And, at last, a warrior of the Samurai as well.
When he had killed them enough to slake the fever, he killed himself. Into the pit of the stomach and up. He felt the blade slide and slice, too sharp to tear, a warrior's weapon. The eight-inch steel made cat's meat of his bowels and heart and lungs. Rafferty felt himself dying, but it was worth it, it was worth it, it was worth everything in the world . . .
After he committed suicide, he sat there and watched his victims running about. It was several seconds before he noticed that he wasn't dead.
Girty's friend demanded: "Do you still think the machine treatments are good?"
Girty said: "Ow. The ugly son beat me black and blue." He rubbed his bruised pink paunch, staring at the door where they had carried Rafferty out, weeping.
"You're lucky," said Girty's friend. "Suppose he really had a knife, instead of that old cigar butt he picked up. Suppose somebody else on your Project cracks up, only this one gets a gun somewhere."
Girty said petulantly, "Where would anybody get a gun these days?" He was getting his breath back, and his nerve.
"Suppose he did," his friend insisted.
Girty said truculently: "Watch yourself. I don't stand for anti New Way talk. So Rafferty cracked up. I knew he was a weak one. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and what's it to me if somebody like Rafferty gets broken?^
He measured his words carefully. 'People like Rafferty are troublemakers, they don't want to work, they don't want full employment. They liked the soft, rotting life under the Old Way and the Machine. If you don't give them treatments, they'll make trouble now. Sure, some of them crack up—like sometimes you put a casting in the press and it cracks, because it's brittle. Worthless. Mudgins knows what to do with the worthless ones. Make them fit, or break them."
"But I don't like Mudgins and his treatments," Girty's friend said violently . . . but not out loud. He sat up, wonderingly. He wasn't in the habit of talking to himself and he wondered if other people ever talked like that to themselves.
Girty, unhearing, was brooding: "You'd think even a piece of trash like Rafferty would want to be part of something. Why wouldn't he? But no, he has to work up some crazy resentment—try to kill me. Why? What reason could he have?"
Girty's friend could not give him the answer, though he might have had suspicions. Mudgins could have answered him, and a few others around Mudgins or elsewhere. A few in high places who didn't need even touch-up courses under the machines, could have told him Rafferty's reasons. But only a few. The others, the many, many millions, they could never sav what the reasons were; because some of them had never known them, and some had had to forget.
I Remember a Winter
I wrote this story on a balcony of the Century Vl/yM Hotel in Beverly Hills one afternoon, while my wife was taking a nap in our room and, having finished it, could not quite decide what to do next. I was pleased with it, and I thought it was science fiction, but I wasn't at all sure that anyone else would. So I sent it to Damon Knight for an opinion. He never said whether he thought it was sf or not, but he did publish it in Orbit.
I remember a winter when the cold snapped and stung, and it would not snow. It was a very long time ago, and in the afternoons Paulie O'Shaughnessy would come by for me after school and we'd tell each other what we were going to do with our lives. I remember standing with Paulie on the corner, with my breath white and my teeth aching from the cold air, talking. It was too cold to go to the park and we didn't have any money to go anywhere else. We thumbed through the magazines in the secondhand bookstore until the lady threw us out. "Let's hitch downtown," said Paulie; but I could feel how cold the wind would be on the back of the trolley cars and I wouldn't. "Let's sneak in the Carlton," I said, but Paulie had been caught sneaking in to see the Marx Brothers the week before and the usher knew his face. We ducked into the indoor miniature golf course for a while; it had been an automobile showroom the year before and still smelled of gas. But we were the only people there, and conspicuous, and when the man who rented out the clubs started toward us we left.
So we Boy Scout-trotted down Flatbush Avenue to the big old library, walk 50, trot 50, the cold air slicing into the insides of our faces, past the apple sellers and the wine-brick stores, gasping and grunting at each other, and do you know what? Paulie picked a book off those dusty old shelves. We didn't have cards, but he liked it too much to leave it unfinished. He walked out with it under his coat; and 15 years later, shriveled and shrunken and terrified of the priest coming toward his bed, he died of what he read that day. It's true. I saw it happen. And the damn book was only Beau Geste.
I remember the summer that followed. I still didn't have any money but I had found girls. That was the summer when Franklin Roosevelt flew to Chicago in an airplane to accept his party's nomination to the Presidency, and it was hotter than you would believe. Standing on the corner, the sparks from the trolley wheels were almost invisible in the bright sun. We hitched to the beach when we could, and Paulie's pale, Jewish-looking face got red and then freckled. He hated that; he wanted to be burned black in the desert sun, or maybe clear-skinned and cleft-chinned with the mark of a helmet strap on his jaw.
But I didn't see much of Paulie that summer. He had finished all the Wren books by then and was moving on to-Daredevil Aces; he'd wheedled a World War French bayonet out of his uncle and had taken a job delivering suits for a tailor shop, saving his money to buy a .22. I saw much more of his sister. She was 15 then, which was a year older than Paulie and I were. In his British soldier-of-fortune role-playing he cast her as much younger. "Sport," he said to me, eyes a little narrowed, half-smile on his lips, "do what you like. But not with Kitty."
As a matter of fact, in the end I did do pretty much as I liked with Kitty, but we had each married somebody else before that and it was a long way from 1932. But even in 1932 I tried. On a July evening I finally got her to go up on the roof with me; it was no good; somebody else was there ahead of us, and Kitty wouldn't stay with them there. "Let's sit on the stoop," she said. But that was right out in the street, with all the kids playing king-of-the-hill on a pile of sand.
So I took her by the elbow, and I walked her down the Avenue, talking about Life and Courage and War. She had heard the whole thing before, of course, as much as she would listen to, but from Paulie, not from me. She listened.
It was ritual courtship, as formal as a dog lifting his leg. It did not seem to me that it mattered what I said,, as long as what I said was masculine.
You can't know how masculine I wanted to be for Kitty. She was without question the prettiest doll around. She looked like—-well, like Ginger Rogers, if you remember, with a clean, friendly face and the neatest, slimmest hips. She knew that. She was studying dancing. She was also studying men, and God knows what she thought she was learning from me.
When we got to Dean Street I changed from authority on war to authority on science and told her that the heat was only at ground level. Just a little way above our heads, I told her, the air was always cool and fresh. "Let's go up on^he fire escape," I said, nudging her toward the Adantic Theatre.