Flippant highfalutin meek
But then… the subhuman is so much more acceptable than the superhuman. I looked down. The sunset was just beginning. The rosy glow deepened as they neared her and changed the colors of everything. The red plaid of Bens shorts seemed more emphatic. The sand turned orangeish. She ran to meet them, laughing and splashing her feet in the shallow water, and she came up and held Ben tight around the waist and Littleboy said, Aaa. I thought I recognized her, being from San Francisco myself. Perhaps shell join Mr. Rideout and me for a cocktail this evening. What room is she in? As Mangon brought her tea she heaved herself up and made room for him by her feet among the debris of beads, loose diary pages, horoscopes and jeweled address books that littered the couch. Mangon sat down, surreptitiously noting the time (his first calls were at 9:30 the next morning and loss of sleep deadened his acute hearing), and prepared himself to listen to her for half an hour. I went outside, into my last day on Mars. He related the details of his meeting with Titus Wrixton, the probable reason behind the extortion attempt, and his surveillance of last nights second blackmail payoff in the Hotel Grant’s bar parlor. The blackmailer, or the blackmailer’s emissary, he went on, “is or was Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. He led me directly there from the hotel.” There have been all kinds of notions and guesses as to how it would end. One held that sooner or later there would be too many people; another that we would do each other in, and the atom bomb made that a very good likelihood. All sorts of notions, except the simple fact that we were what we were. We could find a way to feed any number of people and perhaps even a way to avoid wiping each other out with the bomb; those things we are very good at, but we have never been any good at changing ourselves or the way we behave. He was silent for a few seconds, masticating his cigar. Some of the angry light dimmed in the gray eyes, giving them the look of cold ashes.All right. Perhaps I was mistaken in my presumption. But goddamn it, woman, Im at my wit’s end. Dont do it again, then. Well have to send them to all our friends. Therell be twenty-eight of us from A dormitory, and only four of them. We’re going to deal with them in the dining room, take their keys and let ourselves out. Youve only got a dollar, his big sister said. Where do you want to go—to Tiffany’s?” (Nova Express is the source for Quote #5; and I must admit I cheated slightly on this one, and changed Burroughs unmistakable punctuation to a more conventional system, to make it less obvious.)* * * * I threw the emergency brake on and got out. I began to walk. gott(inscrutably): I will listen for the present. Hush! Penrose was not as clear as he had been.Be sure my message gets through, he said. Sometimes, as I told you, the guy would twist and turn a little during the job, and then the results would often be quite striking. But usually he would just have one hand on his head and his mouth open, pleading and swearing that he hadnt tried to fight the Syndicate, or split the unions, that he was all for workers’ unity and innocent as a lamb, and Mike didn’t like that, because then they all looked just the same, same faces, same gestures, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Pig work,’ he called it. by Christopher Anvil.
