Basingstoke glanced out the window, toward the distant lagoon. “This is no bad place, Beaupre,” he said. “When they told me I was to be transferred, I thought it would be to some far worse one. That planet Aphrodite, perhaps-the one that goes around a flare star, so that one can live only in tunnels under the surface.”
Heimat nodded, though in fact he did not much care where he was anymore. Remembering that he was, in a sense, the host, he ordered drinks from the waiterthing. “Unfortunately—” he smiled “—they don’t allow alcohol.”
“They did not in Pensacola, either,” said Basingstoke. “That is why I was so pleased to be paroled, although if you remember, I was never a hard-drinldng man.”
Heimat nodded, studying him. “Cyril?” he ventured.
“Yes, Beau?”
“You were out. Then you violated pt. role. Why did you kill those people?”
“Ah, well,” said Basingstoke, courteously accepting his ginger ale from the waiterthing, “they angered me, you see.”
“I thought that was the case,” Heimat said dryly. “But you must have known they’d just put you back here.”
“Yes, but I have my pride. Or habit? I think it is a matter of habit.” Heimat said severely, “That’s the kind of thing a prosecutor might say.”
“Perhaps in some sense a prosecutor might be right for people like you and me, Beau. I didn’t need to kill those people. I was not used to crowds, you see. There was pushing and shoving to board a bus. I fell. They all laughed. There was a policeman with a machine-pistol and he was laughing too. I got up and took it away from him—”
“And shot thirty-five people.”
“Oh, no, Beau. I shot nearly ninety, but only thirty-five died. Or so they tell me.” He smiled. “I did not count the corpses.”
He nodded courteously to Heimat, who sat silent for a moment, sipping his own drink while Basingstoke idly summoned up pictures of Martinique and Curacao and the Virgins. “What lovely places they are,” he sighed. “I almost wish I had not killed those people.”
Heimat laughed out loud, shaking his head. “Oh, Cyril! Is it true that we have the habit of killing?”
Basingstoke said politely, “For a matter of pride or principle, it is perhaps so.”
“So we should never be released?”
“Ah, Beau,” Basingstoke said fondly, “we never will, you know.”
Heimat brushed the remark aside. “But do you think it is true, we are incorrigible?”
Basingstoke said reflectively, “I think—No. Let me show you.” He whispered to the control, and the PV views ifickered and returned to a scene of Curacao. “You see, Beau,” he said, settling himself down comfortably for a nice long chat, “in my case it is pride. We were very poor when I was a child, but we always had pride. We had nothing else. Seldom even enough to eat. We would open a snack shop for the tourists, but all the neighbors had snack shops, too, and so we never made money from it. We had only the things that were free-the beautiful sun, the sands, the lovely colibri hummingbirds, the palm trees. But we had no shoes. Do you know what it is like to have no shoes?”
“Well, actually—”
“You do not—” Basingstoke smiled “—because you were American and rich. Do you see that bridge?”
He pointed to the PV vista, a bay with two bridges across it. “Not that ugly high thing, the other one. The one on pontoons that floats. With the outboard motors that open and close it, there at the end.”
“What about it?” asked Heimat, already beginning to wonder if having a companion would relieve boredom or add to it.
“That is a matter of pride without shoes, Beau. This I learned from my grandfather.”
Heimat said, “Look, Basil, I’m glad to see you and all that, but do you really have to—”
“Patience, Beau! If you have pride you must also have patience; this is what my grandfather taught me. He too was descamisado-without shoes. So on this bridge when it was new they had a toll. Two cents to walk across it . . . but only for rich people, that is, the people who wore shoes. People who were barefoot, they crossed free. So the rich people who wore shoes were not stupid; they would take them off and hide them, and cross, and put them back on at the other side.”
Heimat was beginning to get angry. “But your grandfather had no shoes!”
“No, but he had pride. Like you. Like me. So he would wait at the bridge until someone with shoes came along. Then he would borrow his shoes so he could pay his two cents and cross the bridge with his pride still safe. Do you see what I am saying, Beau? Pride is expensive. It has cost us both very much.”
I didn’t want to stop talking about the children because they were appealing; I can hardly stop talking about Heimat and Basingstoke, either, but for quite other reasons. If ever two persons were hateful to me, they are the ones. It is the attraction of the horrible.
When Cyril Basingstoke came to join Beaupre Heimat, the children on the Wheel were just getting the word that they were being evacuated. It made the news. Both Basingstoke and Heimat took an interest; probably they were rooting for the Foe, if anything, though it must have been a conflict for them both. (Pride in the human race? Resentment against that major fraction of it that had put them in prison?) But they had other conflicts, not least with each other. For neither Heimat nor Basingstoke cared much for the society of equals.
They bored each other, in fact. When Heimat found Basingstoke dreaming in front of the PV views of Curacao or Sint Maarten or the coast of Venezuela, he would say, “Why do you let your mind rust out? I have made use of my prison time! Learn something. A language, as I have done.”
Indeed he had, a new language, perfectly, every few years; with all the time he had had to do it he was now fluent in Mandarin, Heechee, Russian, Tamil, aassical Greek, and eight other languages. “And who will you speak them to?” Basingstoke would ask, not taking his eyes from the tropic scene before them.
“That isn’t the point! The point is to keep sharp!”
And Basingstoke would look up at last and say, “For what?”
If Basingstoke was tired of Heimat’s nagging, Heimat was tired of Basingstoke’s interminable reminiscences. Every time the black man started a story, the general knew how to finish it. “When I was a boy,” Basingstoke would begin, and Heimat would chime in:
“You were very poor.”
“Yes, Heimat, very poor. We would sell snacks to the tourists—”
“But there was no money in it, because all your neighbors had snack shops, too.”
“Precisely. None at all. So sometimes we boys would catch an iguana and try to find a tourist to buy that. None of them wanted an iguana, of course.”
“But once in a while one would buy it, because he was sorry for you.”
“He would, so then we would follow the tourist to see where he let it go, and then we’d catch it and sell it again.”
“And after a while you’d eat it.”
“Why, yes, Beau. Iguana is very good, like chicken. Have I told you this story before?”
It was not just the boredom. There was, each found, something about the other that really grated on the nerves. Basingstoke found Heimat’s sexual habits revolting: “Why must you try to hurt the things, Beau? They are not alive anyway!”
“Because it gives me pleasure. The keepers have to take care of my needs; that is one of them. And it’s none of your business, Basil. It does not affect you, while that ifithy stuff you eat stinks up the whole prison.”