep them out of trouble.' Get rid of the Machine, put people back to work. If they don't want to work the way they ought to—make them! I remember, back in the Fifth—"
Rafferty wasn't listening, not exactly, but the words were fuel to keep him going. But the rubber was through with him, and flopped him right-side-up again, and again there was that moment when the universe stopped, waiting to see if the man would see the knife.
The rubber said cheerfully, "There you are, sir. That'll fix you up. Now how about a little suntan to tone up the skin?" His hand was already on the switch, and the tube overhead flared violent. Rafferty stared ragingly at it through his goggles, hating the darkened, shapeless core of the light.
Girty's oration broke off: "—but that's the way Mudgins always— Hey. Say, excuse me, but— Hey."
Rafferty froze. From the corner of .his eye he saw John Girty ponderously pushing himself up on one flabby arm, staring at him with doubt in the wrinkled little eyes. Nearsighted Girty—but he had recognized Rafferty!
It was the moment of the knife. Quite slowly Rafferty lowered his legs to the floor. "Dirty cow," he said soundlessly. He felt the knife, keen and ruthless in his hand. Eight slim inches to kill with. "Dirty, dirty, dirty," he chanted— but it was not soundlessly. "Dirty, dirty, I'll kill you, Girty." It was loud now, his own voice.
Oh, they tried to stop him. He could have laughed at that, if he had remembered how. Try to stop Rafferty, with an eight-inch killing knife! They were all shrieking and yowling and running about at once, and they grabbed at him, but he brushed them off like the staining soot of the air. And they got in his way, but it cost them. He hacked and stabbed and sliced and slew.
He was a Spartacus, and a Lizzie Borden, swordsman and butcher. He stabbed every one of them to the heart and ripped them up and down, and for the first time in longer than he could know, Rafferty was Rafferty, Mister Rafferty, a man who had once been a human being and, God save the mark, an artist, and not a mere flesh ersatz for a bookkeeping machine. Kill and slice and tear! They overturned furniture, squealing and thundering, like a trapped horse kicking at the flaming, booming walls of its stall. But he killed them all, many times, this Rafferty who was Spartacus and Lizzie Borden—