“You heard what happened? Thought they were being clever. Found someone in the Eugenics office who was open to—ah—persuasion and got themselves a forged genalysis. Went to a private clinic, and the karyotype said they were going to have a mongoloid idiot. Twenty-five thousand buckadingdongs it cost them to get that gene certificate, and they had to have the kid aborted after all!”
“We got ours through the Olive Almeiro Agency. Very big operation. Naturally it can’t be passed off as our own—my wife is even fairer than I am and the kid is dark, hair, skin, eyes, the whole shtick—but we could have waited five, six years for a baby to match our own genotype and then not been able to afford the cost.”
“So when these two had finished Shalmaneser said where’s the baby? And they said oh, you have to wait nine months for that.”
“Look, I don’t mind panhandlers as such—in fact I think it’s a damned good idea to license them because at least that gives you the option of choosing whether you’re going to support a given individual case instead of simply taxing you and passing the money on in welfare allotments to wastrels and vagabonds. But the way the union has got whole districts of the city sewn up now and insists on kickbacks and drives non-members out of the area—that’s more than I can swallow!”
“Oh, are those the new Too Much joints? May I try one? I heard very good things about the strain. Thanks. I hope Gwinnie doesn’t recognise them or she’ll make us pay forfeit on them and I don’t like the look in her eye. She’s building up to something really nasty, I suspect.”
“The draft got his balls. They’re cracking down very hard at the moment. Did everything he could—turned up for the board with mother in tow, wearing one of her dresses, orbiting like crazy, and they took him anyway. He’s in that horrible army hospital St. Faith’s right this minute undergoing aversion therapy for ambivalence and tripping both at once. It’s absolutely inhuman, and of course if it works when he comes back he won’t want to know any of his old friends, he’ll be one of their automatic push-button people, a good solid respectable citizen. Doesn’t it make you want to weep?”
“One thing about this crazy party, I do depose—I never expected to see so many shiggies at Guinevere’s place looking like shiggies instead of like sterile-wrapped machines. Do you suppose she’s testing the temperature to see if she should move the Beautiques over to the natural trend?”
“Happened all in a moment. One second, just a bunch of people walking down a street, not going any place in particular, and the next, these brown-noses clanging on big empty cans with sticks like drummers leading an army and all sorts of dreck flying through the air and windows being smashed if they weren’t out already and screaming and hysteria and the stink of panic. Did you know you can actually smell terror when people start rioting?”
“Louisiana isn’t going to last much longer, you know. There’s a bill up for next session in the state legislature which will ban child-bearing by anyone who can’t prove three generations of residence. And what’s worse they’re only offering five to two against it being passed. The governor has his two prodgies now, you see.”
“I was in Detroit last week and that’s the most eerie place I ever did set foot. Like a ghost town. All those abandoned factories for cars. And crawling with squatters, of course. Matter of fact I went to a block party in one of them. You should hear a zock group playing full blast under a steel roof five hundred feet long! Didn’t need lifting—just stand and let the noise wipe you out.”
“It’s more than a hobby, it’s a basic necessity for modern man. It fulfils a fundamental psychological urge. Unless you know that if you have to you can kill someone who gets in your way, preferably with your bare hands, the pressure from all these people is going to cave you in.”
“I graduated with a master’s rating on throwing knives and a grade one rating on hand-to-hand. I already have a marksman certificate on bolt-guns, and next I’m intending to collect one for projectile weapons—rifles, pistols and crossbows.”
“Sure you can come around, but don’t hope for too much. I’m living in a group, you see, and there are eight of us, so I don’t feel much need for variety. Also we have two kids and our shrinker says they have positively Polynesian emotional stability so the last thing I want is to interfere with a setup that’s paying such fine dividends. It’s the extended family bit, of course.”
“Nevada’s mavericking again, did you hear? There’s a bill up for next session to recognise polygamy and institute proper marriage and divorce laws to cover it. Up to groups of ten, I think it says in the draft.”
“Don’t lie to me, darling. I saw that codder’s blip go up on your screens the moment he asked you to dance. I’ve told you before and I’m telling you again, I don’t mind you bivving it privately but I won’t stand for it in public. So I’m an old-fashioned block, so I’m still your wife and if you want me to stay that way you behave when you’re in company—catch me?”
“So Shalmaneser said well, if it takes nine months, why were you in such a sheeting hurry at the end? Haw-haw-haw!”
“I’ve been hoping to have a word with Chad Mulligan, but I can’t pry him away from those Aframs he’s talking to. I want to ask him whyinole when all our dreams are about wide-open spaces and room to move and breathe we like to cram ourselves together at parties till we can’t hardly cross the floor of a room without shoving aside twenty other people.”
“Look, lover, you carry it off very well but I fly a perfectly straight orbit and what’s more I’m married so why don’t you find someone who likes to biv and stop harassing me?”
“I got one of these super disposalls, too, because the garbage clearance down our block is five weeks—catch me, five!—overdue. And the first day I try to use it comes in this sheeting little pest and says I’m violating the clean-air laws. Great balls of dreck, clean air! There hasn’t been any clean air in our neighbourhood for sheeting weeks because of rotting dreck all over the streets and now it’s beginning to block the passages!”
“Yes, but what’s the use of arguing about politics these days? Isn’t such a thing as politics. There’s just a choice between the ways you’re going to cave in through force of circumstances. Look at Common Europe, look at Russia, look at China, look at Africa. The sheeting pattern’s the same except in some places it’s gone further than others.”
“Look, Schritt—all right! Look, Helmut! If you don’t get off my orbit and let me fall free for a bit I’m going to stand right up where everyone can hear me and pull rank, do you hear me? I don’t give a pint of whaledreck if Chad Mulligan does sound subversive to you—he happens to be talking to our ambassador to Beninia and I’m interested in what they’re saying. I was told to carry on with my ordinary activities and if you’ve read my original brief you sheeting well ought to know that it includes being interested in everything relevant or not relevant to my assignment. Now go dig a hole and lie down in it!”
“Things are getting tough again in India, apparently. It’s the protein that was lost when the slit-eyes poisoned the Indian Ocean. And by the way, I hear the containment programme is running behind—a current spilled over past one of the barrages and they’ve been hauling out contaminated fish as far north as Angola.”
“I have this new autoshout of GT’s that programmes itself on a signal from the satellite. Haven’t missed a show in three weeks through rescheduling. Should get one.”