Icicle sharp enter
"Im sure glad they can erase the conscious memory from the kids minds when they have to do that sort of stuff." Carol Emshwiller had then published two or three stories; but she didnt know she was a writer, and the bated-breath humility with which she asked if she possibly might be allowed to sit in on workshop meetings has come back to haunt us Older Hands each summer since. Each summer, I mean, when Carol pops out of the playpen-and-baby-bottle laden car, an infant (at least figuratively) under one arm, and her newest manuscript under the other. (Ed carries two kids and his brushes in his teeth—nothing to it when you get the knack.) "I could offer you money," she said. He looked up angrily. "But I wont. I can see that you would do it only if you wanted to do it." Im sorry, Miss Hutton, said Susan. I must catch my bus now.” They set off down F Street at ten, soon left behind the dingy warehouses and abandoned tenements that had enclosed Madame Gioconda for so long. Squeezed together in the driving cab of the sound truck they looked an incongruous pair—the gangling Mangon, in zip-fronted yellow plastic jacket and yellow peaked cap, at the wheel, dwarfed by the vast flamboyant Madame Gioconda, wearing a parrot-green cartwheel hat and veil, her huge creamy breast glittering with pearls, gold stars and jeweled crescents, a small selection of the orders that had showered upon her in her heyday. The siren of the approaching ambulance rose and fell on a scale of panic. Hejar moved the mans head gently, looking for marks or a tell-tale run of blood from the ear. He found nothing. Good. The brain, then, the control centre was undamaged. Great. Leonoras body lay among the broken tables near the bandstand, half-wrapped in a bleeding canvas. Her face was as bruised now as the storm-cloud Manuel had tried to carve. Shut up, shut up, and get to work! I said that I not only didnt believe in his death but that I didn’t believe in his body either. I said this mainly for dramatic effect as I suspect that Miss Collins is a materialist, and, although I never show any prejudices and am as friendly as possible to those with different opinions, I always maintain my own beliefs whether it does them any good or not. But the enemy was short of pretty girls. They made her one of their women, kept her in a tent. By one means and another she got all kinds of useful information out to the free men of the woods. She had learned the Patheran, the sign writing with twigs, stones and movements of the fingers that the tramps and the gypsies used in olden times. We got her out after two years. It cost us four good men. She was worth it. But she was no longer the same Beatrice. Tall, yes, and with a shape to take your breath away. But her voice was hoarse and her eyes hard. NUN MUM - Dying before either of ones parents; ceasing to fight just because ones enemy is winning Paul Bleeker broke in. "You say a professional man writes for a variety of reasons, John. Name one. Why do you write?" Ratlit said more. "We dont even like each other that much, Vyme. But we need each other. Since shes been here, I get her medicine for her. She's too sick to go out much now. And when I have bad changes, or sometimes bright recognitions, it doesn't matter. I bring them to her, and she builds pictures of them for me, and we explore them together and ... learn about things. When she was a psychiatrist for the government, she learned an awful lot about how people tick. And she's got an awful lot to teach me, things I've got to know." Fifteen-year-old ex-psychiatrist drug addict? Same sort of precocity that produces thirteen-year-old novelists. Get used to it. "I need her now almost as much as she needs her ... medicine." Yes, sir, they do. Quincy, Benedict said, You need twenty gross.” They were sitting against a tiger-striped banquette in an expensive restaurant. Quincy, a huge, choleric man, would have terrified him a month before. No. Merely a passerby who happened to be in the company of Patrolman Maguire when the unfortunate incident occurred..
