TABLE OF CONTENTS

Epigraph
ONE: Proud Flesh
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TWO: Laudable Pus
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Afterword (by Philip K. Dick)
I would like to add my vote in favour of showing female amputees in your magazine.
One-armed and, especially, one-legged females offer a unique excitement and a
pictorial featuring attractive girl amputees would certainly be welcomed by a large
number of readers....
—Letter, Penthouse magazine,
November 1972
 ❖

I only remember one thing very well from when I was a kid, and that's probably because of
the fuss made at the time. I was outside the front door of a day-care center, cutting earthworms
open with a pair of scissors so large I had to use both hands to hold them. The sunshine was kind
of dry and hazy; I can recall it exactly. Just like it nearly always is.
The attendant must have been looking for me for quite a while, because I could tell she was
pretty fuckin’ exasperated. She snatched me out of the planter and took away the scissors. She
carried me into a room with a little sign on the door that said YOUNG 4S. She sat me down in
front of a large television screen, with a bunch of other little kids absorbed in it with their mouths
open. She didn’t see me watching her leave the room, bearing off the scissors like captured enemy
weapons.
In the supplies room, she pulled open the drawer where the scissors were kept I remember
her as being vaguely young and constipated. She was probably thinking, How did he get in here
in the first place? and then, That’s odd, there’s supposed to be another pair of scissors in here.
But by then, I had managed to catch up behind her, and plunged the article in question into her
lower leg, through her mesh panty hose, soft flesh, and stiff muscle, glancing off bone, as I
watched the blood flow over the protruding half of the scissors and then down my two little
hands. I can still see it. When she flopped down onto her knees in front of me, her mouth and
eyes were widened into silent O’s of pain and shock.
Twenty-five years later, I was lying in that shit-strewn alley, near dead. A neat quarter-
century. It must have looked like the blood had never stopped flowing, until I was drenched with
it, sticky and warm. Solid red, a little pool collecting beneath me, with specks of bone chips and
fragmented tissues clinging to my clothes and body. And one forearm buzzing and clicking,
plotting lethal trajectories for enemies to which I was almost inviolate, beyond reach.
 ❖

“I’m leaving,” said the young man. He was known throughout the Phoenix Egg
Ranch as E. Allen Limmit; he ran the company-owned brothel.
“No shit,” said Bonna Cummins, the ranch’s personnel manager. Beneath her
seemingly thumb-wide eyebrows, she glared across her desk at him. Behind the eyes
could be read the thought, The little twerp.
Limmit nodded, trying not to be intimidated, oppressed spiritually by the woman’s
overwhelming bulk. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve arranged passage on tonight’s egg run
to L.A. Paid for and everything.”
“What’s the matter?” scoffed Cummins. “How come the little GPC faggot wouldn’t
give you a ride back in his personal jet? Afraid you’d get chicken feathers on the
upholstery?” She leaned back in her chair, trying to extract something from between her
incisors with one spatulate fingernail.
For a moment, he looked abstractedly around the cramped office. On one wall
hung dusty and yellowing photographs of the ranch’s champion layers, with sometimes
a smaller snapshot of one of their eggs included, with a man standing beside it to
indicate the dimensions. Their eyes, thought Limmit, gazing at the dumb feathered
faces; they’ve always reminded me of horses.
Through the window beside the door, he could see out over the entire floor of the
ranch’s main barn, and observe the white-overalled eggers and techs attending each
stall’s occupant. Penetrating the window glass came a shrill, wailing sound. Limmit
winced, remembering what it was. A short distance beyond the barn’s walls, past the
other barns and dormitories, lay the outskirts of the city of Phoenix, the Arizona sand
sifting through the abandoned streets and freeways. All this, he said to himself, I’ll be
leaving.
“It’s part of the plan,” he said finally, conscious again of Bonna’s heavy-lidded
gaze. “It’s necessary for me to arrive in L.A. that way.”
“Do I want to hear it?” asked Cummins, scowling. “Fuck your stupid plot,
whatever it is. What I want to know is, who’m I going to get to run the damn brothel?”
Shrugging, Limmit said, “That’s your problem.”
“I oughta step on your skinny face for that. You know who’s going to have to run
that place? Me, that’s who!” She calmed down, with visible effort. “But I’m going to be
nice to you. After you get your ass eaten off in L.A., you can come crawling back here
and I’ll give you your old job back. I’ll even have the rooms beside it kept ready for you;
don’t even bother moving your stuff out.”
“Thanks.” He turned for the door. “But I won’t be coming back,” he said grimly.
“Sure. We’ll see.”
 Before he could close the office door behind him, her raucous voice called out after
him. “Until you leave tonight, you’re still in charge of those beds, you hear? So put my
favorite out, you know, Larry 4B. I need to relax after a shitty day like this.” Crossing
the floor of the main barn, dodging the forklifts, each carrying another egg out to the
loading dock or the ranch’s own freezers, Limmit paused outside one stall with the
name LEONA scrawled in chalk below the stenciled code designation. Inside the stall,
the hen lay on its side, as if stricken. Several eggers and techs stood around idly,
waiting; one tech dispassionately inspected the enormous, distended cloacal opening.
The straw beneath the tech’s feet was soaked with Leona’s blood: evidently, at some
point it had been decided that replacing it was a waste of time. “Watch out, Cal,” he
heard one of the eggers call, laughing, to the tech. “Don’t forget the time you poked
your head too far and got sucked up in one of those. Like to smothered before we got
you out.”

Limmit knelt down beside the hen’s head. The red, equine eyes flickered in
recognition, then clouded. “Nernts,” it gasped, the honking voice strangling somewhere
in the animal’s beak. “Nernts neel bagh.”
“I know it hurts,” soothed Limmit, stroking the down alongside its beak. “Don’t
fret—it’ll be all right.” He looked up and saw one of the techs gazing amusedly down at
the scene they made. Leona’s eyes had closed as if she had been comforted, childlike, to
sleep.
Limmit straightened up, meeting the gaze of the tech leaning casually against the
animal’s flank. “How is she?” he asked evenly.
“She?” echoed the tech, puzzled. “You mean the hen? Dying. The egg went
blastomic—she’ll never get it out alive. Even if we went in and took the egg out in
pieces, she’s too ripped up inside to survive. Besides,” she said coolly, “it’s too old to go
to that much trouble to save. Only a few egglaying months left.” The tech shrugged her
wide shoulders and turned away.
He glared silently at her retreating back. Stupid bitch, he mouthed. Looking up, he
saw one of the eggers watching him. He recognized her and quickly left the stall, his
face burning angrily. “Limmit, wait!” the egger called after him. He only quickened his
paces; behind him, in the stall, Leona moaned, then screamed shrilly at another
contraction convulsing her massive form.
The egger caught up with him in his living quarters beside the brothel. “Hello,
Joan,” Limmit said, without looking around to see her.
“I heard you were leaving,” she said, watching him open a small suitcase on his
bed.
“That’s right,” said Limmit. He studied the empty interior of the suitcase. There
was nothing he could think of that he wanted to take from here. He glanced up at the
shelves above his bed, lined with the yellowing paperbacks he had dug out of the dunes
piling up in an old bookstore in the city. The largest science fiction collection in the
Southwest (anymore), thought Limmit, gazing up at their once bright covers; maybe the
world now. Who needs it?
“How come?”
 He snapped the suitcase shut and turned around to look at the egger. Her wide,
coarse face looked the same as when they had graduated together from the company’s
high school six years ago. “Let’s just say I’m tired of the place.”
She looked hurt. “You shouldn’t let them get to you,” she said. “They’re not mean
—they just don’t have time to get attached to them like you do.”
He snorted derisively. “I’m the last person you can tell that to. I run this little place,
remember? I know exactly who gets attached to what around here. Which reminds me,
I’ve got to go stiffen up Larry 4B for Bonna Cummins.”
Joan stood silent for a moment, her close-cropped head bent as if studying her
workboots. “Is that the only reason you’re leaving?” she asked softly. “I mean... it’s not
because everyone here knows who your father was, is it?”
Limmit stared at her without saying anything.
“Because, if that’s it,” she gulped, and stammered on confusedly, “that’s nothing to
be ashamed of, is it? I mean, without him, there wouldn’t even have been a Phoenix Egg
Ranch, would there?” She looked at him in mute appeal.
“What makes you think I’m ashamed of my father?”
“Well, you know, taking your mother’s name and all.” “That’s just the way she
brought me up; neither he nor I had anything to do with it. It’d be stupid for me to
change it now.” She stood for a moment longer, gazing mournful and inarticulate at
him, then she turned and fled out the door. Sighing, Limmit unlocked the brothel’s
drug and alcohol cabinet and, without bothering to sign them out, swallowed dry two
of the precious amphetamine analogs. Plenty of them out where I’m going, he reflected
moodily. I’ll mail Bonna a couple to make up for these.
He sat down on the bed and looked off into space. Without him, he thought, there
wouldn’t even have been a Phoenix Egg Ranch. What a thing to be proud of. Just one of
the many wonderful things Lester Gass left for us. In his mind, he surveyed the ranch’s
barns like hangars, every stall containing its massive roclike hen, delivering its weekly
egg to be cut up and processed into thousands of ersatz edible items. The increase in
body size had had a parallel effect on brain capacity. The hens, too large to move about,
watched and listened with interest to everything that happened around them.
And the brothel too, thought Limmit. My old man thought of everything.
Feeling the first wave of energy released by the capsules, he stood up and left the
room. Better take care of business, he thought, crossing the walkway into the women’s
section.
He injected double the standard dose into Larry 4B, the small red eyes watching
him with a curious emptiness behind them. He had never felt as close to anything in the
brothel as to the egglayers below—the animals here having brains still too small for
speech or thought, even if their beaks hadn’t been removed surgically, the only
nongenetic alteration that took place on the ranch. Limmit watched the swelling
response to the drug begin. By the time Bonna knocked off work and arrived here, it
would reach its maximum.
He didn’t inject any more of the cocks, or douche any of the hens. Let everybody do
it themselves, he thought, returning to his rooms. Or with each other, though that was
hardly likely: Lester Gass’ original schedule of fines for intercourse between ranch
employees had long been forgotten, never having been used more than once or twice.
Waiting for him in his rooms was Joe Goonsqua, the GPC official. “Ready to
leave?” he asked, smiles and dimples breaking out all over his cherubic face.
“Sure,” said Limmit. The amphetamine analogs were making him tense.
“Well,” said Goonsqua, beaming, “the Greater Production Corporation just wants
you to know that it appreciates your help in this little matter. And that, of course, we
will appreciate your further discretion.” He extended a large black briefcase toward
Limmit. “This is it.”
Limmit took the case, the weight of it nearly pulling him over. “Christ, it weights a
ton.”
“Well, heh, you know what’s in it.” Goonsqua stepped back and clasped his hands
together, looking around the room. “Sure you’re all set now? Everything taken care of?”
He nodded. “There wasn’t much.”
Goonsqua cleared his throat. “I understand,” he said, “that you have, ah ...
something set aside for your personal use in the, uh, you know?” He waved a hand
vaguely toward the door and the brothel beyond.
“That’s right,” said Limmit. “Glad you reminded me. I’ll have to give the key to the
compartment to Bonna Cummins on my way out.” He drew the key out of his pocket
and glanced at it. He remembered the warm feathers of its breast, the tangling of the
down with his own hair. Perhaps, he thought, I should’ve said goodbye to her—if she
would’ve understood.
“No, that’s all right,” said Goonsqua. “I’ll take care of it.”
“It’s on my way,” he said, repocketing it.
“Give me the key,” said Goonsqua, his face suddenly florid and unsmiling.
Limmit stared at him, until something clicked together inside himself. “Sure,” he
said understandingly, drawing out the key and dropping it in Goonsqua’s palm. “Try
everything once, I guess.”
Who would’ve thought it, Limmit said to himself as he crossed the main barn floor,
heading for the loading area where the plane was waiting. That an important bastard
like that would even be interested. The dying hen screamed miserably again, thrashing
in the blood-soaked straw.

All over L.A., television sets were being turned on; in Orange County they were on
already.
 The first wave of the assassination party emerged onto the roof of the building. The
setting sun, visible when they had started hiking up the dark stairwells, was gone now,
headed for China. Eddie Azusa, working by starlight, began clamping the weapon and
the separate, multilensed gunsight to the guardrail. Milch, the triggerman and hence the
unofficial host for the party, pulled at a plastic jug of homemade alcohol, a cloudy
brown fluid, then passed it down to little Morris, sprawled exhausted against an
airshaft. Being a newcorner, Morris had been conned into hauling up everything.
“Ready to go,” announced Azusa, and peered through the gunsight’s main
eyepiece. It had two: one through which the gunner could zero in on almost
infinitesimal targets, and another that allowed a second person to observe as well. The
apparatus had been designed for CIA hit teams used to doing everything as a
committee. “Pretty crowded tonight, though. Gonna be hard getting a clear shot.”
Milch replaced Azusa at the eyepiece and grunted. “Maybe,” he said thickly, “this
time I won’t wait for no gray coats, just take out who I feel like.” He was half drunk
already, which in itself was only a buffering for the otherwise lethal or at least
incapacitating compounds he would, as the moment approached, slowly and
luxuriously inject to steady his hand.
Observing Milch’s erratic motions, Azusa felt that there were few things in
Rattown more disgusting than an alcoholic. He himself preferred kainine, in moderate
amounts; as with the other compounds produced in the good Dr. Betreech’s labs
somewhere in the Hollywood hills, there were no physical side effects to obscure the
pure psychical, almost spiritual, changes produced. None of that tonight, however,
Azusa told himself, checking the near-unconscious motion of his hand toward his
inside jacket pocket; fine for the star and fine for the audience. But not for the “agent”
who, he thought grimly, is going to have to keep his shit together to get through this
party night.
 From the other end of the roof came sounds of violent retching. Sixty-plus flights of
stairs, laden like a packhorse, topped off with the unfamiliar alcohol, had been too
much for little Morris.
“Obviously not cut out for this heavy revolutionary work,” said Azusa, to which
Milch sniggered and said, “Send him over to Mother Endure.”
Patti F. swam out of the darkness, bearing another plastic jug, full, out of the
number that Morris had carried up. Milch’s current piece, and thus unofficial hostess:
she set the jug down by the guardrail and stood by him placidly, her face as blank and
vacant, Azusa saw, as any budding cowhead’s.
“Wanna look?” Milch said, offering her the other eyepiece. Together they focused
on the brightly lit street far below and away. Without removing his eye from the
gunsight he groped for the plastic jug, guzzled from it, set it down, and fumblingly
began caressing her flanks. A type of foreplay, Azusa knew. Later tonight, when he had
made himself ready, Milch’s fingers would be curled around more triggers than one.
“See any you like?” asked Milch, twirling the gunsight’s knobs.
“Ooh, there’s a nice one; I’d like to snuff that one, or that one, or ...”
Azusa looked over their heads, down to the distant Interface. From here it looked
like a worm or a snake, filled with a slowly churning light, suspended close to the edge
of the empty, disintegrating buildings and streets that constituted L.A., save for the
merely disintegrating part that was the slum. A snake, he reflected, curiously moved in
spite of his functional cynicism concerning the party’s quasi-mystical rationale. He
became aware of a gentle guttural sound somewhere in the dark. It was little Morris
snoring. He headed in the sound’s general direction. “Just a happy band of assassins,”
he said to the night as he unpacked the tiny portable television from Morris’ prone
form, plugged it into one of the ubiquitous outlets to the cable network that permeated
all of L.A. like a living nervous system in a corpse. Bless John Mox, he thought, and his
Orange County-size ego—keeping the cables into the slums live even though the
chances of gaining any converts from this audience were just about zilch. He switched
the set on, bathing a section of the roof in its soft, gray, trapezoidal light.

“A pimp,” said Leslie. He could smell it, like blood; operating on the principle that
it takes one to know one. He watched the figure, large black briefcase in tow, walking
slowly on the other side of the congested Interface. The figure disappeared into the
crowd. “From out of town—New York, maybe.”
“Huh?” inquired the little whore clutching his arm. She was eighteen, having come
to L.A. a week ago, the day after her birthday.
“That dude there,” said Leslie, pointing him out, as the thin figure reappeared for a
moment at the opposite curb.
“He’s a pimp?”
“Yeah, but not a local.”
She pondered this a moment. “What’s he doing here?” she asked. “Nobody but big
GPC officials and army brass fly that far. You sure he’s from New York?”
Smiling, he studied the serried rows of stroke books arranged in the racks outside
of a little porn shop. Behind him and the girl, the Interface milled and jostled slowly.
The bright covers, pink like some soft, edible candy, pleased him. Stuff, he thought,
two-dimensional stuff. The phrase had popped whole into his mind, filling him with a
sense of satisfaction. “Where else?” he mocked gently. “Phoenix, I suppose?”
“Okay, so he’s from New York, but what’s he doing here?” At least, she thought,
looking up into his face, he’s in a good mood. This is the longest conversation I’ve ever
had with him.
He shrugged. “Who knows. I’ve been watching him cruise up and down the
Interface a dozen times already. Like he’s waiting for someone or something. Whatever
it is, it must be important. When pimps start winging transcontinental, something’s up
for sure.” A sudden, unarticulated thought came upon him, a sense of previously
unintimated levels of pimpdom beyond this first barrier he, with all the force of his own
eighteen years, was trying to penetrate. He wondered if the girl suspected that she was
his first number.
She pressed her face into his leather sleeve. “Does this change our plans?”
 The fleshy magazine covers flared for a split-second in his eyes, the harsh chemical
lights lining the Interface perhaps receiving a momentary surge of current. “Shit. It
would take more than that spooky asshole for me to pass up an opportunity like this.
When those gates open up and Dr. Adder pulls out his machine, you’re going to be
standing right there. If we pull this off, we’ll get you a free job that’ll make every other
hooker on this street look sick.” His voice dropped a few cycles in pitch. “And isn’t that
what you want? Hmm? For your own true friend?”
A tear formed a round dot, like ink, upon the leather. She lowered her face so he
wouldn’t see. “I’m still... a little scared,” she said, her voice muffled, staring fixedly at
her own slim, pale legs.
“Don’t worry,” he said, turning away from the porn shop’s racks, and drawing her
by her bare arm into the street’s flow. He felt a pleasing, expectant tension within
himself. As if, he thought, I know I’ll make it tonight, at last. My big break. An L.A.
pimp can change two-dimensional fantasies to this; feeling the pressure of the girl’s arm
upon his.
Behind them, the short, balding man inside the porn shop switched on the small
television that hung over the cash register. Glancing back, the girl could see the
luminous gray screen clearly through the shop’s door, her vision interrupted only by
the figures passing by on the sidewalk.

From the air, Orange County and L.A. had appeared to Limmit to be slowly
combusting, tinged like glowing coals with the last red rays from the sun. Sitting up
front with the pilot, a madly grinning girl with ALICE stenciled on her breast pocket, he
watched the land approach while half listening to her descriptions of it.
Orange County seemed to consist of randomly grouped pyramids of varying sizes,
but all looming massive even from this altitude. The residential complexes, explained
the pilot. Surrounding them were the remains of whatever suburbs or towns had not
yet been reclaimed by decay and the hills’ patient, rugged foliage. To the north of them
were the rectangular units of the industrial zones. They seemed absurdly small in
comparison to the pyramids: she told him that the main parts were underground. She
pointed out the small landing strip for which they were headed.
L.A. appeared to flow, like an avalanche of rubble, right up to the edge of Orange
County. Cancerous, thought Limmit, slightly stunned by its horizontal immensity. Like
the remains of some malignant growth, it spread haphazardly over the ground below.
As the last light turned violet and faded, the intricate, convoluted details of L.A.’s
tightly packed buildings and streets faded also, replaced, as darkness advanced, by the
image of some thick, coagulated fluid staining the earth. Small, almost undetectable
points of light appeared in the dead city’s northern section. At the southern edge, just
barely within the dark mass, a narrow line of artificial light glowed.
 “The Interface,” said the pilot, pointing to the line and grinning at him. “Hope you
find what you want.”
Limmit said nothing, trying to gauge the distance from the landing strip in the
Orange County industrial zone to the other, almost parallel strip of light.
“Don’t worry about it,” said the pilot, reading his thoughts. The plane started to
descend with them and its cargo of eggs aboard. “There’s no hassle getting from Orange
County to the Interface.”
She had been right. A sullen youth, one of a number loitering around the buildings
near the airstrip, had, upon receiving a bill peeled off Limmit’s savings rolled up in his
pocket, driven him and the black briefcase to the nearest end of the Interface and
deposited him there without a word. The kid had then noisily motored off, back to the
not-distant fringe of Orange County for more passengers.
That had been more than an hour ago; closer to two hours, Limmit realized,
looking at his watch. In the interval he had paced slowly, propelled in part by the
jostling crowd on the sidewalk, up and down the length of the Interface. At first, he had
been approached by dozens of other youths, not sullen like the first, who offered him in
succession an array of tablets, capsules, and vials of liquids unfamiliar to him. He
declined, keeping one hand in his pocket on his roll of bills and the other clutching the
briefcase, until they all had at last given up on him and left him alone.
 The hookers were another thing. Their blank faces and the sharp, unnatural eyes of
their pimps seemed to penetrate through him, waiting for him to approach like the
other customers, or to pass on down the sidewalk. Limmit passed on, a sense of unease
growing within him. Amputees, he thought, glancing covertly at another one; it must be
that nearly half of them are missing something. A leg or an arm, or both, or more. He
watched in fascinated revulsion as a legless hooker emerged from the doorway of one
of the shabby buildings lining the street, and, under the watchful gaze of one of the
older, more expensively dressed pimps on the street, began pulling her way through
the crowd.
Christ, thought Limmit, what’s going on? Are they battle casualties or something?
So many of them. And there was something strange about the intact ones as well: some
undetectable sign of kinship with their mutilated sisters. What’s stranger, thought
Limmit, is that the amputees seem to be doing the better business.
The rest of the Interface, Limmit saw, sorting out its gestalt in his mind, consisted
of the innumerable porn shops and skin flick theaters that, apart from the dealers and
hustlers in the street, seemed to comprise the street’s entire business; the scattered, unlit
building fronts into which the hookers disappeared with their clients; a single obscenely
greasy hamburger and taco stand surmounted by a neon sign that flashed the words
HARRY’S HOT shit over and over (a joke, surmised Limmit, through unwilling to
experiment to see just how perverted L.A. actually was); and the straights from Orange
County, male, constituting the majority of the street crowd, in the classic ratio of
herbivores to meat eaters. The crowd was dotted by a few random uniformed police
who, as far as Limmit could see, seemed to do nothing but stand around and watch. No
vehicles other than the bedraggled cars ejecting more straights at either end of the
street; the crowd was too thick, clear across the width of the street, for any progress to
be made except on foot.
Only one other thing, thought Limmit, watching for a moment his boots moving
through the slowly accumulating layer of trash on the street, to constitute the entirety of
the Interface. He felt suddenly cold, thinking of it. It was the black wrought-iron gates
set directly in the middle of the street’s north side. An old man had pointed them out to
him when Limmit, upon arriving, had inquired where he could find Dr. Adder.
 Before the old man could do anything but point across the street at the gates, a
young, bulky man in a gray coat had approached them and thrust a leaflet at them from
a pile held under one arm. “Here,” said the young man in a sour, rehearsed monotone.
“Save yourself.”
“Fuck off,” snapped the old man, retracting his outstretched arm.
“To hell with it,” muttered the leafleteer, as if coming to a decision deep inside
himself. He had then flung the stack of leaflets at the old man, knocking him down in a
flurried explosion of paper, then stalked off into the crowd.
“Who was that?” had asked Limmit, raising the old man from the sidewalk.
The old man snorted. “Street evangelist. One of John Mox’s damn MFers.”
The description had puzzled Limmit. “Are they always like that?”
‘Forget it.” The old man had clutched his arm tightly. “Why are you asking about
Dr. Adder anyway?”
Limmit had instinctively tightened his grip on the briefcase’s handle. Before he
could say anything, the old man spoke again.
“That’s a lot of crap about him and what he does. Believe me, I used to run this
street, before Adder ever came along; wasn’t even called the Interface back then. You
can trust me. I had those iron gates put up myself, special. So save your money.”
Uncomprehending, Limmit had managed to pull his arm free.
“Wait,” cried the old man as Limmit back-pedaled away. “I can find what you
want—you don’t need that crap from Adder.” He had tried to pursue Limmit, but was
swallowed up in the milling, unnoticing crowd.
Since then, Limmit had crossed the street and passed back and forth a dozen times
or more in front of the black iron gates the old man had indicated. Inside them, across a
small courtyard containing a few desiccated wall-clinging plants and what Limmit
recognized as a motorcycle, propped up rigid and vaguely phantasmical upon its center
stand, he could see the front door of Dr. Adder’s combined residence and place of
business. He had come, complete with black briefcase, all the way from Phoenix to enter
it.
But how, thought Limmit, gazing at and through the wrought iron. That idiot
Goonsqua and his stupid plans. The gate had a lock on it the size of a small potato, and
Limmit could see no button or other means of getting inside. How do I call for an
appointment? he said to himself acidly. But the sarcastic note fell hollow inside him.
Christ, he thought, I don’t even know what Dr. Adder does. An enigma, a complete,
dark vacuum beyond the name. The black iron gates had, upon every subsequent
passage, loomed larger and more ominous in his mind. Together with the amputee
hookers, the old man’s strange babble, and the entire Interface itself, they were almost
enough to make him wish he had never left Phoenix.
But not quite, he thought grimly. That would be death by suffocation; even this
strange exile could be buffered by enough money. He glanced down at the briefcase, its
solid weight in his hand raising his spirits. I might even get to enjoy it after a while. He
looked up and saw, a little ways down the sidewalk, a whore and her pimp gazing idly
in his direction.
Unlike most on the Phoenix Egg Ranch, Limmit had knowledge of coitus beyond
that provided by the company brothel: one fumbling, guilt-inspiring session with Joan,
bulky even back in grade school, and more memorable sessions during his brief career
in the Army of the Southwest.
What the hell, speculated Limmit, running a thumb over the edge of the roll of bills
in his pocket; when in L. A. This one seemed to have all her limbs intact, even if she did
share the strangely bovine, blank expression somehow endemic to all the hookers on
the street. He started to push his way through the crowd toward her. Perhaps, he
thought, it’ll revitalize me. In L.A., maybe you have to lose your cherry all over again. A
business expense. After her, he thought, I’ll know, just like a native, how to get in to see
Dr. Adder.
Up in the shabby room she led him to (after he had deposited several bills in the
palm of her “friend”), she switched on a small television sitting on a bureau. It was the
only piece of furniture besides a large bed that seemed to have been frozen halfway
through a process of disintegration. A totally tensionless bed, thought Limmit, sitting
on its edge; soft, like adipose tissue. In the gray light from the television, the girl’s skin
emerged section by section, her constant, vacant half-smile reflecting the TV’s somehow
fungal luminescence. The incomplete spectrum made her nipples appear dark, coinlike.
Like a dream, thought Limmit, watching her body by the television’s illumination. She
seemed to be moving in slow motion, half real-time. The room’s dim spaces brought the
strangely satisfying thought of grottoes to him.
 Becoming bored, Dr. Adder watched his assistant, Pazzo, cleaning his fingernails
with a surgical scalpel. He suddenly saw which particular scalpel Pazzo was using and
reached across the desk to snatch it out of the smaller, older man’s hands. “Do that
again,” said Adder, placing the instrument on the desktop, “and I’ll cut your fuckin’
colon out.” He laid his hands beside the scalpel, vaguely pleased with the effect. Like
tools, he thought; cutting edges. They were both narrow, angular, like his own face and
body.

“What is it with that knife anyway,” asked Pazzo irritably. They were both sitting
in Adder’s front office.
“It’s not a knife, ass. Besides which I have a sentimental attachment for it.”
Pazzo snorted. “Don’t take out your ill temper on me. If you weren’t so damn tight,
we wouldn’t have to wait an hour for that machine back there to warm up.”
Grinning ferally, Adder said, “They don’t make them anymore. It’s unique.” That
pleased him.
“I give up,” said Pazzo. The conversation didn’t seem to be making any sense, as if
his own fatigue had caught up with him in this slack moment, waiting for things to be
ready again in the operating room. How does Adder do it? he wondered, thinking of all
the small blue capsules, amphetamine analogs, that he, Pazzo, had had to take to keep
up with Adder for the last two days. He felt tired, or even more. Drained, he thought.
Or even ... sucked dry. He rose and walked over to the office window. “Hey,” he said,
looking out into the black iron gates and the night-covered Interface. “Guess who’s
coming.”
“Shitfire,” said Adder disgustedly from behind his boots, which had taken the
place of the scalpel on the desk. It could be only one person. “That pain in the ass.” He
weighed the scalpel in his hand, then extended his arm and sank its point into the edge
of the desk. “I’ve got a good mind to dump on him and his money. Do I need the
aggravation?” He drew a meditative forefinger through the right angle formed by the
blade and the desktop, and watched as Pazzo, Chaplinesque, pantomimed turning
empty pockets inside out. Adder sighed. “Go down and let him in.”
All my old clown tricks, thought Pazzo, wearily descending the stairs. All of
Adder’s screwed games. I can’t take it anymore.
Adder removed his feet from the desk and brushed a few stray crumbs from his
clothes. He balled up a few greasy food wrappings, marked HARRY’S, and tossed them
across the room. Personally fastidious, he affected a degree of slovenliness about the
nonsurgical part of his working quarters that appalled everyone except Pazzo, who was
used to it. A layer, ankle-deep at points, of trash and other lesser and larger debris was
randomly interrupted by stacks of yellowing stroke books, empty bottles, and
unidentified objects. Black-and-white photographs of his work, like a catalog, were
haphazardly tacked to the walls. It was, in actuality, a studied effect: Adder’s attempt to
simulate some sort of archetypal and ultimate abortionist’s den-tattoo-parlor-sink of
iniquity. He enjoyed degrading his clientele in these small ways.
Pazzo reentered, followed by a large, tailored military uniform. Its occupant had a
slightly disintegrating look, as if facial sinews were being cut beneath the skin. The
effects of imminent kainine collapse, Adder knew. “Good evening, General,” he said.
The general flopped down bonelessly in the chair across the desk from Adder. “I’ve
got,” he said, “half of what you asked for. That’s all V m going to pay.”
Adder shrugged. “Pay as you please. You don’t even have to pay at all. Since you
won’t be getting anything until I get my price.”
The general started to sweat. The chair he sat in was permeated with the nervous
perspiration of Adder’s clientele. “Look,” he blustered, “nobody futzes around with
Romanza. I know what I want and you’re going to regret it if I don’t get it.” His lower
lip swelled out like a blister, catching the salt sweat from his gray cheeks.
Adder had a patrician distaste for melodrama in real life. He winked at Pazzo
leaning in the door frame, and pointed a thumb at the general. “A big man,” he said.
Pazzo, with a curiously blank expression, formed a small circle with his left thumb and
forefinger and in an automatic rhythm thrust his right forefinger through it.
The general’s eyes, porcine, swiveled back and forth between the two faces he felt
mocking him. “You punks—”
 “Nyeh, cram it,” said Adder, warming to his role. He leaned across the desk, hands
flat against it, bringing his face a few inches away from the general’s.
“Jam it on!” shouted Pazzo unexpectedly from the doorway. Adder looked up for a
second, surprised and momentarily baffled, then returned his concentration to the
general.
“I’ve got enough customers,” said Adder, snarling theatrically, “to crack your ass
for a favor anytime I want. As a matter of fact”—he jerked out the scalpel—“I might
slice you up right now and just let them get me off the hook. Which can be done.” “You
tell him,” interjected Pazzo again. “Show ’im that two can play these hyperthyroid
games—you’ve seen enough of Betreech’s old movies.”
“Will you shut up,” said Adder, enraged, turning his knifelike face upon Pazzo.
What’s with him? he thought seethingly. He turned back to the general, feeling both his
mood and effect shattered. “You want her?” he said. “You know how much it costs.”
The words sounded lame in his mouth. Pazzo was right, thought Adder. A bad old
movie.
Somehow, Romanza seemed not to have noticed Pazzo’s interruptions. The
general’s face had frozen upon it the look of someone abruptly sprung upon by
something large and carnivorous. Shakily, he fetched a small silver box from his coat
pocket, extracted a minute red capsule, and swallowed. Adder could follow its slow,
struggling descent through the fat-swaddled throat. “Please, Adder,” the general
whispered. He ran pale, blunt fingers through his sparse hair. “I can’t raise that much
money. But I’ve got to have—you know, I—” He broke off, his chins trembling,
infantile.
It always, reflected Adder, comes down to this. You contemptible turd. He had
watched more than enough such men, with their gonads where their brains should be,
to have formulated certain behavior patterns for them. Could, in fact, predict their
precise moment of collapse: that point at which the mark was left groveling sans wit,
sans honor, sans dignity, and soon sans money, ready to exchange any and everything
for the object of his fixated lusts. General Romanza, being of weaker stuff than most,
and having accelerated the process with overindulgence in a variety of drugs, was
nearing that point rapidly.
Adder knew just what to do, which was to screw out of the general everything as
quickly as possible. A certain momentum would thereby be achieved, the velocity of
which would almost be capable of sucking out his gold fillings.
“Don’t worry, General R., old fella,” Adder said, rising from his chair. He felt good
again; even if, he thought, I’m going to have to ream Pazzo’s ass out for fooling around
like that. He walked over to a large, dust-laden television in one corner and switched it
on; its gray rectangle of light fell into the room. Might as well catch old Mox’s
broadcast, he thought, until the operating room’s ready. He stopped to pat the general
on his trembling shoulder as he headed back to his chair behind the desk. “I’m sure,” he
continued affectionately, “we’ll be able to find a solution to your financial difficulties—
one that everybody will be happy with, you’ll see.”

Through the walls, Limmit could hear all around him the sounds of happy or—
mostly—obsessed copulation. He stood by the grime-encrusted window of the hooker’s
room and stared out at the scurrying Interface below. No escape from it, he thought
despairingly. At least not tonight.

“I’m sorry,” the whore called out again. Miserable, conscious of some failure. He
turned away from the window and walked back to the side of the bed. “It’s all right,”
he said, gently touching her shoulder. She was somehow prettier now that her cowlike
passivity had been penetrated. “Not your fault.” His eyes passed over her small,
handful breasts, the flat boyish plain of her stomach, and then, unstoppable, to between
her thighs, her legs sprawled artlessly apart on the bed. There, the sight that had frozen
him, then swelled and pushed him across the room to the window from where he had
looked out sightlessly into the night, sweating, his mind convulsed with sudden fear
and surmise.
She had finished stripping, he remembered, practiced, seconds after she had
switched on the small television that provided the room’s only illumination, the
screen’s tiny, muted laughter sounding distant; Limmit had stepped forward to the side
of the bed, hands at his belt buckle; leaned over her patient, horizontal form; and found,
trembling beneath him, pudenda that had been altered and reconstructed so as to be
nearly unrecognizable. Engorged with real or simulated passion, they had reddened
and flexed slightly under his gaze. Baroque, pathic convolutions of the vulva, other
parts shining wet like fleshy sea plants emerging from the cave formed by her womb.
The effect was indescribable: Limmit had felt himself growing dizzy, falling toward
them before he had sucked in his breath raggedly and fled to the window.
 Now the girl lay on her side, looking at him with sad eyes, unable to comprehend
what had happened. Limmit, his innards quivering but under control, studied the sight
again. What lusts they served to satisfy, what perversions they could adeptly draw
forth, he was not even able to guess. He realized that there were things he might not
even care to find out about L.A.
He saw, surmounting it all, at the point where perhaps not too long ago her pubic
hair might have begun, a small circular tattoo on her abdomen. He had noticed the
same mark prominent on the stumps of the amputee hookers in the street, but had not
gotten close enough to make out its details. It was an amateurish, almost childishly
executed cartoon of a grinning snake’s head. The conviction grew cold and large within
him. He touched the tattoo lightly. “His trademark?” he asked.
The hooker knew who he meant. She shook her head. “The girls do it themselves,”
she said, “after the operations. With a ball-point pen and a needle.”
Limmit nodded slowly. It figured: the altered genitalia had a weirdly professional
finish to them, too smooth to match evenly the crude cartoon snake. Professional, he
thought numbly. So this is what Dr. Adder does. I can’t even handle this, and I’m
supposed to deal with him? Impossible.
And what’s worse, Limmit realized, is that I know there’s even more to it than this.
But what? He searched his memory, looking for some clue he had seen in the street, or
the old man’s babble, or something, that indicated anything beyond what this girl had
shown him between her legs.
Perhaps I just sense it, said Limmit to himself. Something I still don’t know about
Dr. Adder. Or else there is nothing more to be revealed—this was enough for L.A. to
shake me with.
He glanced again at her, then away. Why did she do it, why did they all do it?
wondered Limmit. It might be as well to ask it of lemmings or the tides. Sea waves,
animal waves, human waves; he was beginning to feel that whores’ motives were like
the oceans—basically unfathomable. He asked anyway, and was proven correct. She
responded to his question by smiling sadly and slowly shaking her head.
There was no point in staying, trying to delay the inevitable. He peeled another bill
off his rapidly diminishing roll, tucked it into her clothes piled carelessly at the foot of
the bed, and picked up the black briefcase. He was wrapped in the hallway’s darkness,
after the door shut behind him had cut off his last sight of her, vulnerable in the
television’s flat glare.

Emerging onto the star- and lamp-lit roof from the total darkness of the stairwell,
Azusa finished zipping up his fly. I hope nothing’s gone wrong, he thought, trying to
locate Milch through the crowd of partygoers. I shouldn’t have left him—not at a time
like this. Berating himself under his breath, he began pushing his way through the
massed, sweating bodies and flushed faces.
His worst fears were realized when he reached the guardrail. Milch stood by one
side of the gun and sight clamped to the rail, while Patti F. lay sprawled a few yards
away, where (Azusa surmised) Milch had flung her, eyes wide in uncomprehending
fear like an animal’s. The partygoers had formed a little crescent around the tableau,
their hilarity dampened by whatever had happened.
“Where the hell have you been?” rasped Milch upon catching sight of Azusa. His
drunkenness was gone. His face was livid with anger and a complex mix of other
emotions.
“Screwing,” said Azusa without thinking. It was the truth: one of the advantages to
being Milch’s agent was the spinoff charisma Azusa derived from his intimate,
indispensable association with him. The real object of adoration among the active
residents of Rattown, both male and female, was Dr. Adder, Azusa had realized upon
his own arrival in the slums two years ago. But Milch and the two or three other
triggermen were celebrities enough in their own right.
“You buddyfucker,” said Milch venomously. “You’re the one that hooked me up
with that bitch.” He waved a shaking hand in Patti F.’s direction.
He hadn’t, but Azusa let it slide, argument being pointless. “So what’s wrong with
her?”
“Don’t you see, you dumb cocksucker. Look—right—there.” Azusa followed the
direction of Milch’s quivering forefinger. Patti F. looked back at them both in mute
resentment.
“So what’s the matter?” asked Azusa, exasperated.
“Her ring. Right there. On her goddamn hand. ”
“A ring, and that’s all? Jesus Christ, the last chick you had up here had rings
through her nose, her snatch, even her nipples. What’s so special about this one’s?”
Milch breathed heavily. Almost bashfully, he whispered, “Well, shit, it’s my old
high school’s ring.” The words tumbled out in a rush. “Buena Maricone High School,
back in Orange County.”
Azusa stared into Milch’s eyes and thought amazedly: I’ll never figure this dude
out. Never. What’s running through his mind? How ashamed his old civics teacher
would be to see him here, gun in hand? Do his sphincters tremble at John Mox’s TV
image? What the hell—maybe the night could yet be salvaged. He motioned over
two of Milch’s hard-core fans and pointed out Patti F. to them. Get rid of her,” he said,
not even bothering to watch as they hustled her off.
He surveyed the party. Milch needed another female to help him pull the trigger,
preferably fresh stuff to get his mind off that stupid Patti F. (but then again, he thought
charitably, how was she to have known). He spotted the teenager he had just had in the
stairwell, plunged into the crowd, and dragged her by one wrist over to the guardrail.
 It must be nice, thought Azusa, dispassionately watching Milch grappling the
anonymous new girl, to be so talented and simple—to forget and heal so easily. Not to
know the agonies of responsibility. Ah well. He glanced at the small TV, still muttering
and giggling to itself nearby. Not long, he thought, till Mox comes on. The best time for
the shot. He drew from his jacket a cardboard box, surprisingly heavy for its small size,
and, sensing the crowd of partygoers press forward excitedly, lifted the lid to reveal a
massive, intricately detailed large-caliber bullet.

If only life was like a science fiction novel, thought Limmit, pushing slowly
through the crowds on the street again. He remembered his own collection sitting in the
shelves over his bed in Phoenix, now lost to him forever. If only people actually did just
sit around and talk, unloading on each other the secret or even well-known
underpinnings of their society ... info-dump, the practice had been called in a book
review from one of the tattered old magazines Limmit had among his collection.
The incompetent writer’s way of revealing the details of his story’s setting, or
whatever axe that particular writer had to grind. In reality, it never took place: the
fundamentals of a society remained unarticulated, something to be lived upon, not
talked about. There are no revealing conversations, thought Limmit, for me to
eavesdrop on and discover what’s underneath L.A. Something about Dr. Adder; that’s
messed me up so bad.
He stopped still on the sidewalk. The traffic was thinner here, at one far end of the
Interface. L.A.’s dark buildings sagged together out of the reach of the street’s neon
lights. The black briefcase hung oppressively heavy, crushing in his hand. There was no
hope of pressing on to see Dr. Adder, not at this moment, even if he could get in. The
fear, thought Limmit. I need a drink. Is there alcohol in L.A.?
Miraculously, he noticed a flickering neon sign, BAR, above the door of the last
building before the light ended. As he entered and walked hurriedly to the bar, he had
only the general impression that the semidark interior was filled with people seated at
small, circular tables.
After he knocked back half of the brown acrid fluid the bartender produced in
exchange for another bill from his roll, Limmit glanced over his shoulder to get a better
look at the bar’s other occupants. Jesus, he thought, turning back to gaze into the
remainder of his drink. There had been only one bar, company-owned, on the Phoenix
Egg Ranch, so it was impossible to go into the wrong one. Even if this is the only bar in
L.A., he said to himself, it’s still the wrong choice.
He glanced quickly around again, hoping that his eyes, adjusted to the darkness,
would reveal that the former sight had been an illusion. It hadn’t been: The bar’s tables
were still crammed with scores, or even hundreds, of replicas of the gray-coated
leafleteer who had knocked down the old man earlier. They were all obviously surly
with alcohol, and bending upon him unwavering, hate-filled stares.
Limmit looked up into the bartender’s blank, unsympathetic face, then around to
the door by which he had entered. It seemed a long distance away, through a narrow
corridor of the packed tables. Which is more likely, he thought, to get the shit beat out
of me: making a break for it or staying put? Shit—this is what happens when you go
into strange bars.
“Another one for my friend,” said an unfamiliar voice as Limmit was gazing
morosely into his now empty glass. An arm slapped him across the shoulders. “And
one for me.”
Limmit looked in astonishment at the short, grinning figure perched on the bar
stool next to him. “Uh, no thanks,” he mumbled. The figure wasn’t wearing a gray coat
—was he just crazy or what? “I was just thinking of leaving.”
“Nonsense,” said the figure as the bartender produced two more full glasses.
“These guys’ll crack your ass cold if you try to leave here without me.”
“I should feel safe in here?”
The other shrugged. “Like I said, as long as you’re with me. It’s a popular
assumption among these MoFos that I’m some sort of fingerman for the snipers up in
Rattown. They think if they piss me off, they’ll be the next to get lined up in some
gunsight. It’s not true, of course, but as long as they believe it, it’s all right with me. My
name’s Droit, by the way.”
“Rattown?” muttered Limmit to himself, puzzled. “Snipers?” This sounded
ominous. He quickly gulped half of the second glass before him. To hell with waiting
for the info-dump to come. “You may think this is funny,” he said, “but would you
mind explaining those to me? I’m a stranger here.”
Droit grinned wider. “Yes, I know,” he said. He waved a vague hand to the north.
“Rattown. All those deserted slums and office buildings and shit in back of the
Interface. The rest of L.A. Most of the dealers and hustlers you see here live right in the
buildings lining the street. Certain others who are, shall we say, a little farther gone, live
way back there. Two types, actives and downers. The downers are the real basket cases
— too fucked up to do more than squat in their rooms and tremble. L.A.’s quite a
psychosis factory. A woman they call Mother Endure—beats me where she came from
—looks after them. Scrounges up food and sometimes medicine, lets them suck off her
life force. The actives, most of them like to go on top of the abandoned office buildings
with old CIA weapons they’ve dug up, and snuff one of these MoFos every now and
then.” He sipped his own drink.
“MoFos,” said Limmit. “Motherfuckers?”
Droit shook his head. “Moral Forces. The Video Church of, to be exact. They’re
John Mox’s little evangelists—he sermonizes on TV every night, a big power on the
GPC exec board back in Orange County. Most everybody in L.A. hates Mox, though
they watch him just for kicks, and some of the more hyperactive ones like to plug his
fans in the gray coats.”
“Tell me,” said Limmit. His tongue felt numb and clumsy from the alcohol. “Do
they ever miss?”
“Not so far.”
“Then I’d feel safer out there than in here.”
“That’s academic, since I don’t feel like leaving just yet. Why not stick around and
answer a few questions for me?”
“Why should I?”
Droit smiled unpleasantly. “You might just want to oblige me, considering I know
what’s in that briefcase.”
Limmit considered this for a moment. Fuckin’ Goonsqua, he thought. Sending me
out here not knowing anything more about L.A. than anybody else stuck on the
Phoenix Egg Ranch would, not even how to get in to see Dr. Adder. Probably thought I
wouldn’t come if I did know. And now this guy. “How do you know?” he said finally.
“And so what if you do.” Droit’s smile grew wider. “Oh, I know all sorts of interesting
things, Mr. E. Allen Limmit-who-just-got-in-from-Phoenix. And there’s sufficient
markets for my information, thank you. Granted there aren’t many police around, but I
could find one who’d be interested in your briefcase’s contents. But more likely, I’d sell
the info to my old and reliable customer, Dr. Adder. Surprise is half the game in these
sorts of transactions, hmm? Which is what you’d lose thereby. Whereas, just give me a
few answers, and see how much you’d gain, relatively.”
“All right,” said Limmit, after a second’s thought. “What do you want to know?”
Droit pulled out a little pen and notebook. “Are you,” he asked clinically,
“heterosexual?”
“Yeah, sure.” I guess the bedhen counts that way, he thought. “Have you seen any
hookers here in L.A. that look like your mother?”
“How could I? My mother’s dead.”
 “Looks like, not is. ”
“You ask some pretty weird questions, you know that?” exploded Limmit. He
flushed with anger, feeling mocked by the absurdity of it.
Droit patiently laid the notebook on the bar. “Look,” he said. “I’m in the
information business. I’m the last of the pure, dispassionate social researchers. Selling
my findings to whoever’ll pay the most. I do all right. Certain people, like Dr. Adder,
are very interested in some of the things I find out.”
“Dr. Adder wants to know if I’m queer?”
“No,” said Droit flatly, watching his own hand pick up the notebook again. “This is
for another customer.”
“All right then,” said Limmit. “What else?”
Drawing a thin pack of cards from his coat pocket, Droit said, “These are pictures
of some typical L.A. women.” He handed the pack to Limmit. “Sort through them and
pick out the ones whose laps you’d most like to, and least like to, sit on during a long
train journey.”
“There are,” said Limmit, “no trains anymore.”
“That’s all right. Some of these don’t have laps.”
Limmit turned over the top card, glanced at it, then turned it back over and handed
the pack to Droit.
 “Don’t worry,” said Droit, scribbling in his notebook. “Your silence says as much to
me as anything else you could have done.”
“That’s really sick,” said Limmit. He felt depressed now, the picture having
reminded him of Dr. Adder and his handiwork. “Is that all the questions? I’ve got
business to take care of.” “That’ll do for now.”
Limmit swiveled around and saw that the bar was vacant except for themselves.
Empty chairs and tables bare except for clusters of bottles and glasses. “Where did they
go?” he asked.
Droit waved his pen at the door and the street beyond it. “They left some time
ago,” he said. “They carry TVs along the sidewalk when Mox’s nightly spiel comes on.
You missed it—if you want to see the old fucker, you’ll have to wait for his ser-monette
in a couple hours. Most of the MoFos would prefer to stay in here and get loaded, rather
than go out and risk getting shot. But if you’re going to stay in Mox’s little fan club, you
have to take some chances.”

Outside the bar, Droit turned to Limmit. “Don’t worry about your little business
deal,” he said. “I don’t really know what’s in your briefcase, though I don’t doubt I will
before long. I just knew that somebody like you would be coming, and then when you
arrived I got your name from Alice, the pilot.”
“Who else knew I was coming?”
 “No one. At least, no one you'll be coming into contact with. Even though I could
have used the money, there are certain, shall we say, sequences of events that generate
more useful information if allowed to run their full course.”
“I’m glad,” said Limmit, “you’ve got my best interests at heart.”
“Dispassionate science, my friend. I’ll see you around.” He walked off down the
street.
Limmit felt cold sober. The alcohol’s effect had drained off, leaving him here on the
street again, no further than before. The rest of the Interface and the black iron gates
were still in front of him. Let’s get on with it, he thought. The fear remained, but
something else had died. He sensed other things growing, the running out of time.

“Is your little friend Lyle going to be waiting for you when we leave tonight?” Dr.
Adder smiled innocently across the surgical table.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” said Pazzo, sullenly concentrating on the equipment’s
gauges. This is the part I hate, he thought. The finishing touches on a job—when I’m
shot and he’s really starting to come on. His own rabid joy. Especially after kicking
Romanza’s ass out of here, and then hearing himself talked about even more than usual
by Mox. Dualities, said Pazzo to himself.
“Don’t know what you see in that little honey,” murmured Adder absently, deftly
smoothing with a whirring chrome instrument the stitches in the spread-eagled female
crotch on the table. Transforming the elaborate surgical alterations performed on the
unconscious girl’s flesh into a weird semblance of virginity. “No accounting for tastes, I
guess.”
Pazzo noticed Adder’s hands laying down the tool. He looked up into Adder’s
amused, baiting face.
“Right?” said Adder archly. “No accounting for tastes, is there?”
Feeling his face grow heated, Pazzo said nothing, continuing to meet Adder’s level
gaze.
“What accounts for little Lyle’s taste, I wonder?” continued Adder. “KY, most
probably. Smegma, perhaps, if his parents were antiquarian enough. Have you tried
putting honey on your honey’s honey?”
“Knock it off,” said Pazzo. “Dr. Adder—the world’s last queerbaiter. There’s
something to be proud of, all right.” “And you’re the last one in the world to be
ashamed of it. Not many of you little honeys left, are there? Glad I’m not a faggot.” “Get
screwed.”
With a speed and agility that astonished Pazzo, Adder vaulted over the girl-laden
surgical table, knocked Pazzo down, and knelt on his chest. “You fuckin’ queer,” he
said, grinning fiendishly, and menaced one side of Pazzo’s face with the surgical
instrument.
 “Christ,” said Pazzo, straining his face away from the chrome. “You’ve flipped out
—you’re really on something tonight.”
Adder tossed the tool away and stood up. “Bullshit,” he said, almost childishly
hurt by the accusation. “Nothing but adrenaline high—you know that.”
Pulling himself up, gasping for breath, Pazzo nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he
wheezed. I only said it to hurt him, he thought. Get him off me.
“Look,” said Pazzo, his voice measured. “Maybe you’re still up for fun and games,
but I’m exhausted. I just want to go home and go to sleep.”
Adder picked up the surgical instrument and walked around to the other side of
the table. “You know, Pazzo,” he said, his narrow hands resuming work almost
independently of the rest of him, “I’m actually very fond of you ... but I’m beginning to
think you’re not cut out for L.A.” He smiled thinly.
My bones agree, thought Pazzo, feeling them being pulled, dead weight, to the
earth’s mass below. He watched the gauges, the edges of his vision starting to haze
from fatigue.

The proprietor of the hamburger stand called Harry’s Hot Shit leaned his bare,
meaty arms on his grease-stained counter and observed the traffic on the Interface. In
my own way, he thought, I’m just as important to this street as Dr. Adder. He does his
work, I do mine: cut and stitch, thaw and cook. He fingered one of the paper napkins
that read HARRY’S HOT SHIT —WE FEED THE INTERFECA, misprinted by some
spaced-out Rattowner on an old offset he had unearthed. From below L.A., the
proprietor thought, whence all blessings flow, including my frozen meat.
“So how come the name?” inquired the kid sitting on the other side of the counter.
A few crumbs and spots of grease lay before him, remnants.
 The proprietor ignored him, content and impassive. Young stuff, he thought,
cataloguing the street’s female inhabitants. Old stuff. One-legged, two-legged, other. All
stuff. He liked the word—it implied to him, if not inanimation, at least submissiveness.
He rolled it silently through his head, the s sliding and hissing up to the t behind his
incisors, the ff passing without a sound through his lips like an invisible pearl. Live
meat, frozen meat. Adder fixes them, I fix them; he sends out to me for hamburgers, I
send them up to him, they come to my counter and eat. So how come Mox never talks
about me on the TV?
“I said, how come the name?”
He looked at the kid as if from a lofty height. He hadn’t seen him around before,
and had his suspicions. “What name?” he asked.
The kid pointed up to the flashing neon sign.
“What’s your name?” asked the proprietor, as though this would somehow answer
it.
“Edgar.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen, of course. Why’d you ask?” the kid snapped. He was obviously both on
something, probably kainine, and a believer in a good offense.
“Oh, nothing,” the proprietor said coolly. “I just hadn’t seen you around here is
all.”
“I just haven’t eaten here before,” said the kid, glaring upward through his lowered
eyebrows.
The proprietor’s attention wandered away while the kid calculated the best means
of sneaking away. Before he could slide from the torn plastic stool a policeman had
responded to the proprietor’s unobtrusive signal and nabbed the kid by his collar.
“Buddyfucker!” yelled the kid as the silent policeman gently dragged him off to the
car that would return him to Orange County.
“Now you know,” said the proprietor, folding the crisp bill the policeman had
given him. “Come back next year, when you’re of age.” He tucked the money away in
his spattered apron, and felt momentarily sad. I’m not it, he thought. Not the big time—
like Adder and Mox. The double star we orbit around.

His foot slipped in something wet on the sidewalk, and Limmit lurched heavily
into another person. “Excuse me,” he mumbled, too sunk in his own thoughts to look
up to see which of the anonymous figures on the street, hustler or straight, he had
collided with. Before he could continue on his way, he noticed a woman’s hand
clutching his free arm. He looked up into her face, familiar enough after the years since
he had seen her last to stagger him under the weight of memories.
“Jesus,” he said, after a moment’s dumbfounded funk. “Mary. Mary Gorgon.”
 “Old E. Allen,” she said tenderly. She drew him, unresisting, into the shadow of
the building they were beside, out of the harsh blue-white light and the pull of the
crowd. “I never thought I’d see you in L.A.,” she said, smiling, her face level with his.
Limmit laughed nervously, his emotions confused. “I never thought I’d be here
either.” He paused. She looked almost exactly the same to him as before, complete to
tight faded denims. He wondered for a moment, as he had done before, where she and
her comrades obtained their distinctive thick-soled boots. Perhaps the Front had its own
factory or something. “What about you?” he asked. “The revolution over or
something?”
Stiffening slightly, she shook her head. “Organizing. We don’t win battles on guts
alone.” She grinned slightly at her own melodramatic tone.
“Organizing? Here? An Amputee Hooker Battalion—that’s a hot idea.”
Another shake of the head. “Not here. The slums.” Her smile had faded but not, he
saw with a pang, from annoyance with him—but concern. “What about you?” she said
quietly. “What are you doing here?”
He hesitated, then decided to trust her as he had before. “Business,” he said, lifting
the black briefcase up to her attention.
Her eyes widened, as if the briefcase had sparked some sort of ominous
recognition. “What’s in it?”
Limmit looked around warily, then snapped open the briefcase a few inches and
held it up to her face. He could tell from her expression as she looked inside that she
knew it for what it was.
“Shee-it,” whispered Mary. Limmit, snapping the case shut again, felt a momentary
pleasure at the sudden respect for him that seemed mixed into her expression. It faded,
replaced entirely by the almost motherly concern he remembered from before. “It’s for
Dr. Adder,” she said evenly. “That’s where you’re headed now, isn’t it? The only place
where you could unload something like that.”
 He nodded, silent.
“Where’d you get it?” she asked.
“Long and involved,” he said. “I’ll tell you some other time. Don’t worry, I’ll find
you afterward.” Without saying more, he turned to leave.
She clutched his arm tighter. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go there now. Wait until
later.”
He whirled angrily on her. “Why,” he said. His voice seemed choked by some
colossal lump of phlegm that had gradually been accumulating in his throat. “So that
I’ll never get there?” he gasped, the words barely able to squeeze past the frustrating,
evil taste seeping into his mouth. “Would that please you?” Whipping her head from
side to side, she said, “No. You’ve been stuck on that damn egg farm all these years,
right? You don’t know how it is with people like Adder. Everybody in L.A. except you
knows that he’s been cranked up for the last two days working on one of his jobs. It’d
be suicide to try to deal with him now—he’d bite your head off for fun.” She pulled him
closer toward herself, almost an embrace. “Come on,” she pleaded, reasonable, “give
yourself the advantage at least.” He shrugged, looking away from her face down the
length of the still-crowded street. What time was it? he wondered dully. Time seemed
to be telescoping—it must be hours since he had left the bar. All ability to move or resist
seemed to have been finally sapped off, replaced by an overwhelming fatigue.
Accepting, he thought; like death. He nodded slowly, eyes closed, to Mary. Yeah, okay,
he said to himself. First the street, then the hooker, the bar, and now this. The first good
thing to happen to him in L.A., a miracle almost. Is there a conspiracy, he wondered, to
keep me from seeing Dr. Adder tonight? If so, by now he welcomed it.

“You were right,” said Dr. Adder, looking over his shoulder toward the iron gate.
“There he is.” He finished locking the building s front door and turned around,
ostentatiously sucking in the cool night air through flared nostrils.
Pazzo shrugged and said nothing. Across the motorcycle- and dead-vegetation-
inhabited courtyard he could see Lyle on the other side of the gate, dancing on his toes
and waving at him.
“That one,” said Adder, “is lasting a long time, eh, Pazzo? You’re getting to be just
like an old married couple.”
Up yours, thought Pazzo. In fact, he was getting tired of Lyle s gamut of little-girl
imitations. Maybe I’ll kick his ass out of bed tonight, he thought. Better yet, kick the rest
of him out and keep the best part there in bed. What would Adder think of a
commission like that?
While Adder lifted the motorcycle off its center stand and wheeled it to the gate,
Pazzo studied the tableau on the other side. Besides Lyle there were three others
waiting motionless for them: the ubiquitous Droit and a young hooker and her pimp
whom he didn’t recognize. The crowd milling past them on the sidewalk slowed down
a little to gawk but none stopped, except for a sodden-looking, gray-coated MFer
shuffling a few yards away.
A sudden coughing roar announced that Adder had managed to kick the cycle into
starting. Straddling it, he reached up to unlock the gate, then swung one half of it open.
Pazzo closed it behind them and snapped the lock together. Lyle circled his arms about
Pazzo’s waist while Adder watched contemptuously, rolling the cycle’s throttle back
and forth, varying the dynamics of its ragged noises.
 Suddenly, as if by afterthought, Adder turned to the others standing a few
respectful feet away. “You,” he said over the machine’s racket, pointing to the girl.
“What’s your name?” She smiled. “Just anything you want it to be.”
He waved her off with a disgusted hand. “Don’t bother. I’ve heard that line
before.” He turned to the pimp. “You I’ve seen around before. Don’t tell me why you’re
hanging around here: let me guess.” He peered down at them, as if the motorcycle were
some sort of throne. His eyes seemed to iris down, focusing into concentration. “You
want me to take this fresh merchandise home for the night, as a free sample from your
newly founded firm, Lust and Greed—‘We Pander to the Famous.’
Eh? Is that it? And in return for the night of ecstasy thus produced, I will gratefully
bestow an expensive ADR run and subsequent surgical modifications on said whore.
All free of charge, no doubt.”
The young pimp shuffled his feet in the street’s debris, oddly shy under the
circumstances.
Adder sighed elaborately. “Such, such is the price of fame. Everyone starts to dope
out your every little weakness and takes advantage of it. Still, I am a hard sucker for
virginity. The sexual fascination of the tabula rasa.” He extended his arm and pulled the
girl up onto the seat behind him. “Relative, of course,” he said, warming to his own
hugely enjoyable seriocomic theatrics. “No scalpel has pierced your epidermis, your
largest sexual organ in fact, so the matter of the hymen you split like an onion skin in
your seventh-grade gym class is superfluous.” He turned from the girl’s ashen face to
the pimp. “Not for free, though. Just because you caught me in such a good mood, you
only have to give me fifty percent of her future earnings, rather than the sixty percent I
usually get from those without the up-front money. Don’t bother thanking me now.”
Pazzo turned away, slightly nauseated by the spectacle of Adder’s gleeful role
playing. Lyle whispered something unintelligible into his ear, punctuated by the wet
end of his tongue.
The girl leaned her head against Adder’s back, her thin arms around his waist.
“Hey,” Droit called out suddenly to him. “Did you catch Mox on the TV tonight?”
Adder began to slowly twist the motorcycle’s throttle around, converting its noise
into a gradually crescendo-ing whine. “Yeah, I saw him. That old fart and his show.”
“What was your reaction to it?” asked Droit, readying his pen over his notebook. It
was one of his standard research questions.

“Are you sure about this?” asked Azusa, lifting his eye from the gunsight.
Milch nodded. “No sweat,” he said. His eyes were slightly lidded, reptilian
looking, from the injection a few minutes ago of the herpezine combination.
“You can’t find another MFer?”
 Milch shook his head. “Lucky to get this one. Usually they all disappear after
Mox’s first broadcast.”
“Maybe we should call it off for tonight,” said Azusa, glancing out at the distant
strip of light surrounded by darkness.
“No way,” said Milch emphatically. “And disappoint all my fans?”
He’s right there, thought Azusa. At this late stage of excitation, if we don’t take a
shot we might not even get off this roof alive. “Go ahead then,” he said. “I guess you
know what you can do.” He turned and pushed his way alongside the guardrail,
through the edge of the encircling crowd, silent but reeking of sweat and chemical
exudations. The word had flashed that Milch had finally lined up his shot. There was
some squabbling over binoculars and telescopes.
Leaning out over the guardrail, Azusa could see, beyond the serried backs of the
Rattowners, Milch kneeling down into his contorted assassin’s position: left hand and
arm in control of the gunstock and trigger, the other arm wrapped through the new
girl’s thighs, the right hand plunged into the terminus of her crotch. The gunsight had
been locked over into following position, so that the picture it presented to Milch’s and
the girl’s eyes, their faces pressed up to the mechanism alongside each other, changed
slightly with each minute adjustment of the gun itself. The girl moaned, transfixed at
eye and groin, and began to whisper, out of some subconscious connection, a feverish
chant or song. Milch’s breathing, conversely, had seemed to cease entirely, as though he
no longer needed it.
Something’s wrong, thought Azusa, looking away, staring sightlessly at the far-off
Interface. Total despair gripped him: the burst of satisfaction he derived from deftly
handling the Patti F. crisis had disappeared, replaced by this ominous, fatalistic
presentiment. When Milch had shown him just now his target in the gunsight, the
solitary MFer standing dangerously close to Dr. Adder himself, on his motorcycle, right
out on the sidewalk in front of his black iron gates, the certainty of disaster had
tightened around himself. Even though Azusa knew that with Milch all shots,
regardless of their perimeters, were the same, this seemed too close. Of course, he
thought, that’s what appeals to Milch about this shot. Snuffing this MFer will be like
laying a gift at his own hero’s feet.
He turned back to watch Milch move the gun slightly, perfecting the alignment of
the gunsight’s cross hairs. The crowd was silent as stone: what they could not see,
craning their heads toward the Interface’s distant image, they could imagine. The only
sound dropping into the vacuum was the new girl’s fragmented chant, which grew
slightly louder, as if Milch had discovered a volume control deep within her, and then
crystallized into sudden intelligibility.
Azusa watched in horror as Milch lifted his face from the gunsight and stared,
blanching, at the girl’s mouth. Unheeding, lost in who knew what high school
cheerleader exstasis of memory, she softly crooned, “Fight on, for Buena Maricone....
Ever faithful we will be—”
“Alumna,” croaked Milch, his face bloodless, the injection’s psychic insulation
shattered. The girl’s groin started to buck and rear beneath his hand in sudden spasms
of pleasure. Azusa tore desperately at the backs of the Rattowners in front of him,
struggling to reach Milch and the gun.

At the end of the street, Limmit turned around and looked back. Something
seemed to tug him toward its depths. Mary pulled him gently back around by one arm
and asked, “What’s wrong?”
He drank in her sober, concerned face. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m just
tired.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
He sighed and reached behind him for the wall of the building to lean against, but
it was yards away. “You’re right. Maybe it’s L.A., the Interface itself. I feel like I’ve been
drained. Like my blood all went down the sewers or something.” He shook his head
slowly. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this at all.”
She smiled. “Who is.”

The MFer lurched forward, shoving Droit aside. “Fuck you!” he screamed at
Adder, then staggered toward the motorcycle, both arms upraised, revealing large ovals
of sweat in the gray coat’s folds.
 On the steel-capped toe of his boot, Adder caught the MFer in the stomach and
shoved him back, stumbling. What a night, thought Adder, grinning. Out of the corner
of his eye, he saw Lyle opening his mouth to receive Pazzo’s kiss. “Save it till you get
home!” he yelled at them. “You disgusting fairies!”

Wrenching aside the last Rattowner, Azusa flung himself at Milch. The air seemed
to thicken into a heavy, viscous liquid, through which he crawled agonizingly slowly.
He could see the gunsight’s small circle of light from which Milch had torn himself
away, and the cross hairs, controlled by the spastic hand frozen upon the gun, dancing
from one body to another in the tight knot of people clustered around the motorcycle
on the Interface. Everything on the roof seemed to be moving at a fraction of real-life
time except for that small circle of light, jerking from one possible victim to the next.
Even the girl’s song and Milch’s scream oozed, rumbling, into Azusa’s ears.
Still miles away, Azusa saw Milch’s hand clench slowly around the gun’s trigger.
He heard a low, throbbing roar begin, which quickly modulated up into the gun’s
deafening report. The slow air thinned out suddenly, and he plowed shoulder-first into
Milch, tearing him free of the weapon and the girl. They skidded across the rooftop into
the massed legs of the gaping Rat-towners around them. Twisting his neck around,
Azusa could see the bullet’s white tracer trail arcing down toward the Interface.
 “Look back there,” said Mary, pointing down the Interface. “Just so you can’t say
your entire night’s been wasted—now you’ll recognize him when you see him. That’s
Adder there, on his famous machine.”
Limmit followed the direction of her outstretched finger to the small clot of people
a long distance down on the street. It was hard to see much from this far away. He had
a brief impression of a grinning, knifelike face, when the sound of a small explosion,
muffled by distance, hit his ear. It seemed to come from somewhere high in the
darkness; he looked up and saw nothing but the lightless shapes of L.A.’s buildings. He
turned back in time to see a red spot, like a rose or a small vein bursting in his own eye,
appear down the street where Dr. Adder was.

Nothing could be heard over the roar of Adder’s motorcycle. Pazzo’s head
shattered without warning between Lyle’s hands. A faint tingle like electricity burned
his lips as bone splinters and fragments of pulpy tissue flew in a nimbus of vaporized
fluids. Blood welled from the neck of the body collapsing and twitching like a puppet,
washing over the larger pieces of facial structure that had already fallen to the sidewalk.
Lyle’s hands closed together on something warm and damp, and he went into great,
back-arching, vomiting convulsions, Pazzo’s tongue being expelled from his mouth like
some blood-swollen leech.

“Shitfire,” said Adder. Stunned. The cycle’s engine died, snorting and coughing as
if drowning. “Somebody just got Pazzo.”
 “Really?” said Droit, looking rapidly from Adder to the corpse and back again. He
took out his notebook. “Could you describe your reaction to that?”
 ❖

“Es wird mirganz angst urn die Welt, wenn ich an die Ewigkeit denk,” sang the small,
yellow plastic radio. It was just before noon; some earth tremor had toppled the radio
from the window sill onto the floor, switching it on. Limmit woke at the sound, tangled
up in sweat-soaked sheets. Panic-stricken, he jerked his bare feet to the cold wooden
floor and looked around for some place to hide the still-smoking pistol in his hands. He
looked down at them and saw that they were empty, the palms pink but bloodless. A
dream, he thought stupidly, as the last fragments evaporated. Something to do with last
night. The music flowed on, all atonal strings and horns whining. Slumping, spine
curved, against the wall at the head of the bed, he ran his tongue over corduroy-
textured teeth; he had never awakened in Phoenix with a mouth like this.
On the other side of the bed, Mary slept on, exposed, the bed coverings in a puddle
at Limmit’s feet. He watched her even, childlike breathing raise and lower gently her
dark-coffee breasts and their nearly black aureoles. Her eyelids with their dark lashes
lay unmoving, untroubled by REMs or other night phenomena. If she was dreaming at
all, it was of immobile, sunlit landscapes free of last night’s sudden, conclusive splash of
violence. From which Mary had pulled him to this room, after he had run halfway up
the Interface, a fear clenching his heart, to see Dr. Adder vanish completely behind his
iron gates, leaving behind the mangled corpse for the suddenly numerous police and
silent crowd.
He pulled himself across the bed, closer to her. The wet stain in the middle of the
bed had evaporated, absorbed into the night air’s humidity. He leaned down and kissed
her forehead, causing her eyelids to flutter and then open, regarding him calmly.
“What’s that music?” she asked softly.
“Wozzeck, ” he said, leaning back against the wall. “By Alban Berg.” He knew it
from the small collection of tapes, all German vocal works, left behind in Phoenix with
his paperbacks. They had belonged to his father: the only material remainders of that
shadowy yet distinct figure that had ever come into his possession, other than the black
briefcase now stored beneath the bed.
Ein guter Mensch, Limmit echoed the opera’s captain inside his own head, der sein
gutes Gewissen hat, tut alles langsam .... Wrapping her arms around his bony waist, Mary,
ignoring the incongruous radio, said, “It’s nice to have you back.” She smiled, turning
her face away from him shyly, as if she felt it foolish, a small betrayal. Just like, thought
Limmit painfully, the first time years ago. His heart constricted with the memory’s
pang. Wasn’t there one single gesture of hers, one word or smile or anything that
couldn’t slip like this through all his defenses?
At the Phoenix Egg Ranch, Limmit’s mother had died when he was ten. He hadn’t
cared much for her, finding her only interesting as a link through the past to the vividly
remembered image of his father. Given to alcohol and depression, she hadn’t given the
young Limmit many details about Lester Gass, other than the often repeated fact of his
having stranded his wife and five-year-old child at the ranch, one of the many
enterprises he controlled or had a hand in. Still clear in Limmit’s mind was the image of
his father’s face, staring at him from the door of the helicopter that was bearing Gass
aloft, until both helicopter and father disappeared into the Arizona sun.
Not much provision had been made for young Limmit upon his mother’s death. He
moved in with R. C. Cuthbertson, the harmless old fart who was running the brothel
back then. The old man had been his mother’s only friend on the ranch, feeding her
alcohol and sympathy in exchange for brief hand jobs. When Limmit grew older and
ran into disciplinary problems at the company-run high school, Cuthbertson, in the
manner of a wise old uncle, introduced him to the contents of the brothel’s drug
cabinet.
This is a ssssnap, said young Limmit to himself, oozing through his scholastic
career. The world and its contents shrank into a level, featureless plain. The high school
was actually little more than a holding pen, detaining its occupants until they were old
enough to go to work among the chickens. The teachers appreciated Limmit’s new
cooperative attitude, even though he did seem to slouch a lot and only mumbled in
response to questions. For his own part, Limmit felt warm and comfortable, insulated
from the other adolescents, whom he had never (except for the overfriendly Joan) really
seemed to fit in with. He had always felt a barrier, compounded partly of his own
mixed feelings about his father, between them and himself. Fuck ’em all, he would
fuzzily repeat to himself.
At age eighteen, upon graduation, Limmit discovered that he had somehow, while
wrapped in his cozy private miasma, neglected to fill out the form, a routine matter for
all students, requesting exemption from Selective Service processing. Notified of his
subsequent induction, he craftily filled his suitcase with what he calculated to be a
sufficient supply of his favorite downers from the drug cabinet, enough to last his three-
year hitch. They were all confiscated from him upon stepping off the bus that had
brought him and the three or four volunteers from the ranch’s graduating class to the
army training center near Salt Lake City.
After boot camp, young Limmit found himself in the Army of the Northern
Midwest, under the leadership of General Abraham Romanza, spending most of his
time toting one end of a huge metal tube studded with various lensed devices over the
gentle agrarian hills of Ohio and surrounding states. No one ever saw General
Romanza. At one point in his military career, young Limmit read on the wall of a field
latrine that the general spent all his time back at GHQ, chasing army nurse tail and
personally farting on any and all requests for transfer of duty— and Limmit believed it.
The Midwestern Liberation Front, led by the feared Anna Manfred, was reaching some
kind of zenith and blowing up autonomic farm machinery by the long ton, leaving
square miles of accelerated two-month wheat rotting in the fields. This waste was
overseen only by the smoldering hulks of the giant combines that had had the entire
agricultural responsibility, from seeding to reaping, to themselves. The Army of the
Northern Midwest, Limmit included, trudged through the fields, chasing in slow,
methodical soldier fashion the revolutionary bands.
As it turned out, too methodical: one of Anna Manfred’s lieutenants deduced that
the army’s search pattern, supposedly random, was in fact a simple mathematical
progression, a semispiral based on the set of primes. Once the pattern, which had
indeed been set up by General Romanza’s big military model computer, was figured
out, all of the army’s future moves were easily calculable. Which fact greatly helped the
MLF in setting up an ambush (ill-famed since in military circles) some eighty miles out
of Cleveland.
Most of the troops died immediately in the crossfire. Young Limmit and the other
half of his tube-toting team, a Spec. 4 named Jetsam, were pinned down in the
combined wreckage and impact crater of their division’s hot-lunch copter. For the rest
of the afternoon, they disposed of slowly cooling coffee and sandwiches, only slightly
singed, and listened to mingled weapon and death noises. To pass the time, Limmit
sorted through the company’s mail sacks, which had burst open in the copter’s crash.
Dead letters: there were not going to be any recipients for them, let alone an actual mail
call. Not surprisingly, none were addressed to him. He opened them, extracting letters
from home, seminude Polaroid snaps from girlfriends, dear johns from others, small
packages of crushed cookies, socks, et cetera. The contents of one small package were
more interesting than the others.
Evening came, and they were surrounded at an indefinite distance by an unknown
number of revolutionaries. Limmit had little conception of them other than what had
seeped through from an army indoctrination film six months earlier at boot camp,
which he had mostly slept through. A woman’s voice crackled metallic over a bullhorn:
“Imperialist lackeys ...” (“Shee-it,” he could hear her comrades laughing among
themselves, good-natured from excitement and success, at the melodrama.) “How’s
this,” continued the bullhorn to both groups. “Hand the tube over to us undamaged
and we’ll give you your lives and safe escort out of here. That’s a promise.”
To young Limmit’s surprise, Spec. 4 Jetsam yelled back “Nuts!” to the unseen
enemy, sincerely dredging up a fragment of some old movie seen at boot camp. Limmit
had thought these conditions excellent. Jetsam disagreed, fervently proposing instead
that they wipe out about forty-five degrees of the encircling revolutionaries with the
one projectile they had for the tube. Young Limmit didn’t bother pointing out the
remaining degrees of pissed-off neo-Bolsheviks that would descend upon them after
they had shot their wad, only slipped between the Spec. 4’s ribs a six-inch, superbly
balanced and honed blade he had removed from an undeliverable package earlier in the
day. He wiped the blade on his pants leg, inserted it into the boot sheath the doting
parents of their undoubtedly dead son had thoughtfully enclosed, tossed the tube over
the rim of the crater, and made a separate peace.
The surrounding revolutionaries turned out to be only seven in strength, three men
and four women, a fact that didn’t shake Limmit’s belief in the correctness of his
surrender. Somewhat autonomous within the MLF, they stayed behind, mopping up,
while the rest of Anna Manfred’s troops regrouped to the east. The leader of the little
band was Mary Gorgon.
True to their word, within reason, and impressed with his quick-thinking execution
of the reactionary Spec. 4, the revolutionaries fed young Limmit a mixed diet of Marx,
Lenin, Malcolm X, Peter Camejo, and others, none of which impressed him very much,
en route to a drop-off point from which Phoenix would be accessible.
“Why Phoenix?” asked Mary. It had been his request.
He didn’t answer. The chemical burden of his high school fog had dissipated
enough to let a certain native cunning and ambition, his father’s heritage, emerge. Or
else his rare, if not singular, spurt of positive action in instinctively snuffing Jetsam had
catalyzed him into no longer being content to be an object moved by other people’s
forces. At any rate, at that point he was already formulating plans for his return to
Phoenix.
(The plans were never put into effect. Even though he still carried the handy blade
inside his boot, it had not been necessary to actually use it on old Cuthbertson, in order
to clear his way for the assumption of the position of brothel-keeper. The mere showing
of the knife to him in private was enough to send the old man into a fatal syncope. After
that, Limmit seemed to run out of steam, the ability and willpower of his father no
longer being secreted from Limmit’s glands. He was will-less, content to let things ride
until a year and a half later when Joe Goonsqua had shown up.)
“Have it your way,” said Mary. The life of a revolutionary for her, he knew: good
times with high moral purpose, touch of fatalist quixotic. Sometimes, watching them
sing ancient Cuban guerrilla songs around the campfire, he suspected her and them to
be in it solely for the fun of it. That they wished it would never end, by defeat or
victory, because they would never find anything else that was such a kick. Came
daylight, however, and he knew that wasn’t the case. He realized that she was ready to
die for some vision of a far-off humanity, even taking on faith the validity of her own
actions. Did it really do any good? It probably wasn’t even appreciated by its supposed
beneficiaries, snug in their gigantic residential complexes on both coasts, or accorded
anything beyond nuisance value by its enemies. Sometimes, on a lunar basis tied in
with her menstrual cycle, she doubted. Even so, there was always a mischievous
pleasure she found in this stuff.
Two nights before they reached the drop-off point, she took him aside to make her
most forthright recruiting pitch. “Come on and join us, old E. Allen,” she said. “Lotta
laughs waging people’s war.”
 “Nah,” he said. “I really think I’d like to see a little more of the world before I get
my ass shot off.”
An army plane, using infrared scopes, spotted the band on the ground below. As if
young Limmit’s words were a cue, it released a small covey of thermotropic personal
missiles at them. Only two missed, distracted by the campfire, the others bursting like
jam-filled plastic bags the internal organs and shattering the major thoracic bone
structure of everyone but Mary Gorgon and Limmit. Through the rest of the night, he
watched her cradle in her arms the one who took longest to die, the rest having expired
almost immediately upon impact. Her tears mixed with the blood that seeped into her
rough shirt as she gently rocked back and forth, crooning to the stiffening body. He had
thought she was so hard.
When the last body had also drained into the red ground around them, she crawled
in with him into a roll of blankets and continued to weep as he, as well as he could,
comforted her.
Later, he would wonder if she had been merely grateful for that comfort. Or if he,
Limmit, had somehow become identified in her mind with her dead and beloved
comrades. When they reached the drop-off point, she told him she loved him.
“You love everyone, minus capitalists,” he said. He felt oddly surly. Perhaps
whatever controlled his emotions had reasoned that if he hurt her enough, she wouldn’t
mind his leaving.
“What’s there for you in Phoenix,” she said. “A lot of mutant chickens and redneck
sodomites.”
“Maybe that’s where I belong.”
“Why. Feeling guilty? Join the MLF to forget that Spec. 4, some other sin, your own
child-of-exploiters inheritance.” “Shove that.” He started walking west, toward
Phoenix. He looked back and thought he saw that her strange, sadness-tinged smile
meant from this distance that she cared for him too much to stop him, that she had
already seen so many loved ones depart from her, the way they could depart only from
someone who cared. He turned and started running, until he tripped and fell,
breathless, scraping his hands raw against the road. Pressing his palms to his mouth, he
sucked the dirt from the oozing cuts, then got up and walked on.
Now that smile pressed itself against his ribs, in this room in L.A. Is it victorious
now? wondered Limmit. Pushing her away, he got up and walked to the window. He
picked up the yellow radio from the floor below the sill and studied it. “I didn’t think,”
he said finally, “that there even were any radio stations still operating.”
She watched him, eyes wide. “It’s just a small one,” she said. “Operated by an old
guy living in Rattown, using a miniaturized transmitter—you can only pick up his
broadcasts in L.A. Just during daylight. Plays mostly old recordings of German opera.”
“What’s his name?”
 She shrugged. “I don’t know. They call both him and the station KCID, whatever
that stands for, if anything. Nobody ever sees him, but he’s supposed to know
everything that happens in L.A.—he does a little patter between recordings. He’s got a
thing about Adder, too, just like everyone over in the slums.”
Limmit wished he could hear that, but decided he couldn’t take any more Wozzeck
right then. It should be L.A.’s theme song, he thought, switching it off and turning to
look out the window. The top pane was shattered, leaving pale jags of glass like teeth in
a mouth, and the lower was mottled with dirt. In L.A.’s hazy sunshine, hunched-over
figures crawled and sifted through the debris that lined the length of the Interface.
“Who are those people?” he asked without turning around.
She studied his thin, pale legs and narrow buttocks, his back with an angry splash
of acne across the shoulders on top of layers of adolescent scar tissue. He doesn’t take
care of himself the way he should, she thought. “They’re scavengers,” she said, not
needing to look. “Old broken-down freaks and cripples that crawl out from Rattown,
looking through all the garbage on the street... For lost coins or pills and shit they can
gobble up right on the spot. Anything they can sell for small profit they carry back into
the slums.”
He came away from the window and sat down beside her on the bed. Idly, he
stroked her brown thigh. “You know what comes next,” he said quietly.
She looked up into the eyes set deep into his narrow face. “Your ‘business,’ I
suppose.”
“That’s right,” he said, nodding.
She took his hand and laced her fingers between his. “In a minute. Please.”
He shut tight his eyes, and squeezed his captured hand together, her knuckles
between his, as much to hurt himself as her. “No more minutes,” he said.

The noon sun appeared over the edge of the skylight and dropped directly onto Dr.
Adder’s face below. Auggh, shouted characters in his dreams, interrupted: I’ve been
shot. We die. Which was true, for dreams and all their inhabitants dissolved as Adder
cocked one eye open at the glare, screwed it shut again with its partner, and shifted his
head upon the rolled-up surgical sheets and bandages that served as a pillow, out of the
sun’s remorseless trajectory. Goddamn sun, he muttered to himself. Or some damn
god? Whatever.
He propped himself up on one elbow and studied the nude figure sleeping next to
him. After the sudden disintegration of Pazzo’s head last night, the remaining levels of
adrenaline and other secretions in Adder’s bloodstream had taken his shock and, as was
his personal tendency, flipped it over into flat-out paranoia. Adder had pulled the
young whore and the motorcycle back behind the black iron gate, locked it, pulled the
whore inside the building’s front door, locked it, and from there retreated into this
room where all his surgical supplies were kept, locking doors all the way behind them.
Here he had pushed two gurnies together against a wall, some vague image (perhaps
gleaned from one of Betreech’s vintage cinema westerns) in his mind of using her body
as a shield as he blasted with a .44 Magnum at the assailants besieging the door of this
sanctum. (None of these fancies had had any effect, though, in diminishing his constant
and irrelevant erection.)
That was last night, however. Now, all stimulants and their engendered fears had
drained out of his system, leaving behind only furry teeth and a general feeling of
shitfulness. He pulled the sheets from their bodies and prodded the girl’s ass. “Hey,” he
said. “Come on, wake up. Big day ahead of us.” Especially for you, he added
maliciously to himself.
The hooker rolled over and looked into his face. Her clear, unblinking eyes
indicated that she had been awake for some time now, lying motionless beside him.
“Some big deal,” she said bitterly, as if she had been rehearsing it in her mind all this
time. “I didn’t figure a night spent with the great Dr. Adder amounted to nothing but a
meager screw on a couple of slab-hard body carts in a crummy storeroom.”
Adder scratched and yawned. “What were you expecting. No, don’t tell me: you
cheap cunts are all alike. You expected in exchange for the services of your almost
virginal body, in addition to the special analytical and surgical services of mine that you
and your pimp are counting on, one, a heady, erotic dash up the Interface on Dr.
Adder’s famous machine, and two, some kind of wonderfuck in Adder’s richly
appointed pleasure palace in the hills. And what were you expecting as regards this?”
He waved with one hand his half-erect organ. “Did you think my cock had little beady
eyes and a forked tongue that flicked in and out? Shitfire,” he said, laughing and rolling
on his back. “You are too much. Just what do you think I owe you?” The girl said
nothing. Adder peered at her through the corner of one eye. She seemed to be looking
through him at the wall beyond, a curiously satisfied, postorgasmic look on her face.
“Even though,” she said dreamily, “it’s only been a week or so, it seems like such a long
ways from when I was my high school valedictorian to here.”
Adder sneered at this. “All alike,” he said, shaking his head. “A// alike. You just
don’t know how all alike you are, do you?” The phrase, with these few repetitions,
seemed to float loose from its meaning and assume some new, sinister potency. “Every
one of you hookers I ever came across out on the Interface claims to have been her high
school valedictorian—Christ, some of you probably believe it. And you know why all of
you build up this fantasy of being super-achiever, pom-pom-honors-society-academic-
socialite chicks?”
Her eyes diffused over his face in anxiety, dreading revelation.
“You really want to know why?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, trying to suppress the quaver in her voice. “Lay it on me.”
 “Because,” he ground on, “it’s not enough to have been a typical dumb Orange
County high school slut and then become a typical L.A. loser trick. Your fall, your
degradation, wouldn’t be far enough. For you, it’s got to be unique, it’s got to be from
the very top to the very deepest pit you ever saw on Mox’s stupid TV show that excites
all you dumb, self-destructive chicks so much. Well, listen”—his voice dropped
ominously in pitch—“you’re all alike; you’re not unique; you won’t hit bottom, it’s
beneath anything you'll ever reach; and you won’t know finally anything more than you
did as a sweet, dumb Daddy’s little snatch-on-legs back in Orange County.”
A tear spread around inside the rim of her eye. “Thanks,” she said tightly. “You
really give someone a lot. For this I got laid?” One corner of Adder’s mouth lifted in a
small smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll still get a good bargain. This afternoon I’ll
run an ADR on you, and tomorrow morning I’ll start to work on whatever I get from it.
I’ll even give you your choice of general or local anesthesia, in case you want to watch.
You’ll get what you came here for. It’s just that it’ll cost you more; you’ll be leaving
behind more than you counted on.”
“You must really hate women,” the young whore said evenly, “to do all that you
do to them, and tell them this too.”
“Ha,” said Adder. “I love women—I give them what they want.”
“All of them?”
“No, of course not. Just those lucky enough to want what I have to give them.”
“Some love,” she said, dry-eyed again. “You give us what we want even when it
destroys us.”
“More than that,” said Adder, his smile tightening into something else. “Even
when it destroys me.”
“That’s happened?”
“Once.”
“I see,” the whore said bitterly into her pillow, “that you recovered all right.”
Shitfire, thought Adder with a tinge of exasperation. This is all good fun, but I’ve
got work to do. Plus Pazzo is no longer here to help. He gave the other gurney a violent
shove with one foot, sending it rolling into the opposite wall. The girl almost fell off, ass
first, onto the floor, but managed to remain clinging to it as it clattered across the room.
From there she glared at him with as much dignity as she could muster, as he swung
his legs over the side of his gurney and started to pull on the clothes he had worn the
day before.

Limmit heard his name called out behind him and turned around, wincing under
the intense L.A. sun. Droit came trotting up the sidewalk, grinning.
“Well, here we are again,” said Droit, walking alongside and clapping him on the
arm. “What’s your reaction to L.A. by daylight?”
 The scavengers turned blank, weakly omnivorous faces upon them, then looked
back to their own busy paws, turning over leaf after leaf of trash, like the pages of some
intensely interesting book or catalog. “Nice place to visit,” said Limmit.
“It has its points,” said Droit absently as he jotted the reply in his notebook, then
stowed it away again in his coat.
“If you don’t mind being shot at.”
“Oh, yeah. That.” Droit nodded. “Poor Pazzo. Really a nice guy when you got to
know him. I just got back from seeing some of my contacts over in Rattown about the
shooting. A profitable trip—a certain someone will be, ah, generously eager to hear
what I found out.” He grinned and winked at Limmit. “You’re going up to see Dr.
Adder now?”
“Yeah, so are you, I imagine. Good thing for you I came along, as I doubt if Adder
would have seen you at this time. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s putting
the final touches on one of his big jobs.” They reached the black iron gates and stopped
in front of them. “You can come in with me. In return, I’m sure you won’t mind my
hanging around when you open this for Adder.” He tapped with one finger the
briefcase hanging from Limmit’s hand.
“I don’t give a shit,” said Limmit, watching Droit press a large button in plain sight
beside the gates. “At this point.”
Adder heard the buzzer, swore, laid down his tools, wiped his hands off, and
exited from his surgical room. Striding across the front office, he picked up a half-brick
from a small pile. At the window, he looked down and saw Droit with someone else he
didn’t recognize. Droit at least was the very person he wanted to see. He tossed the
brick back into the center of the office’s clutter, and went down to open the door.
After leading them silently up to the office, Adder turned to Limmit and said, “Pull
a chair up to the desk. Just toss whatever’s on that one to the floor.”
Limmit’s stomach flinched at the words, and then, as Adder walked on behind the
desk, his trembling hands lifted the stack of mildewed magazines from the indicated
chair. Clits & Shits, the top of the stack proclaimed. The Magazine Lesbian Coprophages
Can Trust. Jesus, thought Limmit, carrying the chair across the room and setting it
beside Droit’s chair. I’m about ready to shit. Adder’s thin, knife-faced figure, clad in a
white laboratory coat, exuded force and presence. The cluttered room seemed
dominated by him, as if it were a projection from somewhere inside himself.
 Leaning back in his own chair, Adder incised a casual scalpel cut across the much-
scarred desktop. “So,” he said to Droit without looking at him, as if the ceiling were
more interesting, “what’s new?”
“Actually,” said Droit, “trends look pretty stable at the moment. I can predict quite
confidently that sexual interest in amputation will maintain at its present level, with
perhaps small upswings through the summer months in genital alteration, junkie
balling, and—”
Something beneath Adder’s controlled surface broke through violently. “You
stupid shit!” he yelled, flinging the scalpel in Droit’s direction. It struck the wall
opposite and imbedded itself there, quivering in minute counterpoint to Adder’s
words. “You think I’m interested in that right now, for Christ’s sake? My goddamn
right-hand man gets his fuckin’ head blown off last night two feet away from myself,
and all you can tell me is what a bunch of Orange County suckers are going to want to
get their feeble rocks off on this summer?”
“Well,” said Droit, unruffled, “I do have other interesting things you might care to
know, but I also have, so to speak, expenses—”
With a grimace, Adder pulled bills from a roll he took out of the lab coat’s pocket
and tossed them across the desk. “Is that enough?”
“If you can spare a few of those green and white spansules, the combination
kainine/barbiturate analog ... yes, those,” said Droit, nodding as Adder extracted a clear
plastic vial from one of the desk’s drawers. “Betreech is droughting up the market on
these right now,” he explained, pocketing the cheerful-colored cylinders, “to drive up
the price. Good rate of exchange on these over in Rattown.”
“The fluctuations of the Greater L.A. Dope Exchange I’m not interested in,” said
Adder impatiently. “Get on with it.” “Relax,” said Droit. “You’ve got nothing to worry
about. They were just having one of their usual assassination parties up in Rattown. The
triggerman wasn’t aiming for you or Pazzo. He was zeroing in on that MoFo that was
hanging around there last night and he muffed his shot, is all.”
“ ‘He muffed his shot, is all,’ ” mocked Adder. Despite his sarcastic tone, it was
evident that a great deal of his tension had dissipated, or else had been drained back
into some internal storage. “That’s real fucking reassuring, is what that is. I ask you,” he
said, appealing rhetorically to Limmit’s blank visage, “just trying to run a little business
here, do I need this? Just a goddamn good capitalist, for Christ’s sake, and I’ve got to
have a bunch of loser gun freaks trying to do me a big favor, which I also don’t need, by
potshooting MFers all over the street. If they start driving customers away, I’m really
going to be pissed, believe me. Besides”—he turned back to Droit as if Limmit were a
microphone gone dead—“what kind of bullet was that anyway, to make Pazzo’s head
crumble like that?”
Shit, said Limmit to himself, does he even stop to breathe? Droit shrugged. “You
know those fans of yours. They’re always rooting around in the cellars of the old CIA
building back there, coming up with new goodies.”
“Great,” said Adder disgustedly. “Just great. Next thing you know they’ll be
coming up with goddamn nuclear weapons. Maybe one of those briefcase jobs ...” His
brows lowered ominously as his eyes flicked from the briefcase in Limmit’s lap to
Limmit’s face and back to Droit. “Hey,” he said with a halflaugh and one thumb
pointed at Limmit, “just who is your friend here?”
Limmit took a deep breath and leaped recklessly into the opening. “Dr. Adder,” he
said, “my name is Limmit, E. Allen Limmit, and I just flew in from Phoenix yesterday,
in order to offer you this unique item, the value of which I’m sure you’ll appreciate.” He
snapped open the briefcase and shoved it across the desk at Adder. That’s enough, he
said to himself, his larynx failing. He’ll know what it is.
Adder studied the contents of the wide-open briefcase for a long moment.
“A deactivated flashglove,” he said finally, looking over the edge of the lid at
Limmit, his face immobile. “You came all the way from Phoenix to show me this? Big
deal. I’ve got three already in my collection.”
“I suspected something of this nature,” said Droit, almost sadly, leaning back in his
chair. He displayed no desire to even glance at the briefcase’s contents.
Limmit leaned across the desk and thumbed a small switch inside the briefcase.
Small red points and shapes of light throbbed on like flames or open wounds. “It’s not
deactivated,” he said quietly, savoring the triumph and the small measure of control, or
at least equality, it gave him. “It’s live.”

Adder’s eyes widened as he gazed upon the transformation of the briefcase. What
had been before cold and inert now glowed and pulsed with a crystalline, gemlike
vitality. Shitfire, thought Adder.
He gently stroked the shining metal surface. It seemed fantastic, an object heavy
with the weight of the past. Nothing else, he knew, that Lester Gass had devised for the
infamous CIA Special Operations Teams had had such an effect in ending the five-year
history of the Popular Anarchy movement that had come so close to seizing national
power. At one point, the anarchists had controlled all of Washington and Oregon and
the northern counties of California. As a point of fact, though, the CIA’s Program
Drench B had been so successful, in its own way, that the CIA itself was disbanded
afterward.
All that remained of the movement was Anna Manfred and her small bands,
growing smaller and more ineffectual every day as they continued to dynamite easily
replaced farming units. All that remained of Program Drench B were relics such as the
flashglove Adder gazed at, and a small group of abandoned buildings surrounded by
decaying walls and barbed wire out in the Mojave Desert.
The power of it, thought Adder. Several hundred thousand anarchists and
sympathizers died in that little fenced-off rectangle in the desert. Executed
continuously, three shifts a day, by machines like this. Lying in the briefcase, the
flashglove looked like a severed forearm and hand of gleaming chrome, rigid, blunt-
fingered, and studded with various small apertures. Gass had surpassed himself in
designing it, taking a minor archetypal image of the twentieth century for inspiration.
The metal hand, the incorporation of some lethal inanimate object into one’s own being,
appearing as it still does in the nightmares of all age groups and used too in lots of
cheap popular media. In some old TV programs and pulp stories it is merely weighted
into being a crushing hammer; in others it can talk. It could be argued that western
man’s obsession with the idealized karate blow is a form of the metal hand archetype,
the rigid, steel-calloused striking hand representing the same fascination with the
artifacts of destruction, the desire to make them part of oneself, the fear of those who
have succeeded in that.
At any rate, said Adder to himself, Gass succeeded. The flashglove materialized
some dark part of everyone’s subconscious.
Many of its victims had frozen, like hypnotized rabbits, when the executioners,
each with a forearm amputated and glove installed into its place upon the stump,
approached through the crowded enclosure, swinging ceaselessly and randomly. The
device operated off the energy of the bearer’s central nervous system; it was equipped
with optical, auditory, and thermal sensors and detection devices giving the bearer a
fantastically heightened awareness of everything around him; and programmed with
enough logic/memory circuits to respond, under the bearer’s control, faster than either
he or the victim could even see. A special alloy sheathed the glove, capable of emitting
lethal harmonic vibrations that exploded flesh and bone upon contact. The image of the
executioners, with the multisource blood flowing off their leather aprons, their eyes
glistening with growing lunacy, one bloody hand upraised, had been psychologically
conceived by Gass to transfix and terrorize everyone who saw or even heard of it.
After Program Drench B’s success, and a certain revulsion that set in the ordinarily
unsoftened hearts of the government, there was nothing to do but shoot the now
hopelessly psychotic executioners. Gass eluded the hit team sent after him, and died
somewhere in the desert west of the camp, ending his faceless and mysterious career.
The flashgloves were all destroyed or defused into inert lumps of metal. Except for this
one, thought Adder. This one escaped somehow.
Along one side of the briefcase’s interior, little rectangles glowed, surrounding
minute black words with red. SERVO MECH I: OPERABLE, read Adder to himself,
SERVO MECHII, OPT. INPUT, ONF-R. Oh fuckin’ marvelous! thought Adder. The best
of all, the largest little red sign that blinked on and off with a quiet, demanding
authority: READY FOR GRAFTING ... READY FOR GRAFTING ...
Adder’s throat felt strangely parched. “Tell me,” he said. “How did you get ahold
of this?”
“Lester Gass was my father,” said Limmit. “When the flashgloves were originally
produced for the CIA, he had one more made than the contract called for. The hiding
place out on the Phoenix Egg Ranch was the only thing of value he left me.” He felt his
voice tremble—would Adder be able to tell that everything after the first sentence was
what Goonsqua had coached him to say?
“I suppose,” explored Adder, “you have an idea of how much something like this
is worth to me.”
“I think we could arrive at a price that would be ... mutually satisfactory.”
Sharp little bastard, thought Adder, grinning. He’d better be careful. Hate to have
to snuff him.
Droit leaned across the desk. “May I see?” Adder, with elaborate graciousness,
turned the briefcase around to him.
“Very nice,” said Droit after a few seconds of silence on everyone’s part. “Most
rewarding from many viewpoints. Though I wonder what it being bugged signifies?”
He pulled his lip abstractedly, lost in thought.
“Bugged?” said Adder, stiffening. “Where?”
“Right there,” replied Droit, pointing to a near-microscopic dot near the edge of the
briefcase’s lining. “Pinhead scanner.”
Adder, mouth set and eyes narrowed in fury, tore the black velvetlike cloth away
from the lid. He extracted a small, flat metal pack connected to the scanner node by a
silver filament.
Jesus shit, thought Limmit, feeling the blood drain away from his extremities. That
lying bastard back in Phoenix shopped me good, all right.
“All right, Mr. Limmit, if that’s really your name,” said Adder grimly, holding the
scanner and transmitter toward Limmit on one flat palm. “Just what the fuck do you
think you’re trying to pull?”
Limmit shook his head desperately. “I didn’t know that was in there. It’s someone
else’s scam, not mine.”
“Sure,” said Adder. “Hope it doesn’t offend you if I check that out a little. Even if
this isn’t your own cute little idea, I’ve got a good notion who’s behind it.” He flipped
the metal pack over. Inscribed on the reverse side were the words PROPERTY OF
GREATER PRODUCTION CORPORATION, BROADCAST MEDIA DIVISION. Adder
picked up the scanner node between one thumb and forefinger and waggled the
extended middle finger of his other hand at it. “I hope you’re watching, Mox,” he
snarled. “Up your ass with your pathetic schemes.” He turned back to Droit. “Did you
know anything about this whole shtick?”
“Sorry,” said Droit brightly. “It’s completely new data to me.”
“Well, since you’re so fucking useless,” Adder said, pulling from the lab coat a .44
Magnum, the same one he had slept with the night before, and handing it to Droit, “I’m
sure you won’t mind keeping an eye on our little friend from Phoenix here. Just make
sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
 Limmit turned slowly to face Droit as Adder got up from the desk, tore off the lab
coat, and threw it over the empty chair. Droit was casually cradling the pistol in one
hand, the barrel unwavering at the very center of Limmit’s chest.

“I thought you were a dispassionate social researcher,” said Limmit.

The gun in Droit’s hand didn’t waver. “I am,” he said. “Then how come you’re
holding that on me? Aren’t you afraid you’re going to bias your findings a little?”
Droit shrugged. “Maybe, but then again I’ll be able to keep on collecting data if I
stay on good terms with Adder. If I piss him off, I won’t be collecting anything much
longer.”
“Shit.” Limmit collapsed back into his chair. The short dialogue had exhausted all
the bravery he could summon up. Into the pit, he thought wretchedly. Even as a kid he
had periodically sensed an abyss beneath himself, one into which at any moment he
could fall, the inevitable result of the simplest or even cleverest of his actions. He felt it
always there, waiting for him to slip up, the subreality beneath the whole world, an
alternate universe from his science fiction paperbacks constructed of shit: Fecal planets
moving around long, brown stars. Busted hopes. This must be what hell feels like, he
said to himself, filled with self-disgust at his own stupidity, even more than fear of its
consequences. This is what I get for listening to that fucker Goonsqua.
Droit coughed apologetically. “You really don’t have that much to worry about,”
he said. “Adder isn’t vengeful or anything, if you’re really on the level with him.”
“Wonderful,” said Limmit. “The only trouble is I’m not.” He watched despairingly
as Droit shifted the gun from his right to his left hand, then wiped the sweaty palm on
his pants.
“Does anybody have any cigarettes?” Limmit and Droit both turned their heads in
the direction of the girl’s voice. In one of the two doorways on the far side of the office a
young girl stood, pallid blonde and naked. She looked back at them, unblushing. “I’ve
looked all over this goddamn place, but I swear that guy’s some kind of ascetic or
something.”
She crossed the room, small breasts shimmering, and perched on the front edge of
the desk between Droit and Limmit. She leaned across its surface, one leg placed farther
out for balance, converting her body into a single pleasing line from bare foot to
shoulder. Limmit thought he could detect a gray pallor, an analog of L.A.’s atmosphere,
growing beneath her still-pink skin. She searched through the desk’s surface rubble,
pushing the closed briefcase to one side. “I give up,” she said disgustedly, turning
around and, hunched over casually, placing her palms on the desk’s edge next to her
thighs. Her movement dissipated the pure line, the body lapsing back into gravity-
bound postadolescent flesh. “Sure you don’t have any cigarettes?” she asked.
“Sorry, don’t smoke,” said Limmit, detumescent from misery.
 “Neither does Adder,” said Droit, “so there really isn’t much point in looking
around here.” With his unoccupied right hand, he fished his notebook from his coat and
propped it on his knee. “By the way,” he said from behind gun and pen, “how did
things go with Adder last night, after Pazzo got shot? Your little deal still on?”
The girl peered at him. “Oh yeah,” she said after a moment. “You’re that nut Leslie
told me about, always going around asking weird questions. You were there last night,
weren’t you?” She considered for a few seconds. “Yeah, I guess everything went all
right last night. I mean, he wasn’t so shook up or anything that he couldn’t function, if
you know what I mean. He said he was going to run an ADR on me later today, when
he got done with some other business. Is this”—she nodded at the gun in Droit’s hand
—“part of what he was talking about?”
“No,” said Droit, smiling and jotting something down. “This is something else that
came up. Did he say whether he was going to start work immediately after the ADR?
Was it going to be a straight ADR run, or with any variations? Just asking for research,
you know.”
“What the fuck’s an ADR?” asked Limmit before the girl could reply. “I keep
hearing those letters.”
Droit looked at him in mild surprise. “You know,” he said, “I’m really beginning to
wonder about you. Are you sure you’re in the right line of work? I mean, you don’t
know shit about L.A.”
Limmit glanced briefly up into the naked girl’s amused eyes. “Come on,” he said to
Droit, “just tell me what it is. Maybe I’d like to know before I die, okay?”
Scratching his chin thoughtfully, Droit said, “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you;
it’s just that, after all, information is my business, you know ...” He trailed off, looking
expectantly at Limmit.
“You must be kidding.” Shaking his head in disbelief, Limmit extracted his roll of
bills and peeled several off into Droit’s empty hand. This is ridiculous, he thought. I’ll
probably be dead in a few hours. He marveled at the fatalistic calm that had suddenly
descended upon himself. What a way to spend the time.
“That’s fine,” said Droit, pocketing the money. He coughed, clearing his throat.
“ADR is an acronym of undetermined meaning, referring to a process invented, in fact,
by your father, Lester Gass. That is, if you really are his son.”
“I am.” Worse luck for me, thought Limmit.
“Well, we’ll see. At any rate, the ADR was devised by Gass for interrogation
purposes, but not for extracting information based in reality. Gass was interested in
something else, something below that.”
“The pit,” mumbled Limmit to himself. It figures. “Materially, the ADR consists of
two unique drugs, synthesized exclusively now for Adder by the same person who
manufactures nearly all the drugs in L.A. Both drugs are injected intravenously into the
subject and the interrogator. The first shot acts to eliminate the barriers between the
different evolutionary stratifications in each person’s cerebral cortex. All the
submerged, bestial layers are united with the topmost, conscious layer into a single
entity. An alligator that can talk.”
“What’s the use of that?” asked Limmit.
Droit ignored him. “You’ll see. The second shot establishes a telepathic rapport
between the subject and the interrogator. It’s a cumulative effect—it wouldn’t work
without the expanded psychical energies created by the other drug. Both individuals, or
rather their egos complete with the formerly buried parts, meet on a common symbolic
ground outside their bodies.”
“That part’s kinda hard to believe.”
“Believe what you want—you paid to know. The whole effect of the second drug is
a refinement of some of the original mind-uniting drugs of the late seventies. Those
were eventually given up by most people because they were only able to give the
sensation of a rapport between minds, without any actual details—so faint a sensation
that it would be impossible to tell whether it was an illusion or not. The other drug Gass
devised for the ADR resolved that question.”
“So what’s the point?”
Droit showed a small irritation at the interruption. “The point is,” he said, “that the
interrogator, if he was strong enough, could examine the totality of the subject’s mind,
conscious and subconscious, while they were in this common psychical meeting
ground. It’s like a separate world or universe: the details of it are created by the
interaction between the two minds. Most people, after having the first drug injected,
have the topmost, normally the only conscious, layer of the mind overwhelmed by the
release of the submerged parts. The individual’s psychic energy goes into constructing
elaborate fantasies, satisfying the buried, primeval lusts and hungers of the former
subconscious, using the symbols and thought patterns of the mind’s top layer. If the
interrogator can control those portions of himself, and resist the attacks of the subject’s
expanded and united mind, then it’s all spread out before him—the entire contents, not
just the conscious part, of the subject’s mentality.
“The only problem with it,” continued Droit, “was that, at the time, Gass himself
was the only person able to control it to that purpose. CIA men who tried it either came
back with nothing, having succumbed while under the ADR to the power of their own
subconscious, or else, if they persisted, becoming subject to a particularly nasty and
irreversible decay of the higher conscious functions. A unique cancer, sort of, since it
consisted of those sections of the brain that contained the primitive, unconscious areas
of the mind absorbing the other sections. As if the beast within had been finally aroused
by the ADR and was attacking and eating its long-time captor. Eventually, after some
really interesting personality changes, the autonomic functions would also be
consumed and the would-be interrogator would die.
 “The only effect on Gass, and since then, of course, on Adder, was a residue of the
telepathic effect created by the ADR’s second drug. Close physical proximity to
someone who’s been a subject under the ADR before, and the injection of the two drugs
into either individual’s bloodstream, is enough to stimulate the ADR’s complete effects
in both.”
“I still don’t see,” said Limmit, “what good that is to anybody, let alone Gass or
Adder.”
Droit sighed and spread one hand alongside the gun. “Gass used it for his own
purposes—he got the inspiration for the flashglove from interrogating captured
anarchists with the ADR. Adder, however he got ahold of it, is able to control it too, but
for a little different end. Evidently it takes a certain type of mind, where the conscious
layer isn’t as far removed from the submerged sections to begin with as in other people,
to get control of it.
“The heart of Adder’s position in L.A.’s little social scheme is that he does two
things with the ADR. For one price, sometimes taken as a percentage of future earnings,
he’ll run a young girl, fresh on the Interface, under the ADR, and then surgically bring
about the particular masochistic fantasy he saw there. It’s kind of moral, actually. An
aptitude test for determining what degradation would be most satisfying; what they
were looking for in L.A. to begin with, or else they wouldn’t be here, only it was too far
buried for them to be sure of discovering themselves.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” said the girl, emotionless.
“For a higher price,” said Droit, “Adder runs the ADR on those who can afford to
pay for it, mostly big shticks in the GPC and high army brass. That’s to find out what
private, basic lusts are in them, aching to be released and satisfied. Whereas most poor
schmucks from Orange County you see on the Interface have to find their own private
kinkhood through experimentation. In both classes, nearly all the fantasies deal with the
amputation or mutilating or altering of the sexual object. Hence, all of the chopped
hookers out on the street. The rich customers get one cut to the exact specifications of
their ADR-revealed hunger—there’s never any problem finding the girls for it—and
store them in little rooms in the buildings along the street. They swap door keys every
now and then for variety, but for the most part they’re fantastically attached to their
little pets. After all, deep below, that’s what they’ve been lusting after for millions of
years.”
“Some humanitarian, all right,” said Limmit. He accepted Droit’s explanation—it
revealed too much about L.A. not to be true to some degree.
“In his own way, he is,” replied Droit. “Though I doubt if he gives a shit about
much of any of it except the money.”
“You guys are fulla shit,” the girl said disgustedly. “Lotta metaphysical garbage, if
you ask me.” She looked Limmit full in the face. “You’d understand better the way
things are in L.A. if you spent more time out on the street instead of listening to weird
bullshit artists like him.” She jerked a thumb at Droit. “Do you want to know how it is
with this ADR thing?” Limmit nodded dumbly, vaguely wondering why the girl was
affecting such a phony “from the gutter” speaking manner.
“No hooker,” she said, “is going to make any money in L.A. unless she has a
specialty. And without money, she isn’t going to have a friend or anything else that’s
nice to have. So, one way or another, she gets ahold of Dr. Adder. He dopes her out and
peeks in her skull with this ADR stuff, and finds out what she’d be good at, or what
parts she wouldn’t mind losing. Then he does it, back there in his operating room. Oh
yeah, and sometimes he runs it on some fat rich guy and finds out what he’d really like
to do, but is too afraid to admit to himself. That’s all.”
Droit rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.
“You know,” said Limmit to both of them, “he could be a fake. There might be no
ADR at all. He just saws away however he pleases, and the suckers bang away at the
results, believing because of his reputation that he must be right.”
“There’s a possibility of that,” admitted Droit. “I’ve never been under the ADR, so I
can’t say for sure. But Adder doesn’t like to trick people. He likes being strong enough
to tell them flat out what he’s going to do to them, and then doing it. And everybody
digs it, of course.”
“This whole thing is hopeless,” said Limmit. A sudden wave of despair surged
over him again. He had fallen into the hands of some mad doctor who extracted great
bloody lizards from people’s brains and then chopped away until the people resembled
them. A surgeon who cut out carcinomas and threw away the rest of the living body as
not wanted. Adder was probably capable of turning Limmit into a toad for minor
annoyance, like some childhood nightmare. And here he sat, talking it over with L.A.’s
last and cheapest independent social researcher and some stark-naked chick with
amputee ambitions. “Hopeless,” he muttered again.
“It passes the time,” said Droit. With a grin, somewhat malicious, he picked up
from beside the girl’s left thigh on the desk a small ticking clock inscribed “To Dr.
Adder, Best Regards, Admiral Sennet,” and displayed its face to Limmit. The hands had
been replaced with miniature scalpels.

The flanks of the motorcycle lay dappled in the leaf-filtered sunlight. Adder trod
over the moist layers of decaying leaves and other soft vegetation to the door of
Betreech’s residence and factory. The door was only visible as a slightly less overgrown
patch in what seemed to be a general facade of dark vines and leaves. Adder brushed
aside several of the vines, found a small metal button, and depressed it, hearing the
loud, raucous buzz inside the house. No answer came. “Motherfuck,” said Adder, and
bent down to dig through a layer of decomposing greenery nearly a half-foot thick at
the base of the door. He uncovered a rotting doormat (WELCOME), spotted with bright
dots, colonies of mold. Beneath the mat was a brass key.
Inside the house, after the door swinging open had deposited a residue of dust,
cobweb fragments, and dried birdshit on his head and shoulders, Adder shouted
Betreech’s name. Again there was no answer. The sound of his voice seemed to travel
only a few feet before it was sopped up by damp carpets and drapes, lush with mildew
and rot. Adder’s shouts seemed to have as much weight as the cheap veneer peeling off
the suburban petit bourgeois furniture that had been in the house when Betreech had
acquired it, and never bothered to dispose of. One of the house’s encircling vines had
managed to penetrate the wall, but had not got very far, becoming despondent and
sickly in the light-scarce gloom inside the house. This had left the field open for the
vine’s microscopic, airborne cousins. The fabric of the couch and chairs was gradually
being replaced by a richer, self-renewing velvet; the chintzy end- and coffee-tables
became lacquered with dull and intricate finishes, evolved and bent by moisture into
shapes undreamed of in the bright eyes of long-dead faggot interior decorators.

“What a mess,” said Adder softly, being an admirer himself of the baroque that
springs up from the intricacies of filth. He walked into the kitchen where the stairs into
the cellar had been plunged, wondering if anything would sprout from the garbage in
his lab back on the Interface, if he kept it as moist as up here in the thickening jungles of
the Hollywood hills. He tended to doubt it. A vividly garish mold, sprung from one last
peach-half left forgotten in its can sitting on the edge of the sink (one of many in various
stages of rebirth), dripped down the wood cabinet, pointing to the trap door set into the
buckling linoleum floor. A series of ketchup dots disappeared, the last neatly bisected,
at the edge of the trap door. They were still fresh, as Adder could tell by smudging one
with the toe of his boot. At least he’s still alive, thought Adder as he pulled open the
trap by its metal ring and descended.
At the bottom of the stairs, three bare concrete corridors split off at forty-five-
degree angles. From the first two on the right, Adder could hear the varied noises of
Betreech’s autonomic pharmacological factory, muffled only slightly by the several
weighty intervening doors. I might have known, thought Adder disgustedly, seeing the
pale sheet of light emerging from beneath the door at the end of the short corridor to
the left. As he stepped toward it, he could hear a familiar, rapidly slapping sound.
Inside, Betreech lay sprawled diagonally in the centermost of a group of a dozen
upholstered theater chairs. The only illumination in the room was the large white
rectangle cast against one wall by an antiquated motion picture projector. The
projector’s take-up reel spun relentlessly, slapping the tail end of some film against the
lens housing. Adder strode to the projector, switched it off, and turned on the lights.
The unconscious old man was dressed in a woman’s Civil War-period crinoline ball
gown, the long white skirt of which was rucked up past his thin, blue-veined legs to his
narrow waist. His naked hipbones stuck out like butterflies swathed in dough. One
hand still cradled his now detumescent flesh; a small liquid stain trailed down one
thigh, matching the trail of saliva from his mouth, subject to the same gravitational pull.
Adder caught the scent of the breath that whistled out of the old man’s mouth,
observed the dead pipe, stuffed with ashes, balanced carefully on the arm of the chair.
“Ah, Betreech,” he muttered. “Beating your meat at age eighty-plus, just like some
brain-fogged old geriatric in an Orange County rest home.”
Adder retreated out the door and returned in a few minutes with a glass of water
from the upstairs kitchen, in the cleanest glass discoverable in a short search. “Come on,
old scout,” he said, bringing the glass and the old man’s lips together. “You’re going to
dehydrate your tongue some day, going to sleep with your mouth open like that.”
The old man’s mouth sipped automatically at the water, then consciousness spread
outward from the vegetative functions of the brain. Two unfogged, slightly reddened
eyes fluttered open. Seeing Adder, the withered head smiled, which, in combination
with the antebellum outfit, gave the impression of a gay mummy laid to rest in drag
and come alive again. “Ah, Adder,” the old man said, apologetically dabbing at the
drying semen with one edge of the crinoline skirt. “Come upon me in the midst of my
little vice, eh?”
Dr. Betreech’s little vice consisted of dressing up like characters in his collection of
old Hollywood films and stroking himself to a climax at the thought of the sexual
activity imagined to be occurring in the ellipsis between one cut and another. “Jerk off,
smirk off,” said Adder. “As long as you’re happy.” He remembered the time he
discovered Betreech here dressed in a baggy fur ape suit scrounged up for him from an
abandoned costume shop in the slums, and excitedly claiming to have discerned four
explicitly sexual ellipses in the last surviving print of the 1933 King Kong—as simian
pure a film, thought Adder, as Betreech had ever shown him from his collection. It was
alarming how much Betreech had aged since then, only a few years ago: Now, the small
violence of each film-inspired orgasm left him unconscious. It all reminded Adder
idiotically of a description he had heard as a kid of some apocryphal male (black,
naturally) who had an organ so big that when fully erect, the loss of blood from other
parts of the body caused him to black out. Maybe Betreech’s brain, exercising overtime
to supply the (to him) missing party of all these old flicks, had grown the same way.

“So,” said Betreech, sipping at his glass of water, the crinoline skirt down primly to
his ankles, “what brings you up here? Just visiting a lonely old man? Unusually
thoughtful of you.” Perched on the back of the theater seat in front of the old man,
Adder shifted uneasily. “Come off it,” he said. They had gone through all this before, as
if life had become looped somehow and threaded into Betreech’s projector. “Why try to
make me feel guilty, for Christ’s sake? Do you expect me to come up to stay and cook
for you, clean up that terminal mess upstairs? Nursemaid you while you rot into
senility with one hand wrapped around your decayed old prick?”
“I still don’t think you understand much of anything,” murmured the old man.
“Go live your own life out, see if I care. I worry about you—is that all right? I’m old
enough to be your father, I set you up in business; allow me that much at least.”
“Great,” muttered Adder. “I’ve got the world’s largest dope pusher for a Jewish mother.
So what do you want already?” he yelled suddenly. “A signed and notarized
confessional of all I owe you? Bill my office for it, you old pervert.”
“You’re too defensive,” sighed Betreech, shaking his head, giving up. “All right,
what did you come up for?”
Adder sulkily told him about the flashglove. Perhaps Betreech’s more extensive
contacts within the Rattown underworld and with the mysterious suppliers of his raw
materials had leaked some knowledge concerning it and the plot behind.
“Haven’t heard a thing,” said Betreech. “Maybe this character who showed up with
it acquired it honestly, or at least the way he says he did, and Mox bugged it without his
knowledge. What did the fellow say his name was?”
“Allen Limmit. He says Lester Gass was his father, and he inherited it from him.”
“Might be,” said Betreech. “Gass did have a son who would be about that age now.
When I was still an honest anesthesiologist I assisted at Mrs. Gass’ delivery, in a CIA
hospital. Seems a lot longer ago than twenty-odd years.”
“Mmm,” said Adder, stroking his chin meditatively. “What do you suppose I
should do about the thing?”
“Are you asking me for advice? Don’t buy it. There’s quite a few stiff laws left over
from when the CIA was disbanded against unauthorized persons possessing a live
flashglove. Obviously Mox is trying to set you up for some kind of a bust, thinking that
the heaviness of the crime would be enough to circumvent his partners’ and your
friends’ conniving to protect you. I’d say drop it—maybe turn in this Limmit character,
like a good citizen.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” said Adder. “I want it.”
“Why? To complete your image? One useless machine like your motorcycle isn’t
enough, you need another power symbol? You wouldn’t be able to graft it on without
giving up your fine lucrative practice, which you need two skilled surgeon’s hands for.
Give that up, and your former friends couldn’t care less while Mox had it and you
deactivated.”
“Look, I just want it, okay?” said Adder. “Just to have, not to use.”
“What a dumb schmuck,” said Betreech. “He wants to have it just as proof that he
can have it. Big bad Adder—ain’t nothing he can’t do.”
“Fuck off.”
“It means so much to you, find your own damn way to get it.” The brown-spotted
hands angrily pressed the crinoline’s wrinkles out against his lap. “Remember you have
‘friends’ willing enough to do you favors. Why ask my advice?”
“Thanks a lot,” said Adder, springing from his perch. “You’re a real fuckin’ help.”
Betreech followed him up the stairs, through the moldering house’s kitchen and
front room, out the door, and watched as Adder mounted his motorcycle. “Don’t
worry,” the old man called out, conciliatory, from the front doorway. “You’ll work it
out all right.”
Adder grunted, then spoke. “Take it easy on those movies. No double bills from
now on, all right?” Without looking around for Betreech’s nod, he kicked over the
engine and slid off down the hill trail packed with dead leaves. He looked around once
and saw the old man still watching his progress, the expression on his face made
indiscernible by distance, but the fragile antique crinoline gown glowing in the
fragmented afternoon sunlight.
* * *
“All right,” said Adder, seating himself down behind his desk. He balled up the
white lab coat, money included, and wiped the street’s dust from his face. In front of
him, Droit looked composed and inquisitive, the young hooker seated on the desk
vapid, and the still mysterious Limmit nervous and extremely uncomfortable. He’s
probably been frozen like a rabbit since hearing my cycle snarl into the courtyard a
minute ago, thought Adder. “Enough of this futzing around. You, Droit, give me back
the gun and bug off. Yeah, don’t worry, I’ll let you know of any developments. You”—
he prodded the girl in one buttock —“get back in the other room. I’ve got enough
trouble keeping this place neat and tidy without every broad-assed hooker in L.A.
sweating all over my business papers.”
As the two departed silently, Adder swiveled his chair in Limmit’s direction.
“You,” he said, wagging the gun at Limmit for emphasis, “stay right where you are. I’ve
got a little phone call to make.” He got up, keeping part of his vision and the gun
pointed toward Limmit, and searched through several molder-ing piles of debris. A
stack of vintage skin magazines tottered, then avalanched in a flow of pink and brown
photos, revealing a telephone behind them.
Limmit heard him punch out a number. Adder seemed to be in a good humor:
what did that mean? “Give me General Romanza,” he thought he heard Adder say
behind his back. “I don’t care,” continued Adder in a louder voice, “you stupid capon.
Just put him on.” Pause. “Well, when he gets back tell him to call Dr. Adder. Don’t
forget, or it’ll be your ass.” Adder sat down behind the desk again. He stroked the gun’s
barrel with one forefinger, and smiled crookedly at Limmit. “Why don’t you,” he said,
“tell me all about it. Who you are and where you got the flashglove.”
“My name really is Limmit. I am Lester Gass’ son. I got the flashglove back in
Phoenix. A GPC exec named Joe Goonsqua flew out to the egg ranch and gave it to me.
He arranged for me to come out here and try to sell it to you; I don’t know why. I was
to keep whatever I got from you for the glove as my profit in the deal.”
“Jesus,” said Adder. “And you fell for that? A setup like that smells wrong about
twenty different ways. A frame for me, and a nice way to get burned or killed for you.”
He tossed the gun on the desk beside the black briefcase and tilted back in his chair,
hands clasped behind his head. “You know,” he said, “I really believe you. I can’t help
feeling for you. Just another punk kid out looking for an honest con. Just like me a while
back, before I hooked up with old Dr. Betreech. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be a
specialist in some Orange County medical center right now, with a heavy trank habit,
ulcers, and children. Puts me in a nostalgic mood, yes indeed.” He fell silent for a
moment, deep in reverie. Suddenly the chair descended back onto all four legs and
Adder leaned across the desk toward Limmit. “How would you like to work for me? I
need a new assistant; my old one got snuffed last night.”
“I was on the street,” said Limmit. “I saw—”
“Yeah? Don’t worry about it, it’s not an occupational hazard or anything. Purely
accidental, risks of city living, you know. How about it?”
This took some consideration. Limmit felt partly numb with shock. If his fortunes
took any more sudden falls and rises he was afraid his lunch would follow them next.
“I don’t know,” he said, and laughed nervously. “What would I have to do?” “Just
general hassling. And give me a hand at the operating table. Know anything about
surgery?”
Limmit told him of his work with a scalpel at the egg ranch’s brothel.
“That’s more than that dud Pazzo knew,” said Adder. “In your case, you’d already
be halfway to picking up a good trade. Earn while you learn.”
“Why me?”
Adder shrugged and spread his hands. “Who can I find in L.A. that would work
out? Everybody here is on some image kick, even me to some extent, though I’ve got
mine under control. I need someone who can cut through all this obsessive crap, deal
with just profit and cash.”
“Maybe,” said Limmit. He gazed around the dingy office. “But if I’m going to stay
here in L.A. I want to know a few more things. You don’t have to be one in order to
want to know a little about lunatics, especially if you’re locked in the homicidal ward.
Droit told me about that ADR of yours, and why all the top GPC guys are so stuck on
you they even let you operate down here at all. All except this John Mox, that is. If your
fans are running around taking potshots over our heads at his fans, I want to know
what the story is.”

It’s not much. A sort of joke. Some people actually don’t find it funny, though. I
suppose it wouldn’t be fair for you to sign on without having heard it.
About the time I was graduating from high school, which is a ways back, the exec
board at the Greater Production Corporation decided to initiate a new program for
some of their factory workers. Volunteers were to get cash bonuses, and toasters, TV
sets, et cetera, for undergoing surgery designed to improve their job performance. GPC
bigfarts figured they’d save a bundle by retooling their workers’ arms and hands to flex
in different ways, assume different stress and load capacities, and so on, rather than
retooling or redesigning a lot of expensive machinery. After all, if you’ve got some
apparatus that performs about two hundred separate functions on a plastic flange
extrusion, it’s cheaper to alter your assembly line workers to handle the item in the
factory’s most efficient way, rather than trying to build the machine to fit all its actions
to be within natural human capabilities, right?
So anyway, a small problem—no medical personnel geared up and specially
educated to do the necessary surgery. Big Orange County-wide aptitude test, I get in it
by accident, and they pick me, both for my high natural ability and the GPC’s desire to
kill two birds with one stone. I had some so-called “personal adjustment problems”
when I was a kid. This way, they could show what a productive citizen I had been
therapied into. Me, I just wanted some soft job with lots of spare time for my hobby,
personal vegetation. They ship me off to the Auckland Medical Center in New Zealand.
Not many people around here are even aware there is such a place. There I meet up
with Dr. Betreech, the screwed-up med student’s unofficial friend and adviser. He was
working up to being deported for peddling illicit substances. Things happen.
Five years later, we both come back to L.A. and hole up right on the fringe of the
empty slums closest to the Orange County industrial district. There’s already a little
sporting life going on here. Those GPC pricks got no hold on me, didn’t even bother to
sign me to any contract in exchange for my high-priced education: they thought the
prospect of a big salary was enough for their little pet cut-up to come home to Orange
County. It wasn’t. Pretty soon, Betreech and I are a big success, making big money doing
interesting work; becoming cultural heroes and objects of frenzied worship in our spare time.
The Famous Amputationists’ School is looking for people who like to slice.
Whatever. Within months every GPC official is a customer of mine, including John
Mox, even though he was head of the Video Church of Moral Forces back then as well.
Just another satisfied customer, happy for me to arrange the customized tickling of his
personal perversions. Little did he know what plots were circling around him, like pet
vultures of mine. I had a grudge on him; I was just waiting for the perfect moment.
One day he comes up to my office, this office, with the hots. Wants me to do a big
genital alteration (his thrill) on some girl he said he had found himself. Get this: I
discovered later it was his wife. Some guys have no pride, even though she was, hmm,
somewhat of a slut anyway. Her name was Jing, like the sound a cash register makes.
The chance I had been waiting for. I assure him I’ll give his woman a box like none he’s
ever been into before, and set to work. It takes me a while, but I do it just the way I
want.
Now, I knew for a fact that Mox was as square in his screwing as everything else he
did. Missionary position, with the lights off, always. So when that chick’s cunt closed
around his organ in an unescapable rictus, all he could see when he looked down in
horror at their interlocked loins was the faint phosphorescence I had given my little
surprises, as they slid out of their cleverly concealed sheaths, but that was enough. In
my ADR probe of Mox I had seen particularly strong a certain nightmare figure found
in nearly every man’s subconscious, and now here was Mox, stuck hilt-deep in that
dreaded nemesis, the Vagina Dentata. The grip around the base of his shaft was so tight
that no fear was frenzied enough to drain even a drop of blood sustaining his erection,
as he beat on the poor girl’s chest, she bewildered by all the uncontrollable functions I
had built into her body to be triggered by simple coitus, mouse in baffled trap. He had
time for probably one long scream as the long shark fangs I had filched from the ruins
of the UCLA oceanology labs slid inexorably slow out of her groin and closed in on his
prick like a dumb fish in a hard ivory sea anemone. If Goonsqua, his faithful little
second-in-command, hadn’t been right outside the door, rushed in, and rushed him off
to the hospital, while the girl went into her own hysterics at the sight of the bloody and
mangled penis being spat out of her like a particularly ugly abortion, Mox would have
been dead now for a long time.
Can’t win ’em all, I decided, sitting behind the little peephole through which I had
observed (infrared scanner) the whole thing. In a way, Mox castrated was even more
satisfying than Mox dead. I returned to my practice a pleased man, and things have
continued as they are to this day.
 ❖

“Shoo-ee,” said Limmit, pale. “Some story.”

“Nothing much, really,” Adder said, shamming modesty. “Just another urban
folktale of sordid bloodlust.”
“Mox became so down on you after that?”
“Well, sure. Before, he tut-tutted on his MoFo broadcasts in a general way about
me and the whole Interface, but it was sheer hypocrisy—-just another thing too good to
share with the masses. With his cock, however, went his duplicity. He’s become more
powerful now, image-wise—attracts all those messed-up leafleteers you see out on the
street, just itching for a chance to break loose and kill every dealer and whore in L.A.
Mox keeps ’em repressed, however, to maintain his influence inside the GPC. He’s not
quite as dumb as he is fanatical.” Limmit sat silent, thinking. “How come,” he said
finally, “you wanted to get him?”
The amusement disappeared from Adder’s manner in a way that subtly frightened
Limmit. The skin of Adder’s face tightened around his sharp bones, like a sheath about
to be split open by the knife within. “Because,” he said, “everything I remember about
growing up over there in Orange County came walking into this room wrapped up in
that one person. Not because of some archetypal conflict of polarities, anarchy versus
order, son versus father, or any of that other crap, but simply because I hated his bowels
the same way I hated them when I was a goddamn child, for Christ’s sake, and my
teachers would load me up on downers and tranks and set me in front of his
sententious moral face on the tube. He was younger then, but it was the same face that
came walking in here that had told me practically every day of my life till I was
eighteen to sit still, work hard, be good, and don’t say anything. So I chopped off his
balls, a childhood dream come true. I used to fantasize as a kid, with whatever part of
my head was still mine underneath the layers of numb cotton wool they shoved in, that
all my teachers, from nursery school on, were Mox’s paid agents. The truth was worse
—they did it almost for free. And they did a good job, too.
“Look out there.” He cast a hand at the window that looked out over the street.
“Everyone thinks it’s called the Interface because L.A. and Orange County share the
same pathological boundary there. Well, that might be—it’s as good an explanation as
any. But it’s my Interface, too. Every part of me that came out crippled or dead from
Orange County is out hooking on that street, trolling down my spine for all corners.
And there isn’t any part of me that got so crippled up that it isn’t staggering or crawling
down that pavement in the same direction, regardless of incline, down or up. I mean,
they did a job on me. When I stumbled into taking that surgical aptitude test long ago,
all I could even think of wanting to be (at that point, it’s hard to want anything) was a
fuckin’ librarian—the closest modern equivalent in my mind of a monk in a medieval
retreat. And that’s where I’d be, thanks to Mox and all the little Moxes, if certain things
hadn’t happened. Maybe Betreech, in his little den in Auckland, let me try out the ADR
once too often; maybe the reptiles, the alligators, climbed up out of the sewer, up the
toilet bowl, and ate, ass first, the good little boy squatting there taking his respectable,
constipated shits. Whatever. It’s really no wonder to me at times that all those
psychopaths in the slums are obsessed with me. The Interface isn’t anything I created
with Betreech’s help. It is me, spread out with a giant hard-on thrust deep into the
subterranean recesses of L.A. Godhood? I fuckin’ love it.”
“Jesus,” said Limmit, aghast at the vehemence that had swelled into Adder’s voice.
“You’re really crazy.” He regretted it instantly, remembering the scalpel, gun, and
flashglove laid out on the desk, a lunatic arsenal.
Adder laughed, becoming calmer. “I’m not that much of a megalomaniac. I’m just a
hardworking hustler with a good con and an unhappy childhood like all the rest.
Everybody’s got a horror story to tell. And a proposition for you. Go on, take it, it’s
what you want, you little hungry pimp. You won’t wake up some night to find me
standing over you, drooling onto a machete clutched in both hands.”
“So, all right,” said Limmit. He could feel his heart accelerating, dizzying him.
“When do I start?”
“I’ll get hold of you tomorrow. The only job I’ve got going at the moment I’ll be
able to wrap up by myself tonight. Oh yeah, one little thing right now.” He opened up
the flashglove’s case and extracted the pinhead scanner. He placed it on the desk, its
tiny eye gazing at them both. Taking the roll of money from the lab coat, he handed the
bills over to Limmit. “Thank you,” said Adder, looking directly into the scanner, “for
bringing me this fully active flashglove, which I’ve always wanted for my personal use
and possession.” He picked up the scanner and held it to his grinning face. “Thought
you’d have to wait longer for your evidence, didn’t you, Mox? Do your worst,
schmuck.” He tossed it into a desk drawer and slammed it shut. The telephone rang
across the room.
As Adder rose and went to the telephone, Limmit sat lost in thought. “Romanza,”
he heard Adder say; the rest he couldn’t make out. I’m into it now, thought Limmit.
One way or another.
A few minutes later, the phone conversation ended. “Hey,” said Limmit, turning
around in his chair, as Adder replaced the receiver. “What happened to the girl? Mox’s
wife?”
For a second, it looked as if Adder hadn’t heard. He looked blankly through
Limmit, as though no one existed in the chair. Then his eyes refocused on Limmit’s face.
“Her?” he said. “She died, I guess.”
 Through the window, Dr. Adder could see the sun going down in flames from the
sky over L.A. He sat at his desk in the darkening office, the shadows from the debris on
the floor lengthening toward him, and kneaded his forehead with one hand. A few
seconds ago, he had flung across the room the small red capsule that would have
dissolved the headache, an aftereffect of the ADR. The capsule had bounced off the
window glass with a tiny click, joining all the other items underfoot. Fuckin’ thing
anyway, Adder thought moodily.
To take his attention from the pain behind his eyes, he glanced again through the
contents of the manila envelope Romanza had sent over. The army messenger had been
waiting down at the gates when Adder had come out of the ADR.
The first sheet, postdated a week ago, detailed the legal incorporation of something
called Adder Research Laboratories; the other sheet awarded that organization the
army’s contract for research into “the military potential of certain obsolete and
discontinued devices of CIA design and origin.” Good old Romanza, thought Adder,
his spirits rising a little. He’s earned his little treat.
There probably won’t even be any word from the law, reflected Adder. Mox had by
now undoubtedly heard of his coup, his authorization for possessing the flashglove. He
patted the briefcase sitting on the desk, then opened it and placed the papers inside. It’s
mine now, he thought, even legally. It’s a new trip, being an incorporated research
laboratory.
From behind him, he heard a groan and the sounds of stumbling flesh. She must be
coming out of it, he thought, turning around. The young hooker appeared in the door
from the stockroom, red-eyed and groggy looking. “Shit,” she said in a shaky voice,
“that’s what I feel like.” She crossed the room and sat down heavily in one of the chairs
in front of the desk. “That’s some rough stuff, Doctor.”
“Think so?” said Adder. “Don’t worry. You won’t have to go through it again.”
Her skin, paler now, seemed subtly looser as well, the small breasts slack as though
slightly deflated with age. It was as if something inside had contracted in fatigue.
“Remember anything?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Blank.”
“No one ever remembers except me.”
“What did it say?” she asked flatly, looking full into his face. “What’d you find
out?”
“Ever hear of junkie balling?”
Nodding slowly, the blood draining from her face, she whispered, “The Long
One.”
“That’s right,” said Adder. He pulled open one of the desk drawers and extracted a
syringe and a small vial filled with a colorless fluid. He laid them on the desktop. “I can
do it later, if you want.”
 “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Go ahead and do it now. It takes a while to set
in, doesn’t it?”
She watched as Adder silently pushed the needle through the vial’s seal. “I
suppose I should have known it would be this,” she said. “I remember when I was in
junior high school, they actually brought my class on a field trip down here. To scare us
onto the paths of righteousness, I guess—they don’t do it anymore. Because it was
daytime, only the scavengers were out on the street. Then a young woman, a whore,
staggered out of an alley toward us. All the kids recoiled except me. She fell to her
knees right in front of me. There was something strange about her eyes. She tried to
speak, maybe something about the crumpled-up paper in her hands. I remember
thinking it looked like a dirty rose. A real rat-faced man came running up and pulled
her away.” She looked away as Adder pricked her arm with the needle. “They gave me
a sedative on the bus back to Orange County, even though I didn’t need one.”
Adder sat down again behind the desk and tossed the empty vial to the floor.
“Maybe that’s when you did pick up on this,” he agreed.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. In fact, she did appear to Adder to be stronger, her skin
filled out to normality.
“It won’t always be this clear,” he said gently. “This stuff works in progressive
cycles, you know. When you hit the periodic low points for the first year or so, you’ll
remember all that you’re losing, and about to lose. It’s only fair you should know.” “I
won’t regret it,” she murmured dreamily. “You’re being so nice to me. No one ever told
me you could be like that.” “Don’t think I am. You’re just easy money to me.”
“Maybe everyone will be nice to me now,” she continued, even softer. “I wonder
what they’ll all seem like to me. Junkie bailers...”
Adder carried the sleeping girl, the exhaustion from the ADR having caught up
with her, into the stockroom and laid her on a gurney. No more would be necessary,
other than calling the pimp in the morning to come get her.
When she wakes up, thought Adder, pulling a sheet over her bare form, she won’t
be really human anymore. And every day that passes, she’ll be less so. The drug, the
only actual hallucinogen Betreech produced, had been the culmination of the visionary
epoch of drug use that had died out in the seventies. It had a cumulative, altering elfect
on the individual’s genetic structure. Gradually, day by day, the perception of reality
changed as the biochemical makeup of the brain and nervous system was replaced by
the new patterns. The pimp fortunate enough to have such a commodity on his hands
fed and protected it from the sharp edges of reality, and located the customers
interested in intercourse with a body no longer inhabited by a mind that could perceive
them. Adder analyzed it to himself as a form of necrophilia.
Back at his desk, he felt a vague dissatisfaction. Maybe I just like working with my
hands, he thought. It’s too easy, just doing it with a needle like this. He opened the
briefcase again and gazed at the flashglove, not wanting to probe any deeper into the
causes of what he felt.

“Get out of here,” said Mary. Her eyes were narrowed with bitterness and hurt.
Limmit wheeled away from the dark window and faced her as she sat on the bed,
face averted from him. “What’s wrong?” he shouted, though the hollow feeling in his
gut already seemed to tell him. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”
She laughed, short and painful. “Happy? That you’re going to be Adder’s assistant
box chopper? You must be joking.” “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, wounded
by her derision. “What’s wrong with working for Dr. Adder? Running that feathered
whorehouse in Phoenix was better, I suppose.” “Oh, Christ, E. Allen.” She turned her
face violently up to his, the single wet streak down one cheek running into her angry,
pressured lips. “Can’t you see what Adder is? How long do you have to be in L.A.
before you know?”
“Okay, bitch, so what is it then?” asked Limmit, maddened beyond restraint. He
still felt ill from the speed at which he had, without warning, dropped into the pit.
Mary attempted to erase the tremors from her voice, speaking slow and flat. “He’s
responsible for it. Everything in L.A., everything out on that street”—she flung one
hand at the window—“he created. It’s his.”
“That’s a-fuckin’ right,” said Limmit. “And I’d have to be crazy to walk away from
a piece of it.”
Shaking her head, she said softly, “You’ll wind up like him. If he doesn’t eat you
first, like everyone else has been. You don’t understand anything.”
“I understand enough. You’re pissed because now you won’t be able to drag me
into that drizzled-out revolution of yours.” “Get out of here.”
“The Red Madonna,” he sneered. “Mother to the troops. Too much for you to
castrate a man yourself; you just look around for a natural failure. But it’s not going to
be me.”
A fine dust settled through the room, dislodged by the door slammed behind him.
That stupid prick, Mary thought, remaining seated on the bed and watching the blurred
images of the Interface’s light come through the window. Asshole.

The last stitch disappeared, merging into flesh beneath the humming chrome.
Adder switched off the instrument and laid it down beside the unconscious girl on the
surgical table. Perfect at last, he thought perfunctorily, admiring his own handiwork,
the smooth, pink submaxillary skin. It was the only detail that had been left undone
from the night before—in a few hours, Pazzo would be dead for an even twenty-four,
one rotation of the earth.
 The building seemed strangely quiet, bloated with silence, even though Adder
could hear the noises of the crowd on the street. He drifted uneasily into the unlit office,
as though looking for something. He sat down at the desk and switched on the lamp in
the center of its cluttered surface. At the edge of its pool of light, a single ancient skin
magazine lay crumpled. He picked it up and leafed through it, stopping at a tattered
page he thought he had almost forgotten from when he had first seen it, rescued from
Rattown’s underground debris. The young girl’s face in the picture looked calmly into
the camera, somehow angelic among the hands that pulled and contorted her body,
inserting themselves.
Adder hurled the magazine convulsively into the dark center of the room. He
rubbed his eyes, gauging from their slight pain how long he had gazed unblinking at
the gray representation of flesh long ago gone soft, wrinkled, then buried. A good lay,
he decided. That’s what I need. When melancholia strikes, and all else fails, think of
cunt.
Springing from the chair, he strode toward the storage room in which the young
hooker lay sleeping, then changed direction midcourse for the surgery. Romanza won’t
be able to tell, he thought, if I take first crack at his new toy.
Inside the surgery, he stroked the soft flesh of the body on the table. Asleep as a
stone, still anesthetized. Fortunately, according to Romanza’s specifications, all sexual
functions had been placed at the subconscious level, ready to go into action regardless
of the girl’s degree of awareness. Adder turned his back on her for a moment, reaching
for his belt buckle beneath the white lab coat. “Ad,” he heard the sleeping girl whisper.
He spun around, fear rising like a ball of vomit in his throat. The girl was still
asleep, as he swallowed and swallowed, trying to get rid of the nauseating taste in his
mouth. She was, as he well knew, with her modifications incapable of speech. Christ,
thought Adder, sinking slowly upon the table beside her, I’m cracking up. What
happened to the girl? a voice repeated inside his head. For a second he thought it was his
own, rather than Limmit’s. What happened to her?
“Why?” he moaned, pathetic, looking down at the unconscious face. He felt himself
struggling, losing hold of some line of demarcation within himself as the face turned to
the black-and-white one in the skin magazine, then to another. “Why’d he ask that?”
Control! he screamed inside, fleeing into the office. Maintain. He frantically tore
open one of the desk drawers, extracted a cylinder of red capsules, and shook several
into his hand, then mouth. He gagged and vomited them whole onto the desktop. He
stood looking at their wet surfaces, a tremor discernible to no observers in the vacant
room. Toward the circumference of the light, he collapsed slowly into the chair,
drawing his fingers through the clutter and across the compulsive scalpel incisions, like
hieroglyphics, in the wood.
At the edge of the desk, his fingers trapped one of the capsules. He picked it up
and bit into it, chewing automatically. The seeping red line along one finger, from
passing over the scalpel’s upturned blade, went unnoticed. “That cocksucker,” he
murmured, his voice drained and exhausted. “Stupid, cock-sucking asshole.”

Screw her, thought Limmit. She can go shit on someone else’s rainbow from now
on. He walked through the milling crowds of the Interface, no longer alien. I belong
here, he repeated fiercely to himself. On the inside of it all, at last. The hollow feeling in
his gut persisted; he felt as if somehow he had been cheated during his sleep.
Absorbed in his own mood, he didn’t notice the arm approach from one side and
circle his shoulders, halting him abruptly on the sidewalk. A voice pronounced his
name with drunken hilarity. Limmit turned and saw Joe Goonsqua’s florid face next to
his. “Hey, how you been doing?” he said, squeezing Limmit tighter.
“All right,” said Limmit, stiffening warily. “I sold it to Adder.”
“I don’t even wanna hear about it,” Goonsqua replied, his face beaming and shiny
from some chemical exudation. “I knew you’d work out all right. I mean, what are you
doing right now?”
Limmit eyed the sloppy, disorganized figure. “Just hanging around.”
“Yeah? Come to my...” He faded off, befuddled. “Party. That’s it. Was a surprise,
all my pals celebrating my return to Orange County. Floated from there to here. Come
on in; they said it’s nearly time for the big climax.” He tugged Limmit toward an open
doorway.
He hesitated, then allowed himself to be pulled by Goonsqua into the building.
Only when he was inside did Limmit recognize it as the MFers’ hangout bar where he
had run into Droit. All the tables had been pushed and stacked against one wall,
leaving a large open space in which several of the street’s hookers stood around
listlessly. Goonsqua, chortling liquidly, let go of Limmit and pulled two of the hookers
unresisting to the bar at the side of the room.
Limmit turned to leave. Something about the room full of idle whores both puzzled
and depressed him. He felt it obvious now that Goonsqua at least knew nothing about
the briefcase being bugged. He’s too messed up, thought Limmit, to pull anything off
right. He didn’t even tell me how to get in to see Adder.
“Some party,” a bored voice said behind him. He turned and saw a one-legged
hooker leaning on her crutch and surveying the room coldly.
“Aren’t you getting paid for it?” asked Limmit.
“Sure,” she replied. “But I don’t know for what. All the other GPC execs
disappeared ten minutes ago, right out that door. They just left that pig behind,” she
added, pointing to Goonsqua. She looked up at Limmit and smiled.
Reaching into his coat, he extracted a bill from the wad Adder had given him and
handed it to the hooker. “Not tonight,” he said, turning back to the door. “Out of the
mood.”
 Even before he crossed the room and reached the door, he could sense something
wrong beyond it. Complete silence had replaced the Interface’s usual nighttime noise.
Standing in the bar’s doorway, he looked out onto the crowded, motionless street.
All of L.A.’s dealers and hookers were standing bunched together in the middle, staring
frozenly at the far ends of the street. Limmit peered over their massed heads and saw
one last Orange County straight, tiny at this distance, disappear, arguing drunkenly
while being pulled behind a solid mass of MFers standing shoulder to shoulder across
the width of the Interface. The other end of the street, only a few yards from where
Limmit stood, was blocked the same way. The MFers’ hands, below their flushed faces,
were full of long hard objects.

A telephone was ringing somewhere. Adder sat at his desk and listened to it. Had
it been ringing long? he wondered. It was hard to tell; perhaps it had taken hours to
pierce the red capsules’ fog and reach him beneath. The phone continued to ring, and
Adder grew slightly annoyed. It won’t stop until I answer it, a portion of his narcotized
mind realized. He got up, swaying slightly. One hand brushed across the desktop,
rearranging the pattern of objects on its surface.
The telephone lay nestled between stacks of old skin magazines, as he remembered
dimly it had earlier in the day. Their soiled white edges glowed faintly, like flesh.
Adder picked up the receiver, silencing the ringing.
“Adder!” cried Droit’s voice from the phone, abnormally excited. “Where have you
been? Something’s happening—” “Where,” interrupted Adder in a thick voice, “are you
calling from?” It seemed important for some reason.
“What the fuck does that matter? What’s wrong with you?” yelled the voice of
Droit. “You’re gonna have to get your ass out of there, and fast.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Adder. Whatever it was, he felt disinterested, as though it
could not possibly affect him.
“Take a look out your window, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you seen? Mox has gone
—”
Droit’s voice was replaced by a dead vacuum. Adder, without thought, put the
telephone back on the floor and sat down beside it. Inside him, adrenaline started to
flow, slowly cutting and dissipating the fog. In a few minutes, he rose shakily, walked
to the window, and looked out.
Screams, shouts of varying pitches and intensities, struck his ears. It must be a
hallucination, he said to himself. But then why had Droit phoned him? He went rigid,
startled by the sudden, glaring realization that the carnage in the street below was real.
MFers armed with short pipes chased the Interface’s whores, pimps, and dealers,
bludgeoning them senseless or dead upon capture. Already dozens of skull-smashed
bodies lay twisted and heaped on the sidewalks. Spots and trickles of blood merged
into a general flow, filling the gutters like a small river. As Adder watched, some of the
MFers, exhausted and grinning, exchanged places with the others guarding the street’s
exists. One pimp dived between their legs, struggled past their grasping hands, and
sprinted down an alleyway. An MFer with a red armband, who seemed to have been
giving orders, came running up and extended a large, blued-steel pistol at the fleeing
figure. A small hole appeared in the pimp’s back, then he was lifted from his feet and
propelled a yard farther down the alley, landing in the pool of blood and tissue that had
burst from his chest. The gun’s noise echoed over the chaos in the street.

That’s what Droit was trying to tell me, thought Adder. Mox must’ve gone crazy.
He wouldn’t dare—why hasn’t the GPC exec board stopped it already— His thoughts
snapped off. Immediately below, he could see the heavy padlock dangling broken and
useless from the iron gates. He spun away from the window and froze, facing the
darkened room. All of the toxins seemed to dissipate instantaneously from his
bloodstream. Faintly, on the floor below him, he could hear the sounds of a group of
men trying to enter the building as quietly as possible, but betrayed by their own
excitement.

What the fuck is going on here? thought Limmit, dazed in the middle of the street.
He looked around wildly for some exit from the buffeting chaos. The motion of
maddened, fear- and blood-crazed runners on all sides doubled him over convulsively
for the second time since the massed MFers at either end of the street had surged
forward on signal from their red-armbanded leaders. He heaved dry: nothing was left
from the first vomitus when he had narrowly eluded the MFers swarming over their old
hangout bar at the far end of the street.
 A pair of crutches clattered on the ground before his eyes. Limmit looked up and
saw an amputee hooker, her eyes glazed with animal panic, fall to the asphalt beneath
an MFer’s short metal pipe. The weapon imbedded itself so deeply into the base of the
girl’s skull that her fall twisted it out of his hands. Before Limmit could move, the MFer,
his face maniacal, leaped massive and toadlike at him, knocking them both sprawling
onto the sidewalk. The MFer scrambled to force his weight on top, as Limmit, with the
strength of unthinking reflex, jerked one fist up into his groin. The heavy body rolled
off, writhing, lost under other running feet. Limmit, breathless, knelt on hands and
knees and panted. Delirious, he thought he could feel the confusion and death flow
wavelike over his back.
A hand grasped his shoulder, then jerked him over onto his back. Another MFer
grinned and straddled his chest, pressing his metal pipe down on Limmit’s throat. The
carnage’s noise grew louder and merged into a single roaring sound in his ears. A silver
line of saliva trailed from the MFer’s rictuslike grin and Limmit felt its liquid warmth
across his brow and cheeks. The pressure on his throat became an iron band of smaller
and smaller dimensions as the MFer pressed his thumbs, wide as houses, into his
larynx.
Suddenly, as the black, vacuumlike dots before his eyes started to grow and merge
with each other, the metal pipe’s pressure ended and the MFer rolled off Limmit’s chest,
and lay on his side, staring astonished into Limmit’s face. He grunted and spurted
blood around the handle of the knife sunk deep into his back.
“Come on,” said Mary urgently and jerked Limmit to his feet. She started to pull
him down the street but he pulled his hand free. “Wait a minute,” he said calmly. He
walked back to the dead MFer and pulled the knife free. He was right—it was his own.
She must have taken it from my boot just now, he thought dazedly. Maybe she lost her
own already, just getting to me. He wiped it carefully on the gray coat before
reinserting it into its sheath in his boot.
“Are you crazy?” yelled Mary, grabbing his arm again. “Come on!” She dragged
him after her for a few yards until, as if suddenly waking, he ran alongside her,
following her lead.
“This way,” she said, pointing to a small alleyway between buildings. “Quick.
They’ve spotted us.” He looked behind and saw a dozen MFers, one with a red
armband at their head, racing over the corpse-littered street toward them. The
unceasing noise from the Interface was eclipsed briefly by the sound of the leader’s
pistol, and the bullet thudding into the bricks on one side of the alley.
Before Limmit could follow Mary into the alley’s dark mouth he tripped over an
outstretched hand on the sidewalk. Landing painfully on one knee, he saw in a flash of
recognition that the obstacle was Joe Goonsqua’s arm, beyond the shoulder of which lay
his face, the eyes puzzled looking and the forehead caved in around a small, neat hole
in its center. A small line of drying blood ran from the hole to the larger pool beneath.
Limmit shook off the strangely riveting effect of the vision, rose, and caught up with
Mary in the alley.
“I saw this,” Mary panted between strides down the alley’s dark length, “when I
came out after you. They’ve only got one young kid guarding this way out. The others
must have got excited and went to join in the action.”
The alley bent sharply, revealing the young MFer. His face drained white as he
swiveled a rifle up at them. His fingers went paralyzed with fear around the gun’s
trigger. Mary snatched it away from him, uppercutting his chin with its blunt end. The
MFer fell to his knees, his face bloodied, and Mary brought the butt down on his neck.
“No time for that,” she said as Limmit drove his boot into the side of the unconscious
head. She pointed along the rest of the alley. “North. Go to Rattown. We’ll lose them
there.”
She threw away the rifle and they ran on, leaving the body spread-eagled in the
alleyway for their pursuers.

The door to the office flew open, and a second passed before three shots flared from
the stairway’s darkness at the figure silhouetted against the window. The figure
dissolved into a man-high stack of skin magazines, bursting out through the window in
an exploding storm of shattering glass and paper, driven by the bullets’ impact.
Adder, standing silent and invisible behind the desk, sighted two feet behind the
spot where the long gouts of flame had appeared in the doorway and squeezed off with
both hands three shots of his own from the .44 Magnum, keeping his arms level despite
the pistol’s jolting kickback. There was the sound of two large objects, rigid but filled
with liquid, hitting the far wall of the stairway, and a scramble of live bodies back down
the stairs.
The young hooker slowly opened the door from the storeroom. In the dim light
from the window, Adder could see that her eyes had the confused look of someone who
has awakened suddenly, but for whom the nightmares hadn’t ended. Fearfully, she
stepped into the office and looked around in the darkness. “Dr. Adder?” she whispered.
Adder stepped from behind the desk and grabbed her by one wrist. “Don’t make a
sound,” he whispered tensely. “Don’t worry. I’ll get us out of here.” For a moment, she
could see the planes of his face illuminated by the light from the smashed window as he
pulled her across the room and flattened them both against the wall beside the door to
the stairway.
They waited until she felt Adder, with a barely audible hiss of intaken breath,
stiffen suddenly beside her. The sounds of rapid, shallow breathing were in the
doorway, detectable at about knee height. Adder, his eyes fully accustomed to the
darkness now, watched as the faces of two MFers appeared at that level, eyes intent
upon the desk at the other side of the room. Swiftly, Adder whipped the girl by one arm
into the center of the room. Stumbling into the faint shaft of light from the window, she
had time to blink once in her confusion before the first MFer, with trained rapidity,
raised an old CIA issue shotgun and had at her. The deafening blast lifted her naked
body, flying, disintegrating into bloody fragments, into the far corner of the room;
Adder took careful aim and shot the MFer behind one ear, snapping his head down
onto the floor in a spatter of fluid.
The second MFer took one look up at Adder beside the door behind him, fired one
shot wide of the mark, then collapsed alongside his comrade, his face shattered by
Adder’s subsequent bullet. Stepping quickly to the desk, Adder snatched up the
flashglove’s black briefcase. He turned and vaulted over the bodies blocking the top of
the stairway. Hope that’s all of them, he thought, racing down the steps. Hope they
haven’t touched the motorcycle.
He shot one more standing guard in the courtyard, dropped the empty gun into the
cavity where the MFer’s chest had been, and mounted the cycle. It started up with a
single kick, roaring and spitting. It hadn’t been tampered with—overconfident, they
hadn’t expected him to get this far.
He pulled the machine past the iron gate with its smashed lock dangling, out onto
the Interface’s surging chaos. A few feet away from him in all directions, the Moral
Forces members, spotted with red and insane grins, chased, beat, and killed, frenzied
with delayed vengeance. The hands of L.A.’s whores and pimps clutched and implored
at the sudden vision of Adder in their midst, impeding him as they caught hold of the
motorcycle, until he picked up enough speed where no worshipper or enemy could
gain a purchase on him. The forks bucked under his hands upon running over whatever
limbs he wasn’t able to avoid in his path, the wheels slipping in puddles of various
fluids.
He gunned it harder, the motor’s unmuffled roar blending into the screams of the
dying Interface, then saw the mass of MFers blocking the end of the street, waiting for
him. He pulled the cycle around short, balancing on one foot through a stopping turn of
180 degrees. The other end of the street was blocked as well. MFers from either
blockade started to run toward him, joined along the way by the ones already in the
street alerted to his presence, all converging on him, pipes and guns raised. Shitfire,
thought Adder, desperately looking around him. His thoughts burned for a fraction of a
second, then he turned the motorcycle in the direction he had started. He picked up
speed again, weaving around the mounded bodies in his path.
Ahead of him, the blockade of MFers grew closer; a few, then most of them
scattered at his manic approach, till only a coolly professional trinity remained standing
in the middle of the road, large guns clutched in both hands and calmly focused on him.
They were waiting for point-blank firing distance. Their unblinking eyes bored straight
into his with a cold passion of hatred. Adder felt he could discern and memorize every
separate line in their faces, swelling up like earth fissures as he aimed the geometrical
center of the motorcycle’s handlebars square into their collective midst. He saw the
small contraction of their fingers around the triggers of their guns.
Even before the explosions following the bullets roared over his head, he clenched
the cycle’s front brakes on hard for a second and pulled the bars around, sending the
machine falling on its side into a whirling skid as he tried to throw himself clear. He
clutched at a whore’s corpse on the road behind him, pressing the stale air from its
lungs with his impact, his momentum pulling them both for a distance behind the
sliding motorcycle, his face thrust into the smashed facial bones of the dead hooker.
One blue eye had been smashed by an MFer’s pipe into jelly. He had jerked one leg free
as the motorcycle fell, but felt it grind across the left for an agonizing second of
shredding cloth and skin.
Motion stopped. He unwrapped himself from the stiffening arms of the corpse, a
smell of friction-burned dead flesh rising from beneath her, and limped toward where
his motorcycle now lay. Behind him, at a distance, he could hear shouts and running
feet.
Two of the MFers were dead or unconscious as he passed them; the third gasped in
pain and shock from the asphalt at Adder towering over him, then attempted to point a
wavering gun at him. Adder kicked it aside and thrust the boot into the stark-white
face. He righted the motorcycle. Miraculously, the engine roared into life. He straddled
it, his left leg throbbing, and was swallowed up in the darkness beyond the Interface
before his pursuers could reach him.

As they got farther away from the Interface, the less light seeped into the alley. In
the darkness, Limmit ran into something waist-high, metallic, and empty. An
abandoned trashcan.
It sent him flying and then sprawling into a wall. For a moment he lay there
stunned, thinking he could feel the MFer’s pipe on his throat again. That passed, and he
looked around the alley’s black shapes. No one else was there. He must have gotten
separated from her among the alley’s twisting branches and turns. He thought he heard
several sets of feet nearby running away from him in another segment of the alley, then
approach, then fade away again.
He shook his head viciously, trying to clear away the ringing confusion. Which
way was north? he wondered. Looking up, he saw only a patch of flat darkness, defined
at its irregular edges by the darker black of the roofs of L.A.’s abandoned buildings. He
smelled something strangely acrid, like sweat, made faint by distance; some
subconscious, crisis-risen sense registered the presence of death in one direction.
Placing one hand against the wall of the alley, he rose and loped on, away from the
scent.
 “I know everything,” said Dr. Betreech. He continued swabbing the blood and oil
from Adder’s leg. “Droit phoned me— he managed to escape over the line into Orange
County.” “What do you think happened?” asked Adder. He felt his strength slowly
ebbing back, after the exhausting ride up into these hills. Luckily, Betreech had been
waiting for him.
“God knows.” Betreech reached up and took a can of aerosol bandage from the
shelves lining the cramped cellar medical room. Spraying it on the raw flesh of Adder’s
left leg and watching it congeal into a porous membrane, he shook his head. “If the rest
of the GPC is letting him get away with it, then some unknown factor has come up.
Some drastic change with Mox or you that we can’t see.”
Submerged in thought, Adder swung his bandaged leg over the edge of the table
and rolled his pants leg down over it. He looked up suddenly at the old man, now in his
white lab coat. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m tired,” said Betreech calmly. “I’m too old to fight or run. There’s a toxic
capsule implanted in one of my molars—when they come storming in here, I can break
it with my tongue and be dead in fifteen seconds. For some reason, I’m still afraid of a
violent death.”
“How long do you think it’ll be before they get here?”
“An hour or more. It’ll take them at least that long to round up a vehicle and then
find this place.”
“Good,” said Adder. “Then there’s time for this.” He reached down and lifted the
black briefcase. It had remained strapped to the motorcycle throughout—he hadn’t let
Betreech pull him inside without it.
“Do you think that’s going to help you?” said Betreech. “Or are you just trying to
go down in flames in a big way?”
“It’s the only weapon I’ve got,” replied Adder grimly. “And I don’t think there’s
going to be much work in my old line for a while.”
“Are you that confident I can graft it on all right?” He studied Adder, his own age-
lined, gray face inscrutable.
“I know how Lester Gass designed this thing, so that it could be attached out in the
desert by nonmedicals. The glove has a grafting sequence programmed in, plus
autonomic neural linkups. All you have to do is attach it to the stump—a boy scout with
a dull axe could do it.”
“It would be better if you ran and hid out, rather than try to fight them.”
“Don’t you think I know that? I just want this in case they catch up with me.”
Betreech sighed wearily. “I don’t believe that. But go ahead and take off your shirt
—it’s probably the last thing I’ll ever be able to do for you.”
 The sensation was like blood circulation being restored to a limb—an intense, near-
painful tingling beneath the point where the metal receptor of the flashglove lapped
over Adder’s stump. The feeling went on for a minute, then faded as he felt the
weapon’s expanded sensory range begin to switch on, like the opening of eyes from his
wrist to elbow.
Betreech studied the dead-white face, the angles sharper and more knifelike than
ever, as if more had been removed in the amputation than his arm. “I warned you,”
said Betreech. “I could have given you a local anesthetic. Even a high-velocity bonesaw
is no picnic.”

“No,” mumbled Adder, rolling his head on the sweat-soaked towel below. “Didn’t
want... anything to interfere. With getting control of it immediately.”
“Do you think you’re in control of it now?”
Adder closed his eyes and nodded. “I can feel it. All of its programs ... I can see
your body heat—like a photo. And the machines in the other room, running hot.” The
eyes flew open. “What’s that?”
“There’s nothing.”
“In the corridor outside. They’re here.” Adder slid off the table and faced the closed
door, then turned around, his mouth open in surprise and his metal arm flashing
upward, as he felt a small, sharp pain in the small of his back. Betreech stood behind
him with a hypodermic, wetly tipped with red. “You,” emitted Adder as a warm,
numbing wave swept through him. His heart beat again and the paralyzing warmth
surged over his head. He collapsed beside the surgical table, dimly hearing the door
opening and footsteps inside the room.
From the floor, unable to turn his head, Adder could see, through miles of black-
bordered, wavering liquid space, Betreech and an MFer with a red armband looking
down at him. “You took your time getting here,” he could hear Betreech say to the other
as the black border swept toward the center of his vision and he lost consciousness.
“There’s my part of the deal.”

“What did you hit him with?” asked the MFer with the red armband.
Dr. Betreech looked down the silent length of the Interface. The mounded bodies
on its surface were lit pale blue by the lights overhead. He felt freezing cold in the night
air, and wished he could stand by the bonfire the last dozen MFers had built in the
center of the street. But that’s where Adder is, he thought, right where they dumped
him out of the car. And I don’t want to see that.
“I said, what did you hit him with?”
“What?” Betreech’s thoughts broke off and he turned to face the MFer. “Oh, I
didn’t hit him with anything—the injection was a normal saline solution, just to make
him think he was threatened. A black placebo.” He hugged his coat tighter around his
frail body. “I knew more about the flashglove than he did. At the CIA camps in the
desert, they found it was necessary to keep the glove bearer unconscious for six hours
after the grafting. It takes that long for the neural connections to fully complete
themselves. If the bearer’s slightest impulse initiates any of the glove’s attack programs
before that period is over, the feedback knocks him out, paralyzes his higher conscious
centers. Takes weeks to recover.”
“That’s more time,” said the MFer, “than Adder’s got.” “Look,” said Betreech,
suddenly shaking with impatience. “Can’t we get on with it? Why don’t you just shoot
him and take me on in to see Mox?”
“Those weren’t my orders,” said the MFer, smirking. “My orders were to bring him
here, have my squad stomp him to death here, and leave him here. Right in the middle
of the road.”
“For God’s sake,” said Betreech bitterly. He turned away from the MFer’s cruel and
smug face. “It’s like kicking a corpse.”
“It’s more fun than that. They say he’s started to twitch and mumble a little. Last
gasp, no doubt.”
Betreech slowly swiveled to face the MFer. “He does what?” “Twitches and
mumbles. Why? What’s wrong?”
 “Christ,” whispered Betreech hoarsely. The few spots of color in his gray face
disappeared, as if sucked back inside. He ran toward the bonfire, followed by the
baffled MFer.
At the edge of the bonfire’s heat and light, Betreech broke through the ring of
laughing MFers, squeezing his frail body frantically between them. They stopped
kicking and drew back a little as he looked down at Adder’s body. The knifelike angles
of his face were obscured by puffy bruises and a stiff crust of dried blood. A thin stream
of blood and saliva flowed from the battered mouth below his unconscious, lidded eyes,
along with low, incomprehensible syllables. His legs and the one flesh arm, battered
and filthy, jerked about erratically.
“Do you have a gun?” demanded Betreech of the armbanded MFer.
He dumbly extracted a large pistol from his gray coat and displayed it.
“Then shoot him,” snapped Betreech, near hysterical, his voice rising in pitch. The
tendons and veins in his neck stood out like thick cords. “Immediately.”
“Why?” asked the MFer. “He’s out, isn’t he?”
“Don’t you see?” Betreech shrieked to the circle of faces, flapping his arm at the
twitching body on the ground. “The feedback from the flashglove only knocked out the
highest layers of his mind, the conscious. The buried parts, the unconscious, are
emerging, taking control! I should have known—I should have seen that the ADR
would make him this way.” He choked, then laughed hysterically as he beat on the MF
leader’s chest with his small, wrinkled hands. “Don’t you see? The Subconscious Man!
Kill him!” He snatched the pistol from the MFer, turned, and pointed it with both
quivering hands at Adder. The eyes of the figure on the ground sprang open, boring
directly into the old man’s gray face.
Betreech’s hands and forearms exploded in a burst of gore as the flashglove, with a
shrill whine, flew and struck like a missile, pulling Adder to his feet. The second blow
shattered Betreech’s head in a whirl of lethal harmonic vibrations. The decapitated body
sank to its knees, then fell forward at Adder’s feet.
Three of the surrounding MFers broke and ran; the others stood in horrified
immobility at the sight of the near-crippled body, filling out from some inner, hidden
source of strength, spotted with his own and Betreech’s blood, the alien look of the
mind behind the eyes. The prehuman portions in control.
When the remains of the last MFer in the circle had fallen, bloody and fragmented,
to the street, only a few seconds had passed, a few seconds of flashing motion as the
flashglove leaped through a fraction of its attack programs. The prehuman portions of
Adder’s brain, looking about with reptilian violence and suspicion, sent his broken
body staggering away from the fire and the sizzling pool of blood lapping up to its
edge.
The flashglove’s thermal sensors enabled him to locate the three remaining MFers,
cowering in doorways. Their blood spattered and washed over his body, joining the
other fluids. With his flesh eyes, the newly emerged mind sections saw the image before
him of a stooped, painfully moving figure, drenched red from head to foot, a single
gleaming forearm piercing the stiffening color. The flashglove flew up and shattered the
reflecting storefront window. A universe of corpses exploded into splinters. The flying
shards of glass opened new flows of his own blood.
The sensors told him there was nothing still alive in the street. He could detect a
small spark of body heat up an alleyway. He staggered toward it, leaving a coagulating
trail behind, the flashglove whining restlessly.

Stumbling around a sharp bend in the alley, he came upon a spread-eagled,

breathing form, a gun with a bloodied grip beside it. He dropped to his knees beside the
figure and sent the flashglove shattering into the skull. The body flopped spastically,
and the metal forearm flew into its chest in an explosion of organ fragments and bone,
the thick heart’s-blood spouting up at its attacker.
The flashglove ceased its metallic whining. The blood-drenched figure swayed on
its knees, then collapsed alongside the fragments of the other body, rolling slowly onto
one side of the again knifelike face. His eyes faded, the mute look of a dying animal in
them. The exhaustion of death, from the weapon’s cumulative feedback, set in. The
flesh arm and legs curled toward his body’s center, toward the fetal position, but
strength ebbed before the contraction was completed. After the blood of others stopped
flowing from his body, his heart slowly and more slowly pumped his own blood out
into the alley; his lungs grew cold. There was nothing behind the eyes now.
“What an angel,” said the distant nurses, as the long-retired day-care attendant,
now an ancient and sweetfaced woman, hobbled out of the TV parlor, dragging one
scarred leg behind her. “She’s so well behaved.” The TV went on chattering the news of
the riot in L.A. to the Orange County nursing home’s other residents, slumped in
wheelchairs or crouched in sofas behind their chrome walkers. The old woman went
upstairs to her own tiny room and lifted her skirt. The TV’s images jumbled and blurred
with her memories of a child’s punishment, completed at last, as she pressed,
whimpering with senile delight, the dried flesh of her loins beneath her bloodless
hands.
 ❖

She was probably psychotic. Just meat, in her own mind and Limmit’s. You
schmuck, he told himself savagely, even as he ground on between the so-far nameless
girl’s spread legs. An easy pickup won’t help. No forgetting that the one who loves and
saved your ass is waiting, worrying, somewhere else.
“I’m going,” the girl beneath him moaned. It had taken less than a quarter-hour,
from the point where she, with flared nostrils and wide mad eyes, had sneaked up on
him in one of Rattown’s mazy alleys and had thrust her hand into the crotch of his
pants, to reach this stage. “Going, I’m going.”
L.A. women have no class, thought Limmit disgustedly, raising himself on his
palms and looking at her. “The word,” he said with icy disdain, ceasing all vertical
motion, “is coming. ”
The girl’s skewered pelvic rotations ended. “Yeah?” she said coolly. “Better look to
be sure.” His erection flagged at the tone of her voice, and she slid out from beneath
him.
Limmit rolled over on his hip and looked in astonishment at the clear yellow fluid
dripping from his lower body onto the drenched bedsheets, becoming tangible as it
cooled from the 98.6° F. it had been held at in the girl’s bladder. “Christ,” he yelled.
“Why’d you do that all over me?”
She had pulled on her pants and a shirt and, sitting on a small dry patch at the edge
of the bed, leaned over and kissed him. “Welcome, honey,” she said sweetly, “to the
land of piss-offs.” After she left, Limmit pulled himself from the sopping bed and
looked around the dingy room for something with which to wipe himself off. The room,
like every other space he had encountered so far in Rattown, seemed to contain nothing
but stifling semidarkness and indistinguishable heaps of trash and dust moldering
lumpish underfoot and in all corners. The only recognizable objects in the room were a
small television, its plug snaking into the cable outlet in the wall, and another small,
yellow plastic radio sitting on top of that. Weird, Limmit had thought when the girl had
brought him to the room. Maybe there was a God, running a galactic dreck hustle, with
L.A. as warehouse. The Solar Connection for top-grade, super-refined shit. Or else it just
grew openly here, no longer having to hide under beds. Inside and out of the people
who lived in the slums. There’s a coil of gray fuzz, big as a boa constrictor, for every
broken heart in L.A.
In the adjoining bathroom, crusted with antique feculence, he found a gray towel
that shredded only slightly with age as he ran it over his body.
Outside, he picked his way through the narrow alleys, heading again for his
original destination. This was only the second morning since the Raid, and his sense of
direction still seemed scrambled—it was best not to wander away from the sections
Mary had guided him through.
That bitch back there had quarts of it, he mused, fingering in his jacket pocket the
radio he had lifted on his way out of the aromatic room. Perhaps Dr. Adder had given
her a specially enlarged bladder, holding copious amounts of fluid for the delight of
those who cared for wet action. Perhaps somewhere in L.A. roamed or lay decomposing
a girl with monster-diametered intestines coiled within her, capable of depositing, upon
depraved and eager upturned faces....
And that would be all that was left of him, thought Limmit dismally. Nothing
remained of Adder except the corpses of his work on the Interface, and the few living
who had come to Rattown before or escaped the MFers the night of the Raid. Limmit
walked on automatically, feeling a great, numbly bleeding cavity opening inside
himself.
On the wall of the alley a series of identical posters were slathered, red ink on
ragged-edged brown paper. Despite the crude artwork and reproduction, the more than
life-sized visage on them was recognizable as Adder’s. Limmit stopped to study one of
the posters. His death seemed to be turning Adder into something new. Like maggots,
thought Limmit bitterly, animating a corpse. He turned away from the poster and
moved on toward the headquarters of the Adder Siege Front, which had been the
poster’s subject.
The meeting room of the Front’s Lead Committee must have been originally, long
ago, the executive offices of some financial corporation. On the walls, under a layer of
dust, Limmit could see elaborately framed graphs and charts, filled with jagged lines.
The lines were colored blue and red, like diagrams of the blood’s circulation. The
committee’s five members looked up from whatever they had been discussing when he
entered.
“Well,” said Mary, leaning across the imitation-mahogany table. Her eyes seemed
more intent than he could ever remember seeing them. “What did you decide?”
Limmit glared back at her, his body rigid with repressed anger. “I decided,” he
said, “that you’re a bunch of fucking ghouls.”
“Aw, Christ, Gorgon,” the figure sitting next to her said disgustedly. Limmit
remembered, from the night before, his name as being Eddie Azusa. “Why do you even
fool around with this schmuck? Who needs him?”
Mary ignored him. To Limmit she said quietly, “Things have changed. Two days
ago this Front didn’t even exist. You’ve got military experience; we can use you. Need
you.”
Limmit sneered, his lower lip trembling with emotion. “You mean I can have a
good place in line for sucking off Dr. Adder’s dead body.”
“Fuck it,” said Azusa. “Look, asshole, if you want to join in, fine. We’ve got barely
enough people as it is to man the defense stations around the slum’s perimeter. But if
you don’t care for it, don’t hand us any of that ghoul shit. You’re just like that idiot
Milch I had to dump. A good triggerman, but he couldn’t face up to the fact that this is
A.D. now: Adder’s Dead. Who cares what he would think if he was alive? If we can
distort his image enough to draw people into a revolutionary movement, that’s all that
counts.”
“Revolution, shit,” Limmit spat out. “There might be one person here who’s some
kind of a revolutionary, but she’s barking up her ass if she thinks she can get me in with
the rest of you mindfuckers.” He turned and strode to the door before Azusa or any of
the others could do anything but jeer an obscenity after him.

They’re right, thought Limmit. Adder’s dead. Facing the committee, he had felt
himself fill with rage; now he felt emptier than before. Rising momentarily from the pit,
he looked around. The alley he was in was unfamiliar, the light from the sun sucked
away into the layers of dirt and trash—he had wandered into some unknown area of
the slums. Shit, he thought wretchedly. The abyss. Bottom at last. Curl up and die.
“Hello, Limmit,” said a voice behind him. He whirled around, startled, to see Droit
with a small grin.
“You made it,” said Limmit. It sounded to himself like an idiotic thing to say but he
could think of no other. “I thought you must have gotten snuffed during the Raid.”
Droit shook his head. “It just took me a while to get here. I ran the other way that
night, into Orange County. Even found a pay phone over there, but it didn’t help.”
“What do you mean?”
“I got through to Adder—warned him about what was happening. He even
managed to escape, I found out, but Betreech screwed him, handed him back over to
the MFers. After everybody else on the street was dead, they dragged him back there
and stomped him.”
“How the hell do you know that?” asked Limmit. “You mean you just watched
while it happened?”
“Fuck, no. I wasn’t anywhere near there—you think I’m crazy? My former client,
KCID, told me about it.”
“How?” muttered Limmit. He felt ill as the last hope buried inside—that Adder
might have somehow still survived—started to shrivel. “How could he know?”
“Beats me,” said Droit, spreading his hands in mystification. “Besides Adder, KCID
was my only other big client for info. But how he ever found out the things I didn’t tell
him, I never figured out. He had some sort of process worked out, an oracle or
something. It had to do with randomly generated numbers —he had a little box, a
minicomputer that lit up with seven- or eight-digit figures, I think. He told me that
when he had enough data worked into the system he could predict any series of events
connected to Adder, a few minutes before each event actually occurred. When I went to
see him last night and told him I called Adder the night of the Raid, that must’ve been
the final datum—he said he had no need for my services anymore, after he let me know
what happened to Adder.”
“But he can’t prove it,” Limmit said desperately. “You don’t know for sure that’s
what happened.”
“Oh, he proved it,” said Droit. “Told me where to go look.” He nodded. “KCID’s
got some kind of inside track on Adder, all right. Seems like a pointless achievement
now, though. I mean, what’s left to predict?”
“You saw it? Adder’s ... corpse?”
“Well, almost.” Droit’s expression grew sickly. “Just about the closest thing to it.”

Christ, thought Limmit, looking into Adder’s face from only inches away. This isn’t
the closest thing to being a corpse. This is worse than dead. As if the stone had been
rolled away, and Jesus had shambled out, giggling idiotically, his brains lapping like
watered oatmeal behind his eyes, his shroudcloth all mired with his no longer
controllable excretions. No wonder nobody knew. Better he shouldn’t come back at all
than to come back like this.
“How long has he been like this?” Limmit asked without turning around as he
knelt by the couch Adder lay on. Droit had left without saying anything more, as soon
as he had brought Limmit to this room.
“Days,” said the old woman behind him, her voice oddly inflected. “Since she
brought him here. You know, her, Mother Endure. She found him in that alley, you
know. I told her then that he was dying. Not dead yet, of course, but close to—just sits
there or lies there, depending on which way I’ve put him, swallows a little of what I put
in his mouth, lets me wipe and clean him. No trouble. No trouble at all. Just like my
little girl Melia.” Limmit turned, still on his knees, and watched the woman indicate
with a nod a young girl squatting in a corner of the filthy room, huddled next to a softly
muttering television. Laughing faces passed back and forth on the screen. The girl’s
eyes, below her matted hair, were blank, staring sightlessly into the center of the room.
Limmit could sense that she was deaf as well as blind.
He looked up at the old woman. “No trouble at all,” she mumbled, smiling. She’s
insane, Limmit thought with a sick horror. One of L.A.’s walking wounded. He slowly
turned back to the figure on the couch.
Adder’s blank face swelled and mocked him as Limmit felt the room’s walls sway
and bend closer toward him, breathing stale dust over his shoulder like this psychotic
old woman. Did you expect to find me here? asked the unseeing eyes. All your life you
were waiting for me, and now I’ve moved on, behind locked doors of gray tissue you’ll
never have the key to. Poor Limmit missed the connection. Too bad for Limmit. Still ...
 He sprang back from Adder’s face, and started to back out of the room. There
seemed barely enough room for him to squeeze through, the walls heaving in a gross
peristalsis in time with the old woman’s thundering breath, which seemed somehow to
absorb the room’s few scraps of light with each contraction. The only illumination came
from the three pairs of dead or near-dead eyes that swiveled toward him, following his
panicky retreat. Jesus, thought Limmit fearfully, I’m losing my mind. It’s too much for
me. I’ll never get out of here; I won’t make it before it goes completely ... I’ll stay here
forever, just like Adder. She’ll take care of me, spoonfeed me and wipe my ass; my teeth
will fall out, and my hair, and my arms will wither and fall off, and my legs from
disuse, and I’ll grow into a giant baby intestine, like a pink slug, with an open mouth at
one end that she spoons oatmeal into, and an open anus at the other that she empties
the bucket underneath every hour, blind, helpless, mewling, puking—
His fumbling hands found the doorknob between them. The door oozed open
reluctantly, and he almost fell through to the corridor beyond. He pushed the door shut
and leaned against its surface for a moment to catch his breath, until he felt, through the
back of his coat, the door going soft and yielding, about to squirm open and suck him
back into the dark room like a gut, a womb. He sprinted down flights of dark, moist
stairs that vibrated like flesh beneath his boots, soft, breastlike layers of tissue.
It was only when he emerged into the smoky sunlight that filtered down and
washed over the planes and surfaces of Rat-town’s buildings and alleys that he felt safe.
Whatever giant placenta lurked up there, waiting for him to weaken and surrender to
her tender care, swallow him up and soften his bones to baby softness, it had remained
behind. In order not to risk losing that which it already had. Adder.
Droit was waiting for him outside the building. “You rotten fucker,” gasped
Limmit, doubled over, trying to fill his aching lungs.
“He’s alive, isn’t he?” said Droit defensively. “I didn’t say in what condition.”
“Go to hell. Christ, I should have known. Don’t you want my reactions? Take my
pulse, shove a thermometer up my ass? You and your asshole data, you make me sick.”
Droit said nothing, only looked back at him in smoldering anger.
 “Go on, get out of here,” said Limmit, straightening up. “Leave me alone. No
wonder KCID got rid of you. Who the fuck needs you? Or KCID, for that matter. Just
like everything else in this shithole—two phonies sucking each other off.” Droit’s face
filled with blood beneath the surface. “Okay, fuckhead,” he said, his voice tight. “Here’s
the last piece of info I’ll give you for free. Did you see his arm? Did you?”
Limmit nodded, his own face beginning to burn.
“It’s not there, is it?” snapped Droit. “He had the glove grafted on before they
caught up with him. And that’s what burned out his brain—what you brought him.
Stick that up your ass and suck on it!” He pivoted on his heel and strode away, his
figure compressed into an angry wedge through the alley.
Limmit felt the hollowness swell within, a bursting vacuum. Numbly, he thrust his
hands into his jacket pockets and automatically drew out the yellow plastic radio. I
don’t even understand, he thought abjectly, gazing at the silent object. But I know it’s
true—I helped. He switched the radio on with one finger.
“Hohl! Alles hohl/” the radio sang out. “Ein Schlund! Es schwankt! Hörst du, es wandert
was mit uns da unten! Fort, fort!”
Wozzeck again, thought Limmit as the music continued thornily. My song now. “All
hollow” is right.
In a few moments the opera’s scene ended and the split-second of silence following
was broken by a strangely cheerful, yet thoughtful voice. “KCID here at the mike,” it
emerged humanely from the radio’s tiny speaker, “somewhere in the heart of L.A. You
know, friends, I think more and more we’re all becoming like poor Wozzeck. I know
my faithful listeners have their little problems, right, gang? But it would be so much
easier, wouldn’t it, if the earth really weren’t hollow. Hohl, alles hohl That’s the way it is,
all right. Isn’t that what you were just thinking? Ein Schlund, a gulf, an abyss, yawns
beneath us and what can we do, friends? Some of us wait all our lives for something,
somebody to come and make us whole, make us what we dreamed we were meant to
be. And then, friends, he’s snatched right away from us. The ol’ abyss yawns and the
awaited one falls right out of our sight. It seems like that pit is always there beneath us,
waiting for us to forget about it, then it opens up again, swallowing up some part of us.
Right, friends? Doesn’t it seem like that? Poor Wozzeck, poor radio audience. You
bunch of losers. But there’s still hope. Yes, I sincerely mean that, and I’m talking right
now to a certain specific individual out there, he knows who he is, and the rest of you
just butt out, okay? Now listen, fella: there’s things down there in that pit, too. Es
wandert was mit uns da unten, right? Something’s moving down there. Go talk to it, if you
think something was coming for you. How long will you go on thinking that, hmm?
There’s levels beneath this one, you know. In that abyss is a world. Fort, fort! Get off
your ass and down beneath Rattown, where the action is! Maybe you should look behind
you, too. In the meantime, how about some Schubert lieder?” Different music flowed
on, replacing the voice.
Limmit started, amazed, at the radio in his hands, sweetly singing now. The
congenial voice had poured itself into him, warm as alcohol. He switched the radio off
in mid-lied. Where’s Droit? he thought excitedly, looking down the alley. He’ll know
what it means.
Surprisingly, he could see Droit about a hundred yards away, running back toward
him. He was waving his arms and shouting something. Limmit strained to make it out.
Suddenly, he comprehended—“Behind you!” in a frantic voice.
Limmit whirled around and saw nothing but the wall of the building several yards
away that terminated the alley. His eyes traveled up its grime-encrusted surface to its
roof, where he could see a figure standing at the edge, silhouetted black against the sun.
The figure leaned its head against the side of some long object braced against its
shoulder and pointed in Limmit’s direction.
The sight froze him for a second, then he jerked back, his feet slipping from
beneath him in the alley’s garbage. As he fell backward he could feel his bowels
knotting in fear, and a bright flare of light appear in front of the figure on the roof. The
ground exploded a few feet behind where Limmit had been standing, showering him
with gravel.
When he wiped his eyes clear again, the distant figure had been replaced by Droit
standing over him. “On the radio,” Limmit panted, reaching for the outstretched hand.
“KCID— he talked to me.”
“Shit,” Droit half grunted. “As if you don’t have enough problems already.”

The woman called Mother Endure stepped silently into the room, from the smaller
room behind it. She had observed Adder’s visitor from there.
“Oh, strange indeed,” the old woman cooed to her. “I imagine our little guest
here,” she said, stroking Adder’s dark hair, “had lots of interesting friends. But that’s all
past now, isn’t it?” Her blind daughter pressed herself closer to the side of the
television, seeing nothing.
Mother Endure knelt in front of Adder’s body to look into his blank face. Her own
was hidden in the cowl of her dark monkish robe. She took his one flesh hand and
cradled it in hers. “All past now,” she said softly. “All of it.”

“This is what he meant,” said Droit, pausing to stamp, Wozzeck-like, upon the
paved surface of the alley through which they were walking. The late afternoon sun
slanted over their heads. “As far as L.A. is concerned, the earth is hollow. Before the
Greater Production Corporation consolidated everything over in Orange County, things
got pretty wild here. Expansion in every direction, just like a cancer. Catacombs,
warrens, caverns, great big fuckin’ maze of old sewers, fallout shelters, subterranean
apartment complexes, abandoned rapid-transit systems, warehouses, layer upon layer
of interconnected tubes and tunnels, vaults, cathedrals, and abysses. All underground.
If you know the way, you can go anywhere you want on the Sump Line, as they call it.
People down there, too: loners and sump tribes. Not all the crazies in L.A. are on the
surface, believe me.”
“Why would KCID tell me to go down there?” asked Limmit. The excitement he
had felt when listening to the voice over the radio had cooled slightly.
“// he did—”
“Is there any way I can go see him?” interrupted Limmit. “Can you take me to
him?”
“No way. He told me he was going into hiding. All his broadcast equipment and
tapes fit into a suitcase—he could be anywhere in the slums with it now.”
“Why’d he do that?”
“Beats me. But you’ve got reasons to head below anyway, whether he was talking
to you or not. That guy on the roof wasn’t just some crank berserker—that was a
professional.”
“How could you tell? Why would anybody come here just to snuff me?”
“The gunner’s equipment, for your first answer. That wasn’t any resurrected CIA
weapon; that was shiny new army issue. Why he’s been sent after you I couldn’t say.”
“Who then?” asked Limmit. “Who could have it in for me now?”
“Well,” Droit said, smiling thinly, “as far as killing goes, there’s only been one
person recently with much of a large-scale interest in it.”
“Mox.” He paled; the vision of Joe Goonsqua’s neatly penetrated forehead flashed
in his mind. “That must be it—for some reason he’s getting rid of everybody who had
anything to do with that flashglove business.”
Droit shrugged. “Maybe. Whatever’s happening, though, your chances above
ground right now aren’t much.”
“There’s more to it than that,” insisted Limmit. “There’s something ... down there. ”
He lowered his eyes to the layer of trash his feet were stepping over. Nothing was
visible below that.
“The only thing I can think of like that is the Visitor.” “Visitor? What the fuck’s
that?”
Their eyes met. “I don’t know,” said Droit flatly. “I’ve never gone to look for it. It’s
supposed to be up north, beyond the outskirts of L.A. even. All I know about it is what
the Sump Liners I’ve talked to have told me. They say that something large fell and
crashed into an abandoned town up there twenty or so years ago. Practically nobody
down here noticed or cared much about it one way or the other. A group of scientists
and technicians living in the slums, unemployed since the universities shut down, went
up one of the underground aqueducts to look at whatever it was. They didn’t come
back, but made arrangements with one of the sewer tribes to salvage all the old
computer equipment from the linguistic labs at the former campuses. The story got
started that the scientists had found something enormous still living at the crash site,
buried about a mile into the ground. Messenger from the stars, eh? And that the
scientists were devoting the rest of their lives to transcribing and translating what it’s
saying. It’s supposed to be taking that long because the Visitor’s time sense is so much
slower than ours.”
“Is all that true?”
“Shit, who knows by now. Maybe it is. There’s only one way to find out.”
And there’s nothing, Limmit said to himself, up here for me now. Except death.
“Can you show me how to get down there?” he asked. “Into the Sump Line?”
“Sure,” said Droit. “It’s not hard. But are you asking me for that info?”
Limmit studied the other’s face for a second. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly. “I lost my
head when I saw what became of Adder.” “Don’t worry about it,” Droit said
abstractedly. “It’ll probably be all over for him in a couple of weeks.”
“I can’t pay you anything, if that’s what you want. I must have lost the money I
had during the Raid.”
“That’s all right.” He sighed. “Nobody else is paying anything now, so I might as
well give it to you for free. When you’re ready, I’ll take you down, find you a guide.
Right now, if you want.” Limmit shook his head. “First I’ve got to tell somebody I’m
going.” He looked around. They had walked back to one of the sections of alley familiar
to him. The building in which he had woken up that morning was only a few blocks
away.
“I’ll wait for you here,” said Droit.
“It might be a while. She may not be there yet.” Maybe she won’t come back there
at all, he thought.
“I’ve got nothing else to do at the moment.” Droit gazed back at the dark length of
alleyway. “You know,” he said suddenly, “KCID never paid me for any of the data I
gave him. I kept working for him because he seemed somehow to understand what was
going on in L.A. I never did. I’d hoped he would tell me eventually. When the Interface
got shut down, I thought that was some kind of end to something. That’s why I hurried
back to see him. But he didn’t say a thing I wanted to hear.” He looked back into
Limmit’s face. “I hope your message turns out better.”

Mary sat on the bed and looked at him standing in the middle of the room.
Somehow, while in the thick of forming the Siege Front, she had found this room and
cleared it of its accumulated layers of trash. When she had first found him again,
wandering in the Rattown alleys, she had brought him here and pressed herself to him
through the nights. This morning, she had left before he woke up, heading for the
Front’s headquarters. “What are you going to take?” she asked.
Limmit walked to one of the room’s corners and bent over the warped cardboard
box that held the few items and changes of clothing she had found for him. She had
made this room into some kind of bastion against the piles of rubbish and dust that
slumped everywhere else like decaying bodies. But already there was a thin layer of
airborne dirt coating the box’s contents. He lifted out a shirt, still in the original plastic
wrapping in which it had been unearthed. Dots of mold bloomed on the graying cloth
beneath the clear plastic. He dropped it back in the box. What the hell do you pack
anyway, he thought, when you’re off to see a two-ton messenger from the stars buried
at the end of the world’s largest sewer?
He straightened up and turned around to look at her. “Nothing, I guess.”
She said nothing. He stood silently before her, then turned away. “All I ever seem
to do anymore,” he said from the doorway, “is say goodbye to you.”
The room was on the building’s second story. From its window she watched him
emerge from the building and disappear, hands empty, down an alleyway. It always
seemed so dark here. There would be even less light where he was going.
To hell with him, she thought. Let him fall ass first into the abyss if that’s what he
wants. There are others enough who need, deserve.... I’ll become another Mother
Endure, but for the comrades of the revolution. Open my heart and thighs to my
compatriots. I understand her now, she said to herself. She could feel the kinship
linking her with that strange image of the slums. Has Mother Endure discovered yet,
could she tell me, how many others it takes to equal the one who’s gone away?
She stood up from the bed. In the corner of the room, the box of his clothes waited
to be thrown away. She looked down at them, minutes passing, then left the room
without touching them.

L.A. was dark when Limmit reappeared. He came down the alley looking the same
as before, the only difference a slightly preoccupied expression. Droit lounged against
the side of the alley, waiting for him. “Let’s go,” Droit called out. He finished shoving
aside with his foot the last pieces of trash from a circular area of pavement. “Wait’ll you
see the guide I lined up for you.” “Guide?” said Limmit. “Oh, yeah. Sorry, something’s
on my mind, I guess. How do we get down there?”
Droit reached down, lifted a large metal plate by the hole near its edge, and pulled
it aside. There was a metal ladder bolted to the side of the cylindrical hole he revealed.
A dim light filtered up from the unseen depths below the alley. “This way,” said
Droit, pointing with a spectral finger. Limmit stooped to the hole’s edge and began to
clamber down, followed by Droit’s boots above his head, all that he could make out of
him. He heard Droit pulling the metal plate back over the tube’s mouth.
 In a shorter time than Limmit had expected, he emerged into a small, low-ceilinged
room, to one wall of which the metal ladder was fastened. In the dim yellow glare of
some sort of gas lamp he could see masses of rusting and unworkable controls, dials,
levers, wheels. He could make out the form of a girl as well, sitting cross-legged beside
the lamp on the floor. Droit descended to his side and panted, out of breath. “Is this it?”
asked Limmit.
“Not really,” said Droit. “More like an anteroom, actually. The Sump Line’s a lot
farther down.” He waved a hand at the girl, who had been watching them all this time
with silent, devouring eyes. “Meet Bandita, Princess of the West Side Sewer Gypsies.
She’s going to take you to the Visitor.”
Limmit took a closer look at the girl as she rose from the floor and crossed the small
space between them. “Hello,” she said, low and playfully ominous. Limmit told himself
that she looked like the kind of girl who could screw you or eat you (literally), either
one, and enjoy them both about the same. Childlike, with vacuum-black hair and eyes,
and white skin made so pallid by, he supposed, underground life that it glowed faintly
phosphorescent; no gray tones at all. Teeth like little sugar daggers. Clad in the
ubiquitous denim and leather boots of L.A., made subtly antique and shiny by constant
exposure to the sewers. “Hello,” said Limmit, at a loss for anything else.
“Here’s where I leave you,” said Droit. “I’ll try to be waiting up here when you get
back.”
“Come on,” said the girl Bandita, taking Limmit’s arm in her hands. She came up to
his shoulder. “Let’s get moving. I really wanna get back down in the Sump, with you.”
“How?” said Limmit. “I mean, how do we get down?” He could not see any exit
from the room other than the circular hole in the ceiling.
Bandita pulled him over to one wall, stenciled L.A.W.D. ACCESS PERMIT REQ’D.
She kicked at the wall and a section swung away, showering flakes of rust and
revealing a pitch-dark doorway. “Go on,” she said, letting go of his arm. “After you.”
Limmit put one foot over the door’s edge and felt around cautiously. “Hey,” he said.
“There’s no bottom here.”
“Just hold your nose,” she laughed, “and jump.”
“Are you shittin’ me—” Limmit turned around and caught in his stomach the push
meant for his back. He stumbled and fell backward through the black doorway. Framed
in the yellow light from the room he had just been knocked from, he saw the sewer girl
jump spread-eagled after him, a grin of fierce delight on her face, like a voluptuous bird
of prey. Behind her, he saw Droit peering down at them from the door, holding the gas
lamp and calling something he couldn’t understand. Dizzy from the rushing of his
blood and having his breath knocked out, Limmit saw the square of yellow light swoop
upward in giddy circles, shrinking from door size to card size to pin size, then nothing.
Air welled up warm and pungent from below, but seemed to rush by too fast for him to
suck any into his lungs. Panicking in the total absence of light he could not see, only feel
the girl’s body reaching for him from above as he fell.

Several bounding heartbeats later, he plummeted into something soft and damp.
The momentum of his fall carried him deep into the center of whatever it was; then,
energy absorbed, it slowly swelled back up, carrying him to the surface of its spongy
mass. He felt the tremors from the girl’s impact into the substance. A light appeared
and Limmit found himself and the girl in the small circle of illumination created by an
electric lamp in her hand. She grinned maniacally. “Some fun, huh?” asked Bandita.
“Loads,” he quavered, looking around. They seemed to be standing knee-deep in a
small sea of some dirty-white, porous substance. “What is this stuff?”
“It’s called sewer fluff,” she said. “It’s all over down here in the Sump Line. We
used to have a guy in the Sewer Gypsies named Jezzy, real smart, knew a lot of science
and stuff. That was because his father had been one of those scientists up north, who
quit that to join us. Jezzy used to tell me it was some sort of combination organism, like
a jellyfish, though I could tell you for shit what a jellyfish is. He said they spawn up
north in some place called Alaska, and clogged up the water pipes coming from there,
which is why the people in Orange County stopped using them. The fluff kinda creeps
around, in and out of the water, and just grows, or else it dies sometimes. Sometimes
it’s not there when you count on it, like to break your fall when you jump from one
level to another. That’s how Jezzy got killed; really smashed him up. Though some say
he did it on purpose, the rotten bastard.” Her face clouded with memory for a moment,
then cleared. “Hey,” she said brightly, “wanna screw? This fluff is the best place for it. It
reacts to your body heat, what Jezzy called thermotropic. Really snuggles you while
you fug-gle. How about it, huh?” She leaped forward, clasping her arms behind his
back and knocking him over onto the fluff s surface. She lay there, looking at him from
atop his chest. Her arms seemed awfully strong to Limmit.
“Do I have a choice?” he asked.
Her laugh pealed off into the unknown reaches of the Sump Line. I have no
principles, thought Limmit. At this rate I’ll never even get to the Visitor. Bandita’s
hands flew from behind him to his belt buckle and, practiced, began their work.
“God,” she panted, “I just want to eat you up all over. How I love topside guys.”
Something in the dark air made Limmit feel giddy. “Is that a sexual position or a
point of origin?”
“Shut up. I’ve got better things for you to do with your mouth.” Portions of body
surged all around him, weirdly illuminated by the small lamp left behind her on a
mound of fluff. How can she be so fast? Limmit wondered. The heat-loving fluff
squirmed beneath them; from the corner of his eye he saw their clothes as dark patches
on a sea of white, undulating away as more tiny waves came rippling at them in the
opposite direction. “Mff,” he said, his mouth full of downy flesh.
“Like that, topsider,” breathed the girl into his ear, and sank her tiny sharp teeth
into it.
There seemed to be a small explosion somewhere in the distance. Limmit almost
began to wonder what it was, then decided to attend to matters at hand, when the lamp
exploded. Limmit jumped to his feet, bouncing and dragging the clinging Bandita to her
knees. “Somebody’s shooting at us!” he yelled. Christ, he thought, has that gunman
followed me down here already?
He felt Bandita pull her head away from his body and look around in the total
darkness. “Shit,” she said sourly. “That asshole Victor.”
Limmit dived across the fluff in the direction he had last seen their clothes. He
heard another shot, and a splat of fluff where he had just been standing. “Victor!”
screamed the girl angrily. “Cut it out, you schmuck!”
His eyes had become accustomed enough to the dark to detect the clothes against
the faint luminescence of the fluff. “Come on!” he shouted to Bandita. “Let’s get out of
here.” He attempted to stand on one leg to pull on his pants, but fell over sideways in
the yielding mass. Another shot rang out, and the bullet penetrated the empty leg of his
pants flapping above him.
“Okay for you, Victor!” called the girl to the invisible gunman again. “See if I ever
give you head again!” She huffed over to Limmit, on his ass struggling frantically to get
his boots on, and gathered up her clothes. “Let’s go,” she snapped. “We don’t have to
put up with this shit.”
Limmit, bouncing and falling over the marshmallow-like surface, followed the twin
pale moons of her buttocks to the edge of the fluff. She slid down its rounded slope, her
bare feet slapping against a concrete floor some six feet from the fluff’s top. He jumped
down beside her. “Hold out your arms,” she said, and he felt her load her wadded
clothes into them. He heard the creaking of more rusted metal, and a shaft of light shot
up from the floor. From it he could see her, compact breasts glinting with sweat,
kneeling beside a trap door. “Down here,” she said. He looked, saw a floor several feet
below, tossed her clothes down, and swung himself to it, holding on to the edge of the
floor above. She jumped down lightly beside him, and the trap door whammed shut.
Particles of rust showered down on them.
“He won’t follow us down here,” she said. “He knows I’d cut off his balls in close
quarters.”
“You know him?”
“I’d recognize the sound of his rat killer anywhere.”
They were in a long corridor without visible end in either direction, lined with
pipes of varying dimensions. Fluorescent panels glowed down the length of the
corridor with a few random blanks. This was the first good light in which he had been
able to see the girl. His general impression was unchanged, even though he now saw
she had a tattoo on one thigh, in the form of a cartoon’s speech balloon with its tail
disappearing into her tangled pubic hair. The balloon contained the words FEED ME.
He felt somehow relieved that it hadn’t been the snake cartoon of the Interface whores.
“We’d better get going,” he said.
“That’s what I say.” She slipped a hand into the front of his pants. “Let’s go—right
where we left off.” She held on with the one hand, and spread with her foot the pile of
her clothes into a rough bed shape on the floor.
“This is insane,” said Limmit. “Fun’s fun, but you reach a point. I mean, I hate to
disappoint you or anything, but all this sudden violence has left me, I think,
temporarily impotent.” She grinned maliciously. “You must be in a bad way when that
happens,” she said, “if even your fingers go soft.”
He sensed the mass of earth between him and everything on the surface. No
principles at all, he thought as she pulled him down to the floor and guided his hands.

Limmit awoke sometime later, his head between the girl’s thighs. He sat up
without waking her and looked around. They were still the corridor’s only inhabitants.
A brief panic welled up in him. Jesus, he wondered, how long have I been down here?
There was no way of telling. It had seemed to take a very long time to satisfy Bandita
and then fall asleep. Days, maybe. He brushed away the empty cans she had fed them
from and pulled his scattered clothes to himself.
As he dressed, he suddenly sensed her watching him. Her crazy smile disconcerted
him when he looked back. Christ, he realized, I’m depending on her. Not just to get me
to the Visitor, but back out of here again. What if she’s really swacked on me, and
doesn’t want to ever let me go. Maybe life underground has affected all the men down
here, given ’em cocks like button mushrooms. In the country of the three-inchers, the
six-inch man is king. He shook her hand loose from his ankle and picked up his boots.
“Let’s start traveling,” he said.
Her eyes seeped enigmatically through her lashes at him. “Whatever you say,” she
said demurely, and pulled her own clothes together.
When she had dressed, she pointed down one direction of the corridor. “That
way.”
Wordlessly, he followed her beneath the fluorescent panels. One flickered and went
out as they passed under it. “Soon they’ll all go,” she said over her shoulder. “Someday
we’ll all have to grope like moles everywhere we go down here. How do moles grope, I
wonder?”
He ignored the last. “Speaking of‘we,’ where’s the rest of the West Side Sewer
Gypsies? Out digging up canned goods somewhere?”
 Her smile faded for a moment. “There aren’t any others,” she said. “I’m the last
one. After Jezzy died, they all got wiped out by the Screamin’ Sludge Queens from the
East Side. Except for me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, I guess. Then who’s this Victor who was shooting at us?” He had
convinced himself that it hadn’t been Mox’s gunner; the ragged cough of this weapon
had been too unlike the crisp puncturing of space he remembered from the surface.
“Not at us, at you. He’s a loner, like I am now. His bunch, the Upper Aqueduct
Rattenfängerei, got caught in a sudden back-flush of sludge from one of the lower
levels. Stunk like shit. He’s gone a little crazy from it, I think. Has a thing about sludge
and fucking—maybe that’s what he was doing when he got washed away by the
backflow. I hung around with him for a while, but he was just getting weirder by the
day. I mean, I like a little variety, but sticking my head under the sewer, mounting me
from behind, and beating me with a rubber boot while screaming ‘It smells like shit!’
was all he ever wanted to do. I finally ditched him, to go guide someone else Droit
brought down to me. A real fruity character named Lyle something. Victor shot at him,
too. Would’ve killed him, actually—snuck up on us, knocked me dizzy, and was sitting
on this fag’s chest with his shotgun about to blow his shrieking head off. Then a bunch
of really weird guys, about five or six straight-looking middle-aged dudes, only
wearing like rubber skin-diver suits with great big orange letters on them, busted in.
Knocked Victor off, grabbed up the little fruit, and ran back up the tunnel the way they
came, before I could even get up off my ass.”
Limmit had listened to her in growing amazement. “Who were they?”
“Beats the shit out of me. The letters on their suits were PSS, I think. I’ve seen ’em
around from a distance, and heard things from other loners. Whoever they are, they
only nab topsiders who have come down into the Sump Line. Kinda scary. One guy
said he had heard they were a bunch of weirdo gourmets from somewhere in Orange
County, looking for new taste thrills. They don’t want us sewer dwellers, ’cause we’d
taste too shitty.”
What the fuck am I doing here? thought Limmit. This is what comes from reading
all that damn science fiction—you get to the point where you can accept just about
fuckin’ anything. “Seen ’em lately?” he asked, almost gaily.
She halted abruptly. “Shh,” she ordered. “Listen.”
Limmit strained, hearing nothing at first. Then, faintly, almost as if he were
imagining it, he heard a soft, gentle sound somewhere far off above or behind them, as
of rubber-shod feet moving, pausing, then moving again. “That’s them,” she whispered.
“Sure it’s not Victor?” One pursuer would have been enough. She nodded. “He’s
following us, too. But him you won’t hear.” He fell silent for a second, absorbing this.
“What are my chances?”
She looked at him calmly. “Pretty good.”
“That’s a comfort. If you really think so.”
 Her eyes grew wider, then she broke into laughter. “That’s really funny,” she
gasped between outbursts. “You were talking about your chances of making it. I
thought you meant of getting killed. That's what’s pretty good.” She laughed harder,
doubling over, her face growing red.
He stared at her until she sobered and looked into his face again. Her grin faded at
the sight of his taut expression. “A real riot,” he said grimly, bunched the neck of her
frayed denim shirt in one hand, and ripped it downward. Her small breasts bounced
forth, nipples erect. “Hey,” she said delightedly. “I thought you were so hot to get
moving.”
“Now there seems to be,” he said, smileless, pushing the torn shirt down from her
pale shoulders and moving on to her pants, “a different light on things.”

“There it is,” said Bandita, pointing. “The last stretch.” Her voice echoed hollow in
the enormous space.
Limmit studied the glassily flowing river, black as ink. He could see along its
length, until it disappeared from sight in either direction, the narrow cement path
bordering it. At even intervals, openings into other corridors appeared like mouths,
similar to the one from which they had just emerged. Overflow drains, he thought. “If
we had something that would float,” he said, judging the water’s sluggish speed, “we
could ride the rest of the way.”
She laughed. “Not hardly. It’s going the wrong way, dummy —toward Orange
County.” She swung off down the silent water’s border.
Well anyway, said Limmit to himself, thank God it’s the last ways to go. Several
times he had woken up in the empty corridors, dark tunnels, luminous grottoes, once in
a dead subway car filled with bone shards, that she had led him through, only to realize
that he couldn’t even remember the purpose of the journey. Slowly, with an effort, it
would come back to him, dragging fragments of what seemed to have been a
completely separate existence before the Sump Line: Adder, Mary, the Interface,
KCID.... Once, he had almost started sobbing when he realized he would probably
never see Bonna Cummins again.
Memory or not, he had followed Bandita, copulated with her, ate what she fed him
—cans at first, but more recently, rats on a spit turned over a little fire. She caught them
somehow when he wasn’t looking. They slept curled up like children or small animals.
Sometimes, he had lain awake with her in his arms, listening to the faint gurgles and
murmurs of the surrounding subterranean world, and for the sound of approaching
feet, rubber-shod or not. How far down am I? he wondered; how long has it been?
 Lost in nonverbal, vegetative reverie, he collided with Ban-dita, who had suddenly
frozen in front of him. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Be very still,” she said softly. Ominously, her usual manic grin was absent.
He listened, but heard nothing. Then he felt it. As if the darkness somewhere
nearby were thickening, coalescing into a form very close to them. “What is it?” he
whispered.
“Victor.” Her voice was small, strangely constricted. “He’s right by us now. We’re
in trouble—this section of the Line he knows a lot better than I do. Part of his old
Rattenfängerei stomping grounds. He could jump out at us anytime. I was hoping we
had enough of a lead to get through here before he caught up to us.” She cautiously
stepped forward again.
Limmit nervously looked around in the damp gloom. That’s what happens, he
thought, if you fuck around too much on the road. He followed behind her as they
proceeded alongside the flowing water, their heads swiveling warily, peering into the
darkness.
Before Limmit could react, a dark figure leaped between them and sent Bandita
sprawling into the tunnel wall with a furious swing of a metal pipe section. “She’s
mine!” the figure, an emaciated and wild-haired wraith, shouted at Limmit, and jabbed
the metal pipe straight at his stomach. He jerked away from it, but caught the end of its
thrust, which sent him sprawling onto the damp concrete. The figure leaped astride
Limmit’s chest, pressing down against his throat with the pipe. “She’s mine!” he
shouted again. “You can’t have her!”
The pipe felt the same as the one the MFer on the Interface had strangled Limmit
with; pressing his life out the top of his head in a bloody mass. He stopped tearing at
Victor’s back, and began beating against the side of his head. Blood sprang from one ear
onto his fist. The contorted face continued to leer and grunt through the growing gray
haze. Then, miraculously, the pressure stopped as it had once before, on the surface.
“Mary?” croaked Limmit, dazed and weak. He rolled on his side and retched blood
and phlegm. His vision cleared, and he saw Victor and Bandita, one side of her face red
with blood, struggling a few yards away, the metal pipe swaying between them in their
hands, gradually forcing her to her knees. Limmit reached into his boot and extracted
the blade that had remained there so long. Dizzy, but with a burning calm, he lunged
forward and grabbed one of Victor’s wrists, the hand still clamped to the pipe. The
emaciated form’s eyes widened in shock as Limmit methodically sliced across and
down through the blood vessels and tendons of his arm. Victor gasped and let go of the
pipe, the blood flowing satisfyingly warm across Limmit’s blade and hands, before he
collapsed into unconsciousness at Limmit’s feet. Limmit smiled wanly at Bandita, sank
to one knee and puked again, then fell the rest of the way on top of the other figure.
He woke up, unknown hours later, to find both Bandita’s and Victor’s eyes
observing him. She had bandaged Victor’s forearm with strips torn from her shirt, and
then bound him immobile as well with the same. His eyes flicked between her and
Limmit, glaring. “Well, what now?” said Limmit groggily. He rubbed his throat
tentatively. “Why didn’t you kill him right on the spot, while he was out?”
She shrugged. “Something could still happen to you on the way,” she said. “If it
did, I wouldn’t want to be left all alone down here. I mean, he does care for me in his
way.”
This is too much, thought Limmit. “You know,” he mused aloud, “back on the
surface, when Dr. Adder asked me to work for him, he said he figured that my being
from someplace else and comparatively unhooked on images would give me an
advantage out here. I’m really beginning to think he was dead wrong. I don’t think I
can understand any of this shit, let alone deal with it.” He leaned back against the
tunnel wall.
Bandita cocked her head strangely at him. “Did you say,” she asked eagerly, “that
you worked for Dr. Adder?”
“Yeah, I suppose you could say that.”
“Wow,” she breathed ecstatically. “What’s he like? I mean, up close. I’ve only
heard of him down here, never really seen him or anything. But you—you’ve actually
touched him and talked to him and everything. His right-hand man, practically, I bet!”
Her eyes glowed with admiration, and she stroked and plucked at his sleeve in a fit of
conflicting desire and sudden shyness.
So even down here, thought Limmit bitterly. Right-hand man—what she didn’t
know made that a cruel joke. A strange mixture of emotions pressed against his heart,
suffocating him. “For your information,” he said, “the last time I saw him, Adder was a
helpless, brain-damaged near-corpse. No hope of recovery. Almost certainly dead by
now, I hope.”
Her eyes narrowed at him. “You lying turd,” she spat. “That’s impossible. I don’t
think you ever worked for him at all.” Her expression betrayed her shock and fear.
“Look,” said Limmit. A great weariness seemed to flow over him like sludge. “I’m
not going to argue about it. Since I came down here, I’ve been pushed off cliffs, shot at,
near fucked to death by you, and been had at with a goddamn lead pipe. Can we just
get moving now? I really think I’ve had enough.” He rose to his feet, massaging his
aching throat. Strangely, his thoughts seemed more lucid now than they had for a long
time, as if the fight had knocked loose a cumulative miasma from him. He turned and
looked away from her, down the opposite direction of the tunnel. Shee-it, he thought.
After all this, that damn Visitor better have something good going.
“So don’t argue with me,” he heard her say behind him. “Argue with this,
fuckhead!” He spun around and saw Victor’s metal pipe in her hands, flying at the side
of his head.
He woke up again, this time his head throbbing painfully. He reached up to the
side of his face and his hand encountered a sticky fluid. He opened his eyes, wincing at
the dim light, and looked around him. He was lying in the same spot where Victor had
jumped them, but Victor and Bandita were gone. Instead, he was surrounded by six
men in rubber skin-diver outfits. One, with gray hair and a thin mustache over a
chrome and brown plastic pipe, cleared his throat. He looked like the insurance-selling
father in old TV family comedies.

“We saw your friends,” said the man, in a voice resonant with trying to be both
authoritative and friendly, “hightailing it down the tunnel. Too bad we didn’t get here a
little sooner. Could have saved you from a nasty crack on the head.” He took his pipe
from his mouth and tamped it down with a blunt forefinger. “Lover’s quarrel?”
Limmit laid his throbbing head back on the cold tunnel floor. “You might say that.”
He closed his eyes. “Go ahead and eat me, I don’t care.”
“Tut, tut, my boy. Do you believe all those horror stories that girl pumped into
you? She’s a sly one, all right. We’ve had a hell of a time, tracking you all this way.”
 Limmit cocked one eye open and squinted dubiously at the gray-haired man. “If
you’re not going to eat me,” he said, “then who are you?”
The man smiled beatifically. “My boy,” he said expansively, “I am your father.”
Limmit shut his eye wearily. Goddamn L.A. is all the same, from top to bottom.
“Like fuck you are,” he said.

“Only metaphorically,” said the gray-haired skin diver. “Am I your father, that is.”
He closed the lid of the first aid kit and tossed it into the center of the inflated rubber
raft, smoothly gliding with the dark river’s current. One of the five other rubber-suited
men pushed aside with a paddle the random small heaps of sewer fluff in their path.
“You see,” he continued, pointing to the orange letters SPS on his suit, “we represent
the Orange County Society for the Prodigal Son. My name’s Endpoint, Albert Endpoint.
I’m the Chief Exalted Patriarch this month.”
“That’s nice,” said Limmit, drowsily trailing one hand in the raft’s wake. With his
other hand he fingered the bandage on the side of his face, and wondered vaguely if
they might have injected a tranquilizer into him when they had found him unconscious.
“What’s your society do?”
“Don’t put your hand in the water like that, son,” said Endpoint. “You don’t know
what’s down there. Yes, well, what does the SPS do? I presume, of course, that you’re
familiar with the biblical story, the parable, of the prodigal son? You are? Well, the SPS
consists of fathers who have lost their children to the temptations of the paths of
wickedness above us in L.A. Nothing would make our hearts more joyous than to see
our sons and daughters return to us, contrite, to be welcomed with love and charity.”
His voice had to Limmit’s ear a canned quality, like a memorized recruiting speech.
“Unfortunately, however, there seems to be a low rate of return from L.A., even now
that the infamous Interface has been shut down. Too many of them are caught in the
magnetic influence of Dr. Adder.”
 “I could tell you a little about him,” said Limmit, smiling ruefully at the water.
“Doubtless you could, my boy. But as it is, the SPS sends a team of members out
each month to accelerate, shall we say, the process of remorse and eventual return we
feel is sure to occur to all of our errant children, given enough time.” Endpoint’s voice
had lapsed into a canned recitation. “Due to certain, uh, legalities, we’re forced to
operate underground, as it were, picking up the ones who venture down here into the
sewers. Naturally, given the still-small, membership of the SPS, the chances of us hitting
upon one of our very own children is quite small. But the principle is what counts,
right? And when the returning prodigal son sees the warm and generous welcome
provided for him by that month’s Patriarch, never does he return to his former evil
ways.” At times, Limmit thought, listening to this Endpoint is like hearing a pamphlet
read itself. “Believe me, in Orange County we really know how to slay the ol’ fatted
calf.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Limmit softly. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. It’s your
intention to adopt me? Like I was your lost son?” “For the time being, yes. As this
month’s Chief Exalted Patriarch, I’m going to make a home for you with my family
back in Orange County.”
“And that way the return of the prodigal son is accomplished?”
Endpoint nodded.
 “Then I’m sorry,” said Limmit, smiling in dreamy triumph, “to inform you that it
won’t work out that way. I wasn’t born or raised in Orange County; I’m from Phoenix.
An orphan, too.” Minutes passed while the six SPS members, in their skin-diving suits,
huddled at one end of the inflated raft and conferred in whispered tones. Limmit sat at
the rear of the raft, looking back at the river. Every second drew him inexorably away
from his goal, the Visitor. For some reason, he found himself feeling that he could give a
shit. Events below the surface seemed to follow their own weird logic; maybe this was
just some roundabout way of getting to his destination. I’ll ride along with it for now,
he thought. Besides, they’ll have to let me go in a minute or two.
“Ahem,” came Endpoint’s voice. Limmit slowly swung his head around. “We’ve
come to a decision,” said the mouth around the pipe. “Concerning your case. Inasmuch
as we’re dealing with spiritual father-son relationships, it would be foolish of us to
insist upon an actual physical return to Orange County on the prodigal son’s part. All
that is necessary for Orange County to be the son’s home in spirit, if he was not born
there, is for him to achieve knowledge of it. Then it becomes his spiritual home, and
thus his home in fact.” Endpoint leaned back with a satisfied expression.
“What does that mean?” asked Limmit.
“We’re going to show you around,” blurted one of the other men, “before we
officially welcome you home.”
“Great,” murmured Limmit, and slumped over the raft’s tubular edge, staring at
the dark water rushing beneath. Kidnapped by lunatic Orange County fathers, he
thought. At least KCID had been right about one thing—beneath L.A. is where the
action is. “Tell me,” asked Limmit, looking around at Endpoint in mild curiosity. “How
come you guys wear those rubber skin-diver suits?”
Endpoint looked uncomfortable. “Well,” he said stiffly. “Most of it down here is a
sewer, isn’t it?”

The inflatable raft remained below, tied to an outcropping of rusted valve handle.
The first of several metal hatchways and doors slammed shut below the last SPS
member on the ladder, shutting off Limmit’s view of the raft twisting on the end of its
tether in the dark, silent stream.
With Limmit sandwiched in the middle, the group threaded its way up from the
sewers to the closed doors of a large freight elevator. As Endpoint thumbed the
elevator’s call button, he grinned at Limmit. “How’s it going to feel to be back on top
again, eh?” he asked. The other SPS members pulled small bags filled with clothes and
shoes from behind a metal panel, and started peeling off their rubber suits.
Limmit, exhausted from what had seemed miles of clanging stairs and ladders,
grunted and nodded. Back on top, he thought wearily. Hot shit.
 All the way up in the elevator, a journey so long that Limmit worried once that the
machine had gotten stuck between levels, the SPS team laughed and congratulated each
other like triumphant hunters. The elevator doors slid open first onto an enormous,
humanless sea of silent automobiles underneath a gray cement sky. Two of the men,
with much handshaking and back-thumping from the others, departed down the even
lanes of cars. “They live in one of the other complexes,” explained Endpoint to Limmit.
“This is the largest, Casa del Solituda.” The doors slid shut again.
They opened again at random intervals, disgorging the rest of the SPS team, with
the same ritual, into carpeted hallways lined into seeming infinity with numbered
doors. Finally, only Endpoint and Limmit were left in the rising elevator. “Good thing
it’s after midnight,” said Endpoint, checking his wrist-watch. “No one will see us.”
The doors revealed another hallway, identical to the others, and Endpoint hustled
Limmit by his elbow from the elevator.
It wasn’t until he was standing inside the Endpoint conapt, in the little kitchenette
to one side of the entranceway, that Limmit realized how much filth and exhaustion he
had accumulated on the Sump Line. His nose recoiled as, isolated now, the combined
odors of sewage and sweat hit his nostrils. I feel like the plague, he thought, trying not
to stain the gleaming chrome and warm vinyl surfaces.
Endpoint tossed the canvas bag holding his skin-diver suit into a closet. “This
way,” he said, opening a door onto a small bathroom. He turned on the taps over the
tub, pulled out towels and a robe from a cupboard. “Try to be quiet, won’t you?” he
said. “Everybody’s asleep, you know.”
Limmit waited a few minutes after Endpoint had left, steam rising from the water
gurgling into the tub. He cautiously opened the bathroom door and looked around. No
one. He stepped forward quietly through the kitchenette and into the little entranceway.
He turned the front door’s handle experimentally—locked. Someone cleared his throat
behind Limmit, and he spun around to see Endpoint standing in the doorway of the
kitchenette, leveling a minuscule pistol at him.
“The shot must’ve worn oflF,” said Endpoint. He had changed into striped
pajamas. “I hoped you were going to be reasonable about this whole thing.”
“I wanted to be on my way again,” said Limmit sullenly. “Before I lost too much
time.”
“Come on, son. What’s a couple of days? Is that too much to ask, to make a bunch
of old men happy? Besides, that’s lot less time than you’ll lose if I have to shoot you in
the leg, or if we have to track you down again.” He laid the gun down on a counter and
wrapped a paternal arm around Limmit. “You might as well face it, my boy,” he said
genially, “you’re stuck with being our prodigal son for a little while. Realizing your
responsibilities is part of growing up. Afterward, you can go back to what you were
doing down in the sewers.”
 “All right,” said Limmit. The compulsion to flee, to descend back into the warm,
dark world of the sewers, ebbed from him as quickly as it had struck. I guess I can use
the rest, he thought. “Bring on the fatted calf.”
After the bath, Endpoint escorted him to another door. He pushed it open,
revealing a small room with two beds. In the dark, a figure lay on one beneath a
blanket, sleeping. “My son Edgar,” said Endpoint, pointing to the occupied bed. “Our
older boy ... left, you know. You can use his bed while you’re with us.” Limmit felt a
momentary twinge of pity for the older man. “And in the morning,” Endpoint
continued, “don’t tell him anything about why you’re really here. My wife and son
don’t know about the SPS—I told them before I left I’d be bringing back the son of a
friend of mine for a visit.” He hesitated for a moment, as if he were going to say
something more, but instead stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind
him.
In the room’s still darkness, Limmit shed the bathrobe and slipped beneath the
empty bed’s covers, luxuriating for a moment in their softness. I haven’t slept in a clean
bed since I left Phoenix, he reflected. There’s something to say for the bourgeoisie.
He heard the figure in the other bed roll over and switch on the lamp standing on
the table between the two beds. The light revealed a small-boned, narrow-faced
teenager sitting up and smirking at him. “How does it feel,” the youth asked, “to be the
prodigal son?”
 “I thought you weren’t supposed to know about that,” said Limmit. What next? he
said to himself. Everybody out here seems to have hidden sides except me. The
Secretless Man.
“My mother might be fooled with that ‘vacation’ crap my father hands us,” said the
teenager Edgar. “But that’s only because she’s swacked out on tranks and TV all the
time. What the hell kind of a vacation trip can you disappear for a month on, in Orange
County? Camp out in some other complex’s recreation center? Fuck that—all my
friends know about their fathers and their little SPS.”
“Yeah?” said Limmit. His eyes closed involuntarily, then flicked open again. “Is
what your dad says about it on the level?” “Ohh,” said Edgar craftily, “maybe it is.
Maybe I know something, though, about it that most people don’t.”
Disturbing. “Like what?” asked Limmit. He snapped his nodding head erect.
Edgar shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, whatever your name is. Maybe I’ll tell you
later.” He reached up and switched off the light. “School day tomorrow,” came his
voice in the darkness. “Lots of business to take care of.”
Limmit didn’t hear, having already fallen asleep.

He watched himself in the bathroom mirror, peeling the bandage from the side of
his face. There was no blood underneath, only a few fading pink lines. My face, thought
Limmit. He grasped the corners of the sink and leaned closer to the mirror to inspect it.
A mirror’s another thing I haven’t seen since Phoenix. He had caught glimpses of
himself, distorted and somehow alien, in the storefront windows of the Interface and
the grime-coated windowpanes of Rattown. But now he saw that not even the trek
along the Sump Line had done anything to him. Had not made his face as narrow and
sharp as it had appeared in L.A.’s reflecting surfaces. Splashing cold water against the
skin, he felt, in an indefinable way, disappointed.
In the kitchenette, the Endpoint family was grouped around three sides of the
room’s central table. Between Edgar and his father, a middle-aged woman in a bright
floral robe sat smiling vacantly. As Limmit sat down in the empty chair on the table’s
fourth side, the elder Endpoint said, “Good morning,” and Edgar mumbled something
around a mouthful of food; the woman said nothing. Something about her face
disturbed him —he tried to study it unobtrusively as Endpoint placed items on the
plate in front of him.
A connection within his memory completed itself. Suddenly he knew of what the
woman’s face reminded him. When his mother had died, the egg ranch’s resident
mortician had filled out the corpse’s sagging, dissipated facial flesh with injected
plastics. Limmit, ten years old, from simple curiosity had prodded with one finger the
sleeping face in the coffin—she had looked younger than he could remember having
seen her. Her pink cheeks had been as stiff and rigid to the touch as the hardened
plastics beneath the skin. Now, he felt that if he were to lean across the breakfast table
and feel Mrs. Endpoint’s face, it would be the same.
“You’ll have to excuse my wife,” said Endpoint stiffly, noticing Limmit’s fascinated
stare. “She’s not very talkative in the morning.” He jogged her elbow and she dreamily
raised a forkful to her mouth, all the while looking through space at nothing.
Limmit broke away his gaze and looked down at his plate. A waffle and several
sausagelike cylinders lay on it. After a bite of each, he recognized them as processed egg
from the Phoenix ranch.
“After I get off work today,” continued Endpoint, “I’ll start showing you around.
Maybe you can watch TV with Muffy, Mrs. Endpoint that is, until I get home.”
“Hey,” said Edgar, grinning up from his plate. “Why not let him come with me to
old Buena Maricone High this morning? You know, sort of take him around, make him
feel at home in Orange County.” He winked at Limmit, who had told him further details
a few minutes earlier about the SPS’s adoption decision.
“That’s not a bad suggestion,” said Endpoint thoughtfully. He turned to Limmit.
“I’ll give you a note for the principal. He’s a ... friend of mine.” Edgar snickered but was
ignored. “He’ll give you permission to sit in on Edgar’s classes. How about it?”
Limmit shrugged. “All right with me,” he mumbled around a mouthful of ersatz
waffle. He took another quick look at Mrs. Endpoint, still smiling at the wall behind
him.
After Edgar had loaned him some of his clothes, Limmit descended with him to the
complex’s parking area. From the multicolored rows of vehicles, Edgar selected what
appeared to be a streamlined armored tank with windows. It was painted fluorescent
blood-red. Limmit was driven back into its plush black imitation leather by the
accelerating G-forces as Edgar careened down the parking area’s ramps and sprang
without looking into the thick of the morning traffic emerging from the residential
complexes.
Edgar patted the vehicle’s dash as he maneuvered it through the traffic. “What a
machine,” he said with fierce pride. “Paid for it all myself, too. Expensive as shit.”
“Where’d you get the money?” asked Limmit, unnerved by the near-collisions as
they sped along.
“Where else?” laughed Edgar. “Peddling goodies.” He did not elaborate.
Once beneath Buena Maricone High School’s single, all-encompassing roof, after
Edgar had found a spot in the school’s enormous parking lot and a bored entrance
guard had directed Limmit to the administrative office concerned with the note
Endpoint had given him, Edgar led him to the school’s main hallway. For a moment
Limmit felt, as he looked around the windowless expanse, that he was back in one of
the Sump Line’s tunnels, only lined with vending machines and milling teenagers.
“Some cavern, huh?” said Edgar, pushing his way through the crowd. He finally took a
position by one wall, between a vending machine that spelled out EGGOBARS on its
front and another that said ERGOTONE. “Just wait,” said Edgar, propping one foot
against the wall.
Gradually, one after another, Edgar’s classmates approached him, staring
suspiciously for a few seconds at Limmit by his side. Edgar and his customer would
exchange a few whispers, then a wad of money would be passed to Edgar in exchange
for a thickly padded manila envelope Edgar pulled out of his pocket from a seemingly
infinite supply. Limmit watched silently as the clot of bills in Edgar’s hip pocket grew
steadily larger.
“Who’s your friend?” asked one girl as she handed Edgar her money. She eyed him
speculatively, the same bruise-purplish makeup surrounding her eyes and the nipple of
one exposed, barely pubescent breast. Limmit smiled wanly back at her; he had noticed
that half the girls in the crowd were like this one, and the others like Mrs. Endpoint,
dazed and rigid. The latter had only drifted by in front of them, not stopped.
“Don’t you know?” said Edgar. “He’s the prodigal son, he is.” “Really?” said the
girl. She ran a forefinger lightly up the fly of Limmit’s pants. “Welcome home.” She
merged back into the crowd and disappeared.
“Just what is it you’re selling?” asked Limmit finally, after seeing several more
rapid transactions.
Edgar looked out over the throng of students. “I used to sell dope,” he said. “But
there’s no money in that. Any kid can get all the downers he wants from his parents’
medicine chest. And stuff like bovaine and kainine only make it in L.A., you know? The
right atmosphere. Who ever heard of an Orange County cowhead? So now I sell ’em
this.” He pulled out an envelope like the others and handed it to Limmit.
Limmit tore it open and unfolded the contents, a sheaf of odd, slick-feeling paper.
The top sheet was a photo of Dr. Adder mounting his motorcycle, obviously taken
without his knowledge by a telephoto lens. Limmit leafed through the other sheets.
Most of them were photos, either of Adder taken unaware, or posed shots of the various
Interface hookers who had undergone his services. The results of the operations and the
amateurish snake’s-head tattoos the hookers had added themselves were prominently
featured. The few remaining sheets were interviews of the whores or other Interface
denizens, describing their impressions or relating anecdotes of Adder. Limmit folded
the sheets and placed them back in the envelope. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that
there’s a market for this stuff?”
Edgar nodded. “It’s printed on a special paper. Goes blank in a week. Also you
can’t photostat or Xerox it—the reflective surface just flares out. I’m the only source.”
“Where do you get them? I mean, you can’t just go up to L.A. yourself and take
them.”
 A shake of the head. “A fellow up there prepares ’em, and then meets me at a
prearranged point in the Sump Line below. I pick up the envelopes, and then later give
him his percentage of the haul.”
“What’s this guy’s name?”
“He said Droit.”
Limmit nodded to himself. Another of the ubiquitous social researcher’s sidelines;
putting his “research” to good use. “And people are that interested here in Adder?”
“The kids are,” said Edgar. “Every week, I sell as many as I’ve got. It’s like, you
know, an act of devotion. You can’t split for L.A. until you’re eighteen, otherwise the
police usually intercept you at the county limits and haul you back. So these little
bulletins kind of keep the flames alive.”
“You’re not a pusher,” said Limmit, laughing harshly. “You’re a fuckin’
evangelist.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Listen,” said Limmit. “Don’t you get any news here? Didn’t you hear of a little
raid on the Interface by Mox’s MFers?” “Sure,” said Edgar. “But Adder escaped.
Naturally. The official word may be that he’s dead, but he’s alive, running the Siege
Front. Otherwise, would I still be getting these from Droit?” He waved the manila
envelope.
It dawned on Limmit. That fuckin’ Droit is sending out old pictures of Adder, and
the kids in Orange County aren’t able to tell the difference. The myth lived on. Limmit
snorted in derision. “I could tell you something about your beloved invincible Dr.
Adder.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Limmit smiled at him. “Oh, nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He paused for a
moment to watch Edgar’s face as he comprehended the situation. “Sure you don’t want
to tell me more about the SPS?”
The youth turned away, irritated. “Forget it,” he said. “What could you know
about Adder?” The crowd had thinned out in response to the officious clanging of bells
several minutes ago and no more customers had approached while they had been
talking. “Come on,” said Edgar, pushing himself away from the wall. “I usually don’t
bother with my English class, but you might get a laugh out of it.”
The class had already begun when they entered the room.
Thirty or so students of Edgar’s age sat around, idly talking with each other,
inspecting the contents of the envelopes Edgar had just sold them, and a few were
watching in a bored manner the large television screen suspended in one corner of the
room. Several of the numb-faced girls sat near the walls, as if stored there.
Edgar led him to a pair of vacant desks by one group of conversationalists. Limmit
grew bored with their talk, mostly low exclamations of delight over the photos of
Adder and the whores, and turned his attention to the television. On the screen, two
men were sitting behind a desk, the front of which was lettered SCIENCE FICTION IN
THE CLASSROOM—AN AUDIOVISUAL APPROACH.
Speaking to the television camera was a young man, well groomed and game-show
oily. The other man was short and appeared somehow incredibly ancient despite his
smooth skin. He looked as if his body had been drained of its contents, refilled with
paraffin, and restored to life. Like Mrs. Endpoint and the high school’s vacant-faced
girls, but with a difference —there still seemed to be a spark of something
unextinguished behind the figure’s eyes. A shock of white hair hung over what must
have once been a living face a long time ago. Now the man sat listlessly, his face slack,
the eyes staring unfocused out of camera range.
“... all of which,” the young man on the screen was saying, a dynamic salesman of
education, “insured Lars Kyrie’s position in American letters, and qualified him for
special preservative treatment from the Board of Education’s Bio-Archive Section.”
Limmit started, and leaned forward to peer closer at the screen. So that’s Lars
Kyrie! He had assumed from the tattered and yellowing condition of the ancient
paperback books bearing his name as author that Kyrie was long since dead.
“You will find,” the young man continued, “one of Lars Kyrie’s disturbing science
fiction stories on page fifty-eight of your text.” Limmit looked around and saw a thick
volume lying on the floor by his seat. He picked it up and looked at the title. Augurs of
Utopia: A Basic Reading Text for Science Fiction in the Classroom. Still listening to the young
man’s voice, he quickly leafed through the book, noting familiar titles and names from
his own abandoned collection back in Phoenix.
Each story in the book was surrounded by a lengthy introduction and questions for
the student. Limmit closed the book and nudged Edgar in the ribs. The boy broke off his
conversation and turned to face him. “What is this, anyway?” asked Limmit, nodding
sideways to indicate the television.
Edgar shrugged, disinterested. “The educational channel. For lit classes they haul
out these old hacks they’ve got on ice and have ’em talk about their books. This
semester we’ve been doing whatchacallit, um ... science fiction.” He turned back to his
friends.
Limmit poked him again. “Aren’t you interested?” he asked. “That’s Lars Kyrie up
there.”
“So?” said Edgar, sneering. “If he’s such dangerous shit, how come they want me
to study him?” He turned away again.
On the screen, the young man’s handsome face was in profile as he spoke to the
older and shorter man. “Good morning, Mr. Kyrie,” he said. “We’re honored to have
you with us today.” The author’s face did not change, but continued to stare vacantly
off to one side. “Mr. Kyrie?” he repeated. There was no response. Without looking, the
young man depressed some buttons on the desk before him, hidden by the camera’s
angle.
 Instantly, the figure of Lars Kyrie jerked spasmodically, the eyes flaring wide, as if
a surge of electricity had been sent through his body. The old writer looked around in
dazed panic. The young man patted Kyrie’s hand soothingly. “There, there. Don’t be
alarmed, sir. We’re here to talk about your writing, remember?”
The aged head nodded slowly, the eyes like those of a cornered animal.
“Now then,” the young man said briskly. “As one of society’s most eloquent
warning voices of a few decades ago, when you were still writing, how do you feel
about the present-day society that you have lived to see?”
The old man licked his dry, flaking lips and fidgeted, as if trying to remember
something. His interviewer’s hand hovered warningly over the hidden buttons. “It’s
wonderful,” Kyrie hazarded quickly. “Uhh ... I’m sincerely grateful that America has
truly taken the wuh-warnings of my juh-generation of science fiction writers to heart in
buh-building—” He broke off, blinking at the camera.
“Yes?” prompted the young man. “In building what, sir?” He flicked lightly one of
the buttons, resulting in a shivering flinch on Kyrie’s part.
“In building,” the old man quickly jabbered, “a society free from personal
alienation and racial strife and war and, and, and ... all those other bad things I used to
write about.” He looked up at the young interviewer cringingly. Someone in the
classroom snickered.
“How interesting,” said the young man. Limmit thought he could detect in his
voice a slight tone of exasperation, as though the interview was not going as well as
planned. “Mr. Kyrie, what do you think is the relevance of your writing to today’s high
school student?”
The old man hung his head without answering, as if ashamed. “Mr. Kyrie?” the
young man asked gently.
The old man did not look up.
“Mr. Kyrie?” The young hand fell over the hidden buttons. The ancient head flung
itself up. A secret switch within him seemed to have been thrown. He took a deep,
rattling breath, almost a sob. “Fucked!” he screamed. “It’s fucked!” The young man
looked too startled to comprehend.
“My stuff is alive!” the old man continued to scream, in a frantic, reedy voice. “But
they’re burying it all under a mountain of shit! I never thought what they did to
Shakespeare”—the young man came alive suddenly, and slapped his hand full upon
the concealed buttons—“they could do to me!” The old man’s eyes rolled up in his head
and he started to sway back and forth. “When they first started teaching my stories in
schoolrooms,” he gasped painfully, “I thought it was wonderful. I thought ... academic
recognition—I longed for it!” The young man pressed furiously with both hands on the
buttons before him. The old man’s face began to twitch erratically, as if it were about to
fly apart. “I didn’t know it would come to this. I didn’t think ... I thought I was too vivid
. .. alive ... for them to make me into a bore ... like all the others they did it to ... make
you think I was one of them ... those gray teachers... on their reading lists...” This is
ghastly, thought Limmit in horrified silence. “Cut! Cut!” he could hear the young man
fiercely whispering to someone outside of camera range. “Get us off the air!”
Kyrie was writhing in his chair now, in response to the young man’s pressure on
the buttons. His head rolled on his shoulders and his arms began to flap spastically, like
a crippled bird. His words continued to spill out in hoarse, explosive gasps. “I didn’t
know ... first the colleges ... those professors were all right maybe ... they loved me ...
but they’re dead ...” “Whaddaya mean, there’s no one in the control booth?”

“... then in the high schools ... studying me and my friends ... until ... you were sick
of us ...”
“Goddamn this old fucker!”
“... until ... you thought we were just old farts ... like all the other old farts ... your
teachers ... and everyone else who had ever written ... that they got their dry hands on ...
like leeches—”
“Don’t give me that ‘automatic’ crap! Get us off the air!”
.. leeches ... bloodsuckers ... dust-clogged filthy cocksuck-ing vampires . .
The young man’s nerve finally broke. “Shut up!” he yelled, letting go of the buttons
and springing at the old writer’s throat. As the two fell behind the desk, one maniacally
throttling and the other, with his old yellowed eyes rolling and bulging from his head,
weakly resisting, the screen finally went blank. A chorus of cheers and whistles
resounded from the classroom audience, who had left off their conversations to watch
the unplanned spectacular. The voice of a different announcer, equally unctuous, came
on. “Be sure to attend tomorrow’s class, when our special guest will be the noted S-F
author Alex Turbiner. This has been Augurs of Utopia, Audio-Visual Supplement. ”
Limmit staggered to his feet and rushed blindly to the door of the classroom.
Outside the door he vomited on the hallway carpeting. He sucked in a few ragged
breaths and straightened up. He stared for a few seconds at the surrounding corridors
and doors of the school, then, without waiting for Edgar, he trotted shakily in the
direction of the main gate. There, one of the school’s uniformed guards glanced idly at
him as he stumbled out into the day’s dim sun.

Before he knew it, Buena Maricone High was out of view. He found himself
walking down a strangely empty street, lined with enigmatic masses of buildings and
full parking lots, when a blood-red car pulled alongside the curb, the door popping
open. “Get in,” called Edgar.
They jerked away from the curb as soon as Limmit had barely closed the door.
Barreling down the road, empty of any other traffic, Edgar turned around behind the
wheel, grinned, and said, “School’s out.”
Limmit stared, uncomprehending.
“I sold out,” said Edgar. “No more Adder-paks left. No point in staying, so I bribed
the gate guard to let me out.”
Numbly, Limmit nodded. “Where are we?” he asked, looking out at the buildings
flashing by. “What’s this place?”
“Industrial district,” said Edgar. “My father’s in there somewhere, turning out
defense items for the Mid-ocean Autonomic Defense Fleet. Though who the fuck’s ever
going to do anything about the USA except forget it even more than they already have,
let alone invade it, is beyond me. Main industry here, though; every building’s part of
it, working on some contract. Except, of course, that one.” He pointed to an imposing
rectangular structure some blocks away but clearly visible over the other buildings.
 “What’s that?” asked Limmit.
Edgar laughed. “A lot of things, but they’re all John Mox’s. His headquarters really
—Orange County Broadcast Central. The Video Church of Moral Forces, and nearly
everything else that shows up on the TV screen, comes from in there. All cables lead to
Mox, you might say.”
So that’s it, thought Limmit, studying the building from the changing angle caused
by the car’s movement. That’s where all this originated from, a source of evil like a
poisoned heart. That’s reached out to Phoenix and brought me here, to kill me amidst
filth and disease. But never anything personal, of course. Limmit felt a cold flush drain
through his vitals. There’s more, he knew, involved here than my life. A thought struck
him. “Lars,” he said in a voice of quiet urgency. “Lars Kyrie’s in there.”
“Yeah,” said Edgar. “Probably catching shit right now, too.” He felt something
snap together beside his heart. “We should get him out of there,” he whispered. He
turned to Edgar with wide, unblinking eyes. “Is there any way we can get some guns?
And some more people?”
Edgar stared at him for a second, then laughed. “You must be crazy. That place is
stiff with MFers. And even if you could get in it wouldn’t do any good. You couldn’t
get Lars Kyrie out.” “Why not?”
“He’s not there—not really. He’s on tape in the archives. He was one of the first,
before I was born even, to have his personality and memory programmed into the big
computer banks they’ve got in there; that’s why his output is that dummy you saw on
the screen this morning, a replica of his original body.” “That was a fake?”
Edgar nodded. “Wires and gears. But with pain circuits built in so they can keep
him in line. Now they’ve developed outputs where they use straight computer
graphics. It’s still realistic, looks like the guy did when he was alive, but it’s really just a
sophisticated animated cartoon.”
Limmit slumped back into the car seat. It was hopeless. There was no way to attack
Mox, guarded deep within his iron fortress, no way to take from him anything like
what Limmit felt had been taken from himself. There’s nothing to do, he thought
bleakly, but to sit here and wait for his gunman to catch up with me. Wait for the bullet
through the base of my skull.
They rode on in silence. Edgar seemed to be cruising purposelessly. The teenager’s
hands clenched again and again on the steering wheel, as if something were on his
mind. Finally he spoke. “Listen,” he said. “There is something you should know about
the Society for the Prodigal Son. I’ll tell you if you let me have what you know about
Dr. Adder.”
A bitter edge pierced Limmit. “Don’t even bother,” he told the youth. “I doubt if
you could make any money peddling this.” And besides, he said to himself, what do I
care what the truth is about the SPS? Let them be or do what they want. He felt himself
turning into an object. Without volition, subject to the will of ... others. This must be
what a stone feels like, he thought. Beyond pain.
“Come on,” Edgar pleaded. “It’s important. Not for money —I mean for me.”
“He’s dead.” The flat words seemed to burn up from his lungs. “Deader than Lars
Kyrie even. Something happened to him during the Raid on the Interface.” He felt his
voice tremble with the suppressed harmonics of grief and shame. “It burned out his
brain. He’s an idiot, if he still hasn’t died all the way yet —a drooling, blank-faced idiot.
He sits in the corner of a dark room in Rattown and is spoonfed and wiped clean by one
of Mother Endure’s walking wounded.” Jesus Christ, cried Limmit to himself, I hope he
is dead, clean-dead.
“B-bullshit,” said Edgar, his face flushed. “He’s alive—I get new pics of him every
week.”
“Droit’s stringing you on,” said Limmit, and sighed. “He’s dead—go wait for the
Resurrection.”
Edgar slammed on the car’s brakes viciously, jerking Limmit forward against the
dash. “Fuck you,” he snarled, his young face contorted with hate and fear. “Shit if
you’re getting any info on the SPS for that bunch of lies.” He reached across Limmit and
pushed open the car door. “Get out.”
As the car roared away from the curb, Limmit turned around on the sidewalk to
see where he had been dumped. He was standing in the gigantic triangular shadow of
the Casa del Solitude residential complex. The Endpoint apartment was somewhere in
its pyramidal mass. He trudged head down through the glass doors of the main lobby
and headed for the elevator. This is my home now, he thought. He no longer felt
horrified or bitter. I’m resigned to it, he thought, probing his feelings like a tooth that
had stopped aching. I’ve earned it. I deserve to live here now.

“You don’t have to show me around,” he told the elder Endpoint when he arrived
home to find Limmit waiting for him outside the conapt door. “I think I’ve seen
enough. I’m ready to come home.”
“Nonsense, my boy,” Endpoint said heartily. He repocketed his door key and took
Limmit by the elbow, steering him back toward the elevators. “I was going to wait until
Edgar brought you home from his school, but since you’re here already, let’s go right
now—you won’t believe it when you see it.”
As Endpoint drove them through the late afternoon traffic, he elaborated.
“Actually, you’re going to be a step ahead of most everyone else in Orange County. I
got special permission to show you this because Arthur Fuller, the man in charge, is a
brother member of the SPS. One of your uncles, so to speak.”
The car pulled through the entrance of another of Orange County’s mammoth
parking lots, crowded with vehicles. Limmit could see, over the tops of strangely green
trees and an elevated railway, the peak of a miniaturized mountain, complete with
ersatz snow gleaming in the dull sunlight. “This used to be one of the world’s most
famous amusement parks,” said Endpoint proudly, pulling into a vacant parking space.
“Now it’s pretty much just Orange County’s local fun spot. Christ, my glove
compartment’s crammed with old unused ‘A’ tickets— from when I used to bring
Edgar here.” His face clouded momentarily. “When he was younger and still liked to
go. But it’s going to be different soon—you’ll see.”
He led Limmit to a small, unmarked gate away from the garishly decorated ticket
booths and main entrances, and showed a slip of paper to a bored security guard who
waved them wordlessly inside. Endpoint pulled him into a large, pre-fabricated-looking
building and down a corridor lined with doors bearing crudely stenciled numbers and
designations. An almost tangible aura of activity exuded from behind the doors, like the
hum emitted by giant machinery. Directly at the end of the hallway was a door marked
FULLER—PRIVATE, upon which Endpoint rapped, then opened without waiting for a
response. “Art?” he called into the room, then pushed Limmit inside with him. “Here
he is. Ready for his little tour.”
A balding man, shaped like an angular pear, rose from behind a desk cluttered
with blueprints and schematics. He grasped Limmit’s hand in his own damp palms.
“Welcome home,” he said sincerely, “to Orange County.”
Limmit opened his mouth to speak, but Endpoint interrupted. “Not yet, Art,” he
said. “You remember.”
“That’s right, ” said Fuller, looking fondly at Limmit. “I hope our little exhibit will
impress you favorably. We want you to feel that this is truly your home.”
I feel it all right, Limmit thought to himself.
“Shall we?” said Fuller, opening another door on the other side of the room. He
ushered Endpoint and Limmit through it.
Beyond the door, Limmit felt his internal organs shift sickeningly at the sight of the
high-ceilinged room’s contents. Its entire length, stretching as far as he could see, was
filled with duplicates of the Interface’s slaughtered whores, in various stages of
completion. All the workers had apparently ended their shift and gone home. The
enormous room was evidently an assembly line: far down its length, the figures were
only skeletal metal frameworks slung from chains attached to a conveyor track in the
ceiling. Then, at stations progressively closer, cylinders, tubes, other mechanisms, were
hooked up in increasingly complicated arrangements; padding, heating elements, and
artificial skin were fitted over the framework; finally, only a few yards from them, the
completing articles of body hair, eyes, and miscellaneous details were being applied or
inserted. A dozen or more of the finished products stood in frozen nudity before them.
Holy shit, thought Limmit, nauseated. The old science fiction pulp wet-dream: the
mechanical cunt.
 Fuller lifted the eyelid of a brunette and peered into the eye in a professional
manner, checking out some detail. “There’s quite an involved rationale behind this
whole project,” he said, an overfriendly lecturer. He dropped the plastic eyelid and
turned to face Limmit. “Briefly, with the shutting down of the Interface, some
replacement had to be created for the, ah, diversion it afforded the residents of Orange
County. It was, shall we say, a vital release of tension. True, many are now finding their
way to the appropriate people in Rattown, the pimps and whores who escaped the
Moral Forces action. That’s easy enough, inasmuch as there actually is no siege
surrounding that area—”
“No siege?” echoed Limmit.
“That’s right. Oh, I know that some people still think there is—mainly because of
that silly Adder Siege Front the Rattown-ers organized. But honestly, how long do you
think a motley collection of psychotics like that could last if the Moral Forces really
wanted to go in and clear them out? Actually,” he added, his voice dropping to a
dramatic whisper, “I hear that several of the Front’s leaders are in on the, um, traffic, if
you know what I mean.”
Limmit could feel his mind fragmenting into layers. One small section flashed a
brief image of Eddie Azusa and the words It figures. But why? another part began to nag
unceasingly. Why did Mox stop there? Had the Raid just been to kill Adder? The
questions burned and sizzled in a tiny corner of his skull like drops of molten steel.
Why did Mox send me with the flashglove to Adder?
The rest of him watched in frozen repulsion as Fuller continued speaking. “So you
can imagine how glad we all were here when the GPC exec board gave us the green
light for our little pet project—the most innovative idea yet conceived for one of this
amusement park’s ‘theme areas,’ as we call them.”
“Fuckland,” said Endpoint, his insurance salesman’s face leering idiotically, and a
strange visionary light in his eyes.
“Mmm, yes,” smiled Fuller patiently, “that name has been considered. But we’re
much more likely to opt for something with a little wider appeal, with less offensive
connotations. After all, it is going to be a family amusement area. Something, of course,
that the old Interface never was.” He took the dazed Limmit by one arm and led him up
to one of the artificial whores. “Don’t be shy. Say hello to the little lady.”
I’m going to be sick, thought Limmit. Right here. Fuller reached behind the thing’s
back and flipped a switch. The hooker came alive and smiled coyly at Limmit. Christ,
he thought, how repulsive. Its plastic face looked eerily like the young girl to whom he
had talked in Adder’s office so long ago. He felt a gentle stroking pressure on the inside
of his thigh. Looking down, he saw what he hadn’t noticed before: the hooker was a
simulated amputee. She had one hand resting on the shoulder of another automaton to
balance herself, and was rubbing the stump of her right leg (only, thought Limmit, there
never was a right leg) against him. He perceived another evidence of painstaking
attention to detail. Right at the edge of the stump, where the synthetic whore’s real-life
counterpart would have had her grinning snake’s-head tattoo, there was the
amusement park’s own version of the mark. A little cartoon mouse’s head, two perfect
black circles for ears, grinning insanely friendly with button nose and wide-sprung
eyes.
This is it, thought Limmit. Nausea and despair sucked at his interior. I’m never
going to leave Orange County. I’ll die right here, only I’ll keep on walking. I’ll be dead,
and I’ll settle down here in Orange County, marry a girl vague from TV and downers,
and we’ll raise anonymous children together, removed from her body like loaves of
bread while she’s knocked out, a widespread brainless oven of a girl. On weekends
we’ll bring them here to Fuckland just like any other Orange County family. And
nobody will know I’m dead until my rotting body starts to fall apart. Right here with
this foam-rubber ersatz whore. My decaying prick will break off right in her
polyethylene cunt. What a thing for the next customer to find.

Limmit leaned his forehead against the hooker’s soft, gently heated breast. A tear
dropped from his eye and beaded on the waterproof synthetic skin. I’m not dead, he
thought in sick desperation. Don’t let me be dead. For the first time in a long while he
found himself thinking of Mary. “I want to leave,” he said in a constricted, childlike
voice. “I want out of here.” Behind him, Endpoint and Fuller exchanged quick, worried
looks. Endpoint brought his face close to Limmit’s. “Do you mean,” he whispered,
“Orange County? Or just this room?” “Here—” Limmit gulped, his cheeks burning and
wet. “Orange County.”
Endpoint straightened back up and faced Fuller. “We’ll have to convene the
welcoming committee tonight. We can’t wait any longer.”
“Why not?” asked Fuller. “If he runs away we can always track him down again.”
“I’m not worried about that,” snapped Endpoint. “I think he’s going suicidal.”
“But if that’s the case—”
“The ceremony will change all that,” Endpoint interrupted brusquely. “I’m the
Patriarch this month. It’s my responsibility, and my decision.”
“All right,” said Fuller, shrugging. “I’ll get on the phone to the others.” He started
to turn away to his office, then stepped back to reach behind the artificial whore and
switch it off. Limmit felt the padded breast begin to grow cold beneath his face.

“How long is this going to last?” asked Limmit. He was seated in the back of
Endpoint’s car, between two SPS members. Endpoint himself was driving, with two
others up front.
“The ceremony?” said Endpoint, glancing at Limmit in the rearview mirror. “Not
very long. A couple of hours; we should be through shortly after midnight.”
Limmit stared out the car window at Orange County’s brightly lit streets. The
questions that had sprung into his mind when confronted by the artificial whore, that
had indeed been boiling at the closest edges of his subconscious since the night of the
Raid, continued to repeat themselves endlessly, like some mnemonic jingle. As soon as
it’s over, he decided, I’ll say goodbye and light out. Back to the sewers. Or any way out
of Orange County.
“Why do you ask?” inquired Endpoint.
“Oh,” said Limmit, “you know, I don’t want to eat too much at this feast of yours.
Slows you down when you’re traveling.”
“He doesn’t want to eat too much?” asked the SPSer on Limmit’s right, sounding
puzzled.
Fuller, sitting up front, turned around. “He doesn’t know yet,” he said
explanatorily.
“Ah.”
“Know what?” asked Limmit quickly. Something seemed foreboding.
No one answered him. The vehicle pressed on through the late night traffic. Limmit
watched the men’s silent faces, all looking straight ahead into the night without meeting
his eyes. The rumor, Limmit thought suddenly, that Bandita told me—
He lunged across the lap of the SPSer to his left, scrabbling for the car’s door
handle. The door popped open for a brief second, giving him a dizzying glimpse of the
concrete road surface flashing by beneath the car. Then the two SPS members hauled
him back into his place between them, and clamped themselves firmly onto his arms,
rendering him immobile. He could see Endpoint’s livid eyes observing him from the
rearview mirror.
“That’s right, son, ” Endpoint grated. “I’m afraid we observe a reading of the
parable of the prodigal son that may differ a little from your conception of the story,
son. ” The way he rasped out the word bristled Limmit’s neck hair. “But then,”
Endpoint continued, “you don’t really know what it’s like to be a father, eh? And to
raise a son like you? Maybe, if you think about it in the time left to you, you’ll begin to
see why we hold that the prodigal son is the fatted calf. It makes more sense that way,
of course. After all, how would you really welcome home such a son? The flesh of his
father’s loins, yet who has feasted on his broken heart. Now it’ll be tit for tat, so to
speak.” Christ, thought Limmit crazily, they’re not even gourmets— they’re probably
going to eat me bloody raw! He struggled to keep control of his senses. Looking out the
window, he saw that the road had entered vacant land, scrubby gray and brown hills.
That probably meant they were only minutes away from whatever isolated spot the SPS
held their ceremonies at. A pair of headlights was visible heading for them; soon they
would flash by on the other side of them and disappear.
“But,” said Limmit desperately, “I’m not even your real son.” In the rearview
mirror, Endpoint’s eyes narrowed into slits. “Like I told you,” he said quietly, “you’ll
do.” Then the eyes darted away from the mirror; Limmit saw them grow wide in
startled astonishment. He looked ahead through the windshield and saw that the pair
of headlights on the road before them was heading straight for them, and accelerating.
“What’s he doing?” screamed Fuller in a terrified falsetto.
Endpoint panicked, slamming on the vehicle’s brakes and cranking the steering
wheel to the right. The car skidded through a ninety-degree arc, nearly heeling over as
it continued sideways in the same direction. Limmit felt himself bounce off the shoulder
of the SPSer next to him, then slam his forehead against the back of the seat ahead.
Dazed, he watched through the side window as the other car’s lights sped closer; at the
last possible moment the lights veered to one side. Something struck the car’s tail a
glancing blow, spinning it back the other way around on the road and smashing Limmit
and the SPS members against the right side of the car’s interior before it came to a
lurching stop.
There was a taste of blood in Limmit’s mouth. His head aching, he looked around
at the car’s other occupants. All except one were still conscious; a spatter of blood traced
itself across the windshield to where Fuller’s head lay on the dash. Endpoint clutched
the steering wheel tightly, his face drained white. Before he or anyone else could say
anything, a hand snaked through the side window and placed a small revolver against
Endpoint’s temple.
“Freeze, Dad,” said Edgar Endpoint.
 * * *
“My own son,” said the elder Endpoint bitterly, staring out the window at Edgar.
“And my gun, too. Who said you could go into my bureau?”
“Two bad ones in a row,” muttered one of the SPS members beside Limmit.
“Let him out,” said Edgar, holding the pistol steady at his father’s head.
“Who?” asked Endpoint blankly. He seemed genuinely confused, still not
recovered from the collision.
“The prodigal son—he’s going with me.”
Limmit scrambled out of the car, the two SPSers in the back seat not trying to stop
him. Outside, on the dark, empty road, he could see Edgar’s blood-red vehicle a few
yards off, one entire side crumpled like metal foil. In the hand without the gun, the
youth dangled a battered crash helmet by its chin strap.
“Don’t try to follow us, Dad,” said Edgar, pulling out the gun. Limmit sensed the
air of nervous tension around him. “Come on,” Edgar said, waving him over to his car.
“Let’s go.”
“Wait a minute,” said Limmit. He reached inside his boot. The blade was still there;
amazing, considering all he had been through lately. He walked around Endpoint’s car,
quickly and systematically slitting the tires.
“Ta-ta,” he yelled as he climbed into Edgar’s car. He was filled with giddy
excitement from the violent escape. “See you later, child eaters.”
“Pretty hairy driving,” said Limmit as Edgar accelerated down the road. He sank
back into the car’s upholstery, accepting it like a dream. “I’m surprised this thing can
still run.” Edgar grinned across at him. “It’s built for little street games like this. The
favorite sport of Orange County’s affluent young. Steel beams all the way around—I
could’ve slammed into a bank and not hurt this car. The side panels are just snap-on
decorative modules—I’ve changed them about twenty times already.” He fell silent; his
gleeful smile drained away completely as he hunched over the wheel.
Limmit studied his silhouetted profile. “So why?” he asked finally. “Why’d you do
it?”
“It’s true,” said Edgar, staring straight ahead. “About Dr. Adder. What you told
me.”
“What confirmed it for you?”
“Droit. I went down below, to the sewers, to give him his money. I told him what
you had told me, and he admitted it was true. He said that he had seen him, Dr. Adder,
himself.”
It’s true, all right, reflected Limmit, plunged again in private melancholia. Now you
know, too.
“Droit told me to give you this,” said Edgar. He handed Limmit a sheet of paper.
“He said he couldn’t arrange another guide for you.”
 Holding it up against the car’s dashboard lights, Limmit could make out the
paper’s details. It was a map of sections of the Sump Line. Directions were indicated on
it, leading from a spot marked VISITOR back to some point in the L.A. slums. It looked
impossibly complicated; maybe, he thought, I’ll be able to figure it out when I get down
there again. He folded the sheet carefully and placed it in his inside coat pocket. Might
as well see it through, he decided. “I take it,” he said, “you’re going to lead me back
down to the sewers.”
Edgar nodded, continuing to stare at the road ahead. “What are you going to do
then?” asked Limmit.
“I don’t know,” said Edgar, shaking his head. “I can hide out all right, I guess,
either down in the sewers or up here at my friends’ for a while.” He fell silent for a
moment. “I always used to think,” he said softly, “that someday I could always go to
the Interface, or Rattown even. Get away from here. But now what can you do?” He
turned his face to Limmit; the car’s dim green dash lights shining wetly upon his
cheeks. “What can anybody do now?”

I should’ve asked the kid for a watch or something, thought Limmit. My sense of
time is really fucked up now. His legs ached as if he had been walking beside the dark
underground river for days; but since leaving Orange County he had slept only once,
curled up dreamless in one of the side tunnels, woken, and plodded on upstream.
Or better yet, he thought, some food. His stomach had long ago ceased rumbling—
only a periodic tremor of faintness welled upward with each step. So far he had not
even seen, let alone been able to catch, any of the small rodents Bandita had found for
them before. They’re probably too smart for me, he thought.
The next section of tunnel he entered was only faintly lit from a few remaining
fluorescent panels above. What looked to be a large clump of rags lay in his path, and
another similar object lay farther on. Weakly, Limmit prodded the closest bundle, and
Bandita’s dead face lolled over, staring up at him.
He bent down beside the body. Against the Sump Line’s background melange of
odors was the scent of several days’ putrefaction. A pool of blood had dried and caked
around the body, pouring from the ragged exit wound in her chest and the smaller hole
in her back where the bullet had entered.
The other object was Victor’s corpse. Stooping down, he saw that the throat had
been expertly slit. One stiff hand still clenched the rifle he had had time to fire before he
bled to death.
Limmit walked back to Bandita’s body and noticed her small outstretched hand
cradling the strap of a large canvas bag. He pulled the bag free and looked inside. It was
filled with old, but still edible, canned foods. He extracted and weighed in his hands a
can of peaches. She must have found a cache, thought Limmit.
 He walked back and forth between the two dead objects, studying their outlines
and contortions. I don’t understand it, he thought. She killed him, and left him.
Heading for ... where? For me? He shook his head, the canned peaches a weight in his
hand.
Her body was astonishingly light when he lifted it in his arms. As he lowered it
into the black, silent water, it sank below the surface, but bobbed back up as it slowly
wheeled around, following the river’s current. When it was out of view he sat down
and pulled off the peaches’ lift-tab. He fished out with his fingers the slippery golden
sections, like tangible sunlight in the dark, from the warm fluid and placed them in his
mouth.

The end of the tunnel, where the dark water emerged from behind a steel and
concrete wall, was littered with the rotting fragments of old packing crates. Beyond
them to one side was a small doorlike opening. Limmit, entering and following its
downward slope, soon found himself in a long room crowded with banks of electronic
apparatus, connected to each other by thick bundles of black cords lying on the floor.
The passageway was so narrow that he slid the strap of the can-filled canvas bag from
his shoulder and dropped it to the ground. On the machines’ faces a few colored lights
shone or blinked erratically; a low, wavering hum filled the room.
Beyond the computers, Limmit entered another room, lined with shelves. Most
were filled with large black volumes—half of one side contained cardboard boxes
crammed haphazardly with computer printout paper. With a finger he wiped the dust
from the spine of one of the volumes—the typed label read VISITOR—TRANS. SERIES
R. A pair of cables from the previous room snaked across the floor and vanished
through another door.
The Visitor was on the other side. The space itself that contained it was enormous,
a cathedral-like immensity. Standing on its floor, Limmit could see no ceiling; only the
wall behind him indicated any of the area’s dimensions. And a few yards away from
him lay the gargantuan bulk of the Visitor. Somehow Limmit sensed that he and it were
the only living things there.
It reminded Limmit of pictures he had seen as a child of certain ants whose queens
grow gross and immobile until the chitinous body becomes nothing but an appendage
of a great shapeless, pulsating mass. Only this was not insect-sized: it swelled and
towered over him like a cloudbank.
Limmit walked closer to its bulging flank and touched it. A faint luminescence
added to the dim electric lights set up around it. A section some fifty feet square slowly
bellowed in and out. As far as he could see, the soft bulk pulsated all over in like
manner, with no apparent coordination. It’s dying, Limmit realized suddenly. It’s been
dying for years.
 Where it rested on the floor, great discolored bruises had developed, as if the pulpy
body’s fluids were collecting and growing stagnant with lividity. Several patches
touching the floor had rotted open, and had emitted a puslike fluid that dried into a
yellow crust around the body’s edges.
He slowly circled the body for several yards. As in the dimly remembered pictures
of the insect queens, a comparatively small half-figure, like a human imbedded waist-
deep, hung attached to the great mass. A hard-shelled trunk the size of a man’s, with
thin, sticklike limbs hanging limply or occasionally twitching, and a smooth oval head
that hung just at the height of Limmit’s own. He walked up and stared into the
suspended alien face. The large, flylike, complex eyes seemed to contain only the barest
spark of consciousness. A tiny microphone was attached to one side of the face’s
arrangement of mandibles. Leaning close to it, Limmit could hear a faint stream of
sounds, a liquid whining. His message, thought Limmit. From so far away. That he has
come to die in order to give us.
He followed the microphone’s dangling cord across the floor to a small machine,
clattering softly to itself and unreeling from a wide slot a closely filled length of printout
paper. The sheets had piled up into a disorderly mountain at the machine’s foot, sliding
like a glacier over the thick black cables from the other rooms. He lifted a handful of the
paper and read it. After a few minutes, he dropped it and snatched up more, scanning it
quickly; then he tore the sheet straight from the machine’s mouth and studied it
frantically.
In the other room he tore the black volumes from the shelves at random, dropping
them as soon as he had seen a few pages of each. He uprooted the cardboard boxes’
contents, until he was standing, panting from exhaustion, knee-deep in a welter of
paper.
Sickness, he thought, filled with disgust and bitterness; filth and disease. All this
way ... for this. He looked around at the scattered sheets of translation. Years, he
thought, decades of babbling, incoherent self-pity. Idiocy. It must’ve been diseased,
deranged when it got here, was sent here. And wallowing in its own decay since,
begging moronically for our help. As if we could do anything at all.
Limmit walked back into the chamber and stared at the Visitor’s bulk. It was no
mystery to him now why the old scientists had all gone someplace else and died, away
from it. To work and hope, he thought, and then find out that no one was coming with
the answers after all.
 The thing’s faint whine and necrotic mass stirred Limmit’s memory. Full circle, he
said to himself; from the egg ranch to the L.A. sewers, two giant corpses at either end.
This would be as good a place as any, he thought, to finish. To lie down beside it and
die. To stop.
The stench of rot flowed through him, warm and rancid. Why the fuck keep on
moving? he thought wearily. Life’s nothing but the beating you take before you die.
And I’ve died so many times already. Killed and lost so much. The remains.
Minutes or hours later, he turned away from the pale mass and slowly followed the
black cables out. Stupid; you keep taking it, he thought, extracting and unfolding
Droit’s map. Until the last time.
 The sewer fluffs luminescence had increased somehow, or Limmit’s eyes had
become completely adapted to the dark. Bandita’s bullet-shattered lamp still lay on top
of the fluff onto which he had fallen from the surface of Rattown. A rope ladder
dangled above him—Droit’s, he thought. He reached up and mounted it, swaying
slightly in space, and climbed until the fluff below him was lost to sight. Looking down
into the darkness, he could see hundreds of yellow points of light, arranged in pairs,
appear on all sides below him. The rats, he thought. They’ve been watching all along.
For a brief flash of delirium, the yellow lights looked like stars in a black sky, and
he hung suspended, unable to tell up or down —it seemed as if he were descending
headfirst into the depths, rather than up from them. The feeling passed, and he climbed
on, until the lights disappeared.
On the surface it was night. Nothing’s changed, he thought as he walked through
the empty dark alleys. The walls were covered with the Siege Front’s red and black
posters, only slightly faded and tattered. Advertisements, he thought, for the land of
shades.
And Mox’s gunman is waiting for me. He knew I’d come back here to die. As good
as dead—only a thin crust of animation left to shatter. He felt as if some slow corrosive
had eaten out the rest, leaving only stilled vacuum.
He came to the ancient, decaying building where Mary had brought him. She’s
forgotten, he thought, mounting the stairs. Left the dead behind. He stood before the
room’s closed door and touched the cold metal of the doorknob. The only one who
might have saved me ... died. Limmit pushed open the door and gazed into the dark,
silent room. He saw that the box of clothes Mary had gotten for him still sat in the same
corner, a thick coat of dust covering it, shroudlike. She’s gone, he thought; like
everything else.
Faint light streamed from the window on the other side of the room. As Limmit
stepped into the room he saw a man’s figure silhouetted black against the window.
Limmit turned slowly toward the figure, palms outward, to accept the bullet.
There was no shot.
“Hello, Limmit,” said Dr. Adder.

I sat there for a long time. Or laid there. Depending on which way the old woman
put me. She fed me, wiped my mouth and ass. I didn’t move; I had become an object.
After my vision cleared, I watched TV—more than I had since I was a kid in Orange
County. The old woman nearly always tugged and pulled my lolling body into a
position where I could see the TV; I guess she thought that as long as my eyes were
open I deserved it in some way. I would lie in the same spot for days, my face turned to
the screen, while the old woman crept through the room’s piles of debris, muttering to
herself. Sometimes the young girl would drift into my field of vision. She seemed to be
attracted to the TV, although I could tell she was blind, as well as deaf and speechless
and with impaired tactile sense, I discovered later. Lying there on the room’s moldering
couch, I would see the girl kneel on the floor and press her face and the palms of her
hands against the side of the TV, her blank gaze turned direct into my empty one. I
figured then that she liked the faint heat the set gave off.
I didn’t sleep, or think, or remember anything. I lay there, or was propped against
one arm of the couch, filled with a strange contentment. Not filled, actually: it was as if
something enormous had been drained out of me, and I could now touch and feel the
vacuum left behind. Peace defined as the absence of .. . something. I had never realized
before how much of everything I did had been a consequence of some nameless fury
within me, as if all my visible manifestations were simply results of an inner storm.
Now I was content to be a tube, without tension or restriction at either end, and the TV
programs passed through me just like the old woman’s prepared mash.
I watched the TV families omnivorously. It got to where I couldn’t distinguish one
bunch from another—they merged in my perception into one giant collective entity, like
a jellyfish compounded of thousands of smaller organisms. The father-extensions would
smile at the mother-extensions, and these would in turn smile at the children-
extensions; and they would all flex and grope through their daily adventures. Which
must have been hilarious, judging from the hysterical laughter that accompanied their
every move, but it all seemed to me like foreign movie actors going through an
unknown language’s tragic opera. Over and over: rituals.
Then other times Mox would come on the TV, and I would watch him just like
everything else. All my former contempt and hate for him was gone—in fact, I was
unaware that I had ever had any. He would drone on and on, his voice sliding through
me like it was oiled. Sometimes, he would mention a figure called Dr. Adder. I knew
there was a connection between that dimly mysterious person and myself, that he had
once even occupied this body lying on a dirty couch in Rattown; but he was gone.
Purged.
I started to fall. Memory began to come back, but it changed nothing. Behind my
empty face I watched again all of that one night’s bodies blur and leap at me, shattering
into corpses. Blood oozing slowly, half-life speed, onto the Interface. Dr. Adder had
done it all, with this metal forearm that dangled from my side as limp, volitionless, as
my other of flesh. It had taken quite a lot out of Adder, I realized—in fact, had taken
quite a lot of him out of me. Who was I? I wondered, falling farther. On the couch,
observed by the muttering old woman, the blind girl, and the happy faces on the screen.
I watched old Betreech’s look of fearful knowledge dissolve into splinters of bone,
clots of blood and tissue, flying teeth like decayed pearls around Dr. Adder’s metal
hand. I watched you sell the weapon to Adder, to him, to me. He and I were still one,
but as I fell farther I could feel him splitting away from me. Pazzo’s head dissolved on
point of impact. A long parade of women went naked beneath Dr. Adder’s knife,
customers under him and the ADR. All those revelatory visions merged, like the TV
shows, into a single feverish dream of overpowered flesh.
Then I fell, motionless on the couch in Rattown, down farther. When there was no
Interface yet for him to come to or create. When he lay encysted in Orange County like a
tumor. There was more of me, whoever I was, than of him back then. Years of medical
school flowed by—I walked through them now in slow, dreamy reverse. Then Buena
Maricone High School: I was part of a river then, indistinguishable from the mass, the
spot of blood that was the embryonic Dr. Adder within me concealed beneath the skin. I
fell through grade school, more of the same, and into a preschool class. The memories
stopped at one particular day. The attendant was not aware of me having crept up
behind her with the other pair of scissors that had been dropped on the floor. The spot
of blood that was Dr. Adder lay right on the surface, formed only minutes ahead and
not yet covered up with my bland layers. He didn’t hesitate, but plunged the scissors
into her calf, the blood creeping in memory’s slow motion over the child’s hand. I
hesitated, did not plunge the blades in; she turned around and saw me, snatched the
scissors away, scolded me, and I resolved in my sincere childish heart to be a good boy
forever. A simple choice between what one should do and what they want you to do;
that’s how it starts for everybody. The attendant walked away on unscarred,
unpenetrated legs, and the bloodspot burned fiercely and disappeared into me, drilling
a corrosive hole that healed over it without a trace.
And then I didn’t fall any farther. There was no need to. At that point he and I were
more than distinct, separate: only one of us existed, and I was at rest upon that couch in
that innocent child’s time. The rivers of blood would never flow over this body’s hands;
no one would open their septic minds to its interior eyes. There was no Dr. Adder—I
had erased him. I will lie here, I told myself, and be good.
I don’t know how long it took for me to reach that point, but once I had, time
almost completely ceased to flow around me. It took what seemed to be days for the old
woman to cross the dingy room toward me, her mutters now edging into subsonic
rumbles. The food she placed in my mouth crawled softer than but as slow as glaciers
toward my anus. I could trace its progress through my guts for weeks, it seemed. The
voices on the TV oozed toward me like paste, the vibrations in the air fluttering and
sucking at my ears like warm contra-bass kisses. The girl, crouched beside the TV,
seemed like an unmoving rock formation, blank and perpetual.
I think now that I was dying. There was only a finite amount of time left before my
heart, sensing that some finality had been reached, ceased to beat. My lungs would no
longer inflate the sluglike body I was evolving to. My mind was thus stretching out for
as long as it could this sweet, empty bliss. It was a race, with me as the dispassionate
observer, to see which stopped first —my heart or my gradually slowing perception of
time.
Years, it seemed, after I had reached the end of my fall, something happened. If
anything deviating even slightly from the room’s frozen routine ever occurred (the
dropping of a dish the old woman was carrying to me or the blind girl, strange flurries
of noise out in the street), time speeded up slightly to encompass the event, then slowed
down again to its lengthening pace. My face was turned toward the TV, as was more or
less usual; the people inside it were swimming slowly through their static ballet, their
laughter emerging as great woofing roars. The girl crouched, dumb and sightless beside
it, pressing against. She had taken to this practice increasingly during the last few
centuries I had been observing the room’s contents— perhaps because of the decreased,
due to me, amount of attention she received from the old woman.
Suddenly, the image on the screen flared out in a brilliant burst of white light and
static. The TV family’s figures resolved back on, but distorted, wavering. They slowly
twisted and flowed, their bodies lengthening and contracting into erotic contortions,
while the TV’s speaker howled and gibbered. The old woman, who had been sitting in
the filthy upholstered chair beside the couch, shrieked, her voice traveling from the bass
end of the audible spectrum to an ear-piercing siren as time raced up to its normal
speed. “Get away from there!” she screamed, leaping up and pulling away from the
side of the TV the blind girl, who lolled limp, clutched in the bony, clawlike hands. She
shook the girl’s body back and forth, screaming a storm of warnings, threats, and curses
at the head which snapped back and forth with its blank, unhearing expression. The old
woman finally gave up in disgust, her outburst exhausted against the girl’s stonelike
face. She flung her across the room, against the couch where I was lying, and raged out
of the room.
The girl slid, dazed by the shaking, to the floor beside me. I watched her blind head
swivel from side to side, unaware of my being there, moving gradually slower and
slower as time started to congeal around me again. In slow motion I saw her rise to her
feet; she stumbled against the side of the couch and flung one arm out, so slowly it
seemed, to catch something to break her fall. I watched her outstretched hand move
through the thickening air above me, and then light on the flashglove, this metal arm,
the skin of her fingers kissing the cold surface, then her weight coming full upon it, the
fingers curving across it, grasping.
Nothing happened for a long moment. An expression I had never seen on her
immobile visage appearing was the last thing I saw then. Something flared around me
in a brilliant white flash, just as the TV screen had done, then faded away. There
seemed to be a waiting silence. A girl’s voice came to me, moving in real-time. “Hello,”
I heard it say, but somehow not with my ears. “You’re ... Dr. Adder, aren’t you?” There
was a faint sizzle of static behind the words; the voice was shy, a child’s, almost.
 Adder broke off for a few seconds, staring at some point beyond the window.
Watching him, Limmit sensed the silent alteration behind the now razorlike face.
Something seemed to have disappeared irrevocably from around its cutting edge.

Her name was Melia—she remembered somebody calling her that, before she
became deaf. That was a long time ago, she told me. There had been a man, her father,
she thought. She was never able to understand any of what he did, but gathered from
what she told me that he had had both a taste for kainine-herpezine combinations and a
fertile imagination. And two victims for it: the woman, too fucked up on bovaine to run
away, and the child, too young. When he finally ODed, the woman’s placid shell was
cracked open by madness, and Melia, the little girl, was senseless. She had walled off
the little one-room hell behind closed eyes and ears; the nerve endings in her skin had
finally shut down almost completely against the pain. She was isolated—the mother
took care of her in her lunatic fashion, living like vermin in Rattown on Mother
Endure’s handouts.
It went on that way, she told me, dark, silent; until she wandered into the TV set
the old woman kept playing constantly there in the room. When I was in med school in
Auckland, the university was studying a group of blind Maori children who could
erratically manipulate small electronic calculators without touching the controls: the
IBM Syndrome, it was called. Perhaps if those children had been as completely shut off
from sensory input for so long a time as Melia, their mutated nervous systems would
have developed into an ability like hers.
She became able to leap the gap from beneath her skin to under the TV’s metal
cabinet, and plug directly into its electronic circuitry. At first the sensations were
meaningless to her —random flashes inside her skull of the colors she remembered as a
baby, noises and voices crackling and fading in and out unintelligibly. She squatted
closer to the set for months on end, until, like learning to see, she mastered this new
sense. It didn’t take long, actually—there was nothing to distract her.
At last she had it: she received the TV’s signals directly, without it being necessary
for them to be translated into light and sound waves, which were lost to her anyway.
She watched the families, and Mox. This was her existence, clamping herself tight to the
side of the TV, sucking these electronic portions of life from it. She told me she
remembered being a little girl like the ones in the TV families, but she believed she had
died, and now she just floated in some uncomfortable limbo, looking back at the world
in this way.
Gradually, as she absorbed more and more from the TV, she reasoned out the
truth. The TV families were less alive than she;
 the memory of the sight of the TV from the days past when she could still see was
recalled; finally, she relived, silently screaming, the forgotten pains that she had sealed
herself from. She knew, to some degree, where she was and what was going on, and
that she was alone and unique—no one in the TV families used a set like this. She
watched on, and discovered there was more to her talent than that.
She learned to trace the TV signal. All the way from the set through the
underground cable back to Orange County. Right to the computer banks in Mox’s
Broadcast Central where the video tapes are created, played, and stored. The entire
electronic apparatus had become part of her nervous system. She could penetrate at will
any section of the entire interconnected communications network that had Mox’s
headquarters as its focus. The electronic extension of her ego raced through the
computer’s memory banks, digesting nearly everything. In the medical data units she
ran into the information concerning the other known IBM Syndromes. She realized her
powers were already greater than anything she found recorded there. Bored as a child,
she determined to see how far her abilities did reach.
Weeks later, she discovered that not only could she penetrate the network, she
could to some degree control it. Starting with the TV she clung to in Rattown, she
altered, distorted the signal appearing on that one screen. The phosphor-dot images
would turn into the weird memories of her father that I saw later. She extended her
power; for a brief period, a wave of distorted images hit all the sets in Orange County
and L.A. as she reached right back into Broadcast Central and changed the signal from
there. She gave up this little game, though; whenever she attempted it, something
would pull her away from the TV—her mother, the old woman, instinctively sensing
that her daughter was somehow responsible for the disturbing patterns on the screen.
Also, she became aware that the network’s technicians were sending tracers throughout
the system to catch their new glitch. Fearful of being discovered, she modified her
actions. Only on rare occasions, when she could no longer resist, did she try it again, to
the TV in the room or the entire system, and then only for a few seconds. That explains,
I suppose, a few phenomena from back on the Interface. She confined herself mainly to
exploring the system without creating any disturbances. She found out quite a lot that
way.
When I was brought to the room, she was only faintly aware of my existence. On
occasion she had brushed or fallen against the old woman, then me, and deduced from
her limited tactile sense that there was another body in the room. Not that she cared—
her life was in the TV. So it was until the incident I already told you of, when her
mother threw her against the couch I lay on.
The electronic network connecting the flashglove’s sensors with my own nervous
system is really only a simplified version of the network she had been playing with all
that time. When she came into close enough proximity, her hand actually grasping the
surface of the glove, the bridge was gapped, just as between her and the TV set. The
glove was, in effect, an electronic interface between our two nervous systems. The
signals from the glove’s sensors were designed so that my brain would perceive them
as analogs of my original senses, particularly sight and hearing. The first thing she
mastered was an “audible” signal—that was the voice I heard. A few minutes later she
was giving me “visuals” through the glove.
I was the first live person her mind had been in contact with since her father, the
people represented on the TV signal being separated from her by the computer banks
and video equipment. She knew who I was, having gone through the memory bank
data on me. She was more curious than afraid; in fact, after a while I thought I could
detect some of the inevitable worship, though whether she was impressed by what she
had learned of me from the banks, or was imitating what she had learned of my fans, I
couldn’t tell.
She gave up the TV, and “talked” incessantly with me. “Visually,” she appeared as
a young girl, not the filthy and skinny creature sitting beside me, clutching the
flashglove, but the one she might have become ... otherwise. She drew the image, I
suppose, from what she had seen on TV. I didn’t even notice, for a long while, that time
had begun flowing normally around me. I told her whatever she wanted to know about
me and the rest of the world that she hadn’t been able to discover herself. She was able
to hold on to my metal hand and reach across the room to touch the side of the TV—it
must’ve been a sight, a blind girl stretching her arms between a catatonic on a couch
and a TV set, like a bizarre seance. She led me through the TV, the cables, and back to
the computer banks and Broadcast Central in Orange County: what she had told me of
her discoveries I was able to see for myself. And there was something there, concealed
deep within the network, that was very interesting indeed; but it took a lot of thinking,
as I lay immobile on the couch back here in Rattown, being fed and wiped by the old
woman, and “talking” silently with Melia, before I realized what it meant to me.
 I stood up from the couch, finally. My muscles ached and screamed at the sudden
exertion; the old woman saw me and fell into a fit on the floor, raving and scrabbling. I
stumbled over to where Melia was kneeling beside the TV and placed her hand on the
flashglove. I kissed her goodbye on the forehead, both there in the dark room and with
our “visual” images in the glove, and told her I’d be back soon. When I walked out of
the room I could hear, somewhere very faintly, the cry of a very small child falling
submerged into a spot of blood as big as L. A.

“So how did you find me?” Limmit stared out the room’s grime-encrusted
window, his back turned to Adder sitting on the edge of the bed.
“When I left the old woman’s,” said Adder, “the first person I ran into out on the
street, the only one, was Droit. It was either just luck or he was telling me the truth
when he said that a KCID broadcast had told him to wait for me there. He told me
where you were traveling, and where you probably would come back to. I’ve been
waiting here for you since over a day ago.”
“Why?” Limmit faced him. He looks harder, he thought again, more knife’s-edge
sharp than back on the Interface— honed for some deadly purpose. The flashglove lay
across his lap, purring muted electronic sounds. “What do you need me for?”
 Adder’s gaze burned expressionless at him. “Because,” he said quietly, “I owe Mox
a great deal. I want your help in paying it back.”
“Shit,” said Limmit disgustedly. Adder’s eyes widened slightly, sensing some
unexpected phenomenon. “I suppose I’m to lead a suicide squad of the remaining
amputee hookers armed with your old scalpels against Mox’s headquarters in Orange
County. You’ll make me president of your fan club if I come back.”
The flashglove’s metal fingers curled slightly, Adder saying nothing.
“I don’t know,” said Limmit, kneading his forehead with one hand. “I’m tired, I
guess. I wouldn’t be of much use to you, whatever your plan is. I left a lot behind,
between the Visitor and here. Not much is left—it was a long trip.”
“So?” Adder shrugged. “I’m not interested in any of that. Everybody’s got a horror
story to tell.”
“Then just fuck you, Adder.” Limmit felt his face burn with some emotion close to
rage. “I was wrong—it was better with you dead.” It’s true, he thought, trembling as the
sudden realization pierced him. “You’re better as a remembered fantasy than a live
reality. Why should I let myself be sucked into your stupid vendetta? Why should
anyone?”
“I would imagine,” said Adder, “that anyone who does get involved with me has
his own reasons.”
Limmit looked straight into the narrow face for a long, silent time. Their eyes
locked without moving away. Limmit nodded slowly, then broke away his gaze.
“All right,” he said, sinking onto the bed beside Adder. “I’ll help you.” He stared
down at the section of floor framed by his own boots. “Did you ever read any old
books, any science fiction?” He shook his head thoughtfully, feeling a determined calm
slowly filling his interior. “No, don’t bother. Don’t answer.”
“We’d better get going. There’s not much time.”
“Wait,” said Limmit, looking up. “One condition. When it’s all over, then that’s it.
Even if you get your whole little circus on the Interface back, I don’t want the job you
offered me, no part of it. I don’t want anything from you—I’ll find my own way out of
L.A.”
Adder nodded impatiently. “Fine. Whatever you want. Let’s go, then.”
“Just a minute,” said Limmit, rising and heading for the door opening onto the
bathroom. “Funny—all that time in the sewers, and I could hardly take a crap to save
my life the whole time.” He pushed the door open.
Great splotches of drying blood splashed in static patterns across the floor and
walls; small spots like red stars spattered across the ceiling. A corpse, twisted and
unrecognizable, stiffening in the contortions of violent death, lay half out of the bathtub
and across the tiny room, one hand cradled in the curved trap of the sink’s drainpipe,
his head, or what remained of it, partially submerged in the toilet bowl. The still water
had turned into translucent rose.
 “What the fuck’s this?” shouted Limmit, standing transfixed in the doorway.
“Beats me,” came Adder’s voice from behind him. “He was hiding here when I
came to wait for you. Jumped me, so he got it.” He paused, then laughed, short and
cold. “It was a sight— I must admit that this flashglove is everything I heard it was.”
“My assassin,” said Limmit, staring at the fragmented body. “That’s who it is.”
“What? Oh, yeah, Droit told me about it. Well, if everything works out, there won’t
be another one.”
Limmit reached in and pulled the shattered head out of the bowl, dripping. Little
clumps of brain tissue, like soft pink cauliflower, and one perfect staring eye floated in
the red water. Ah, fuck it, he thought, and squatted on the toilet seat after dropping his
pants down to his knees. Living in L.A. sure makes you callous.
Feeling his colon functioning unabashed, Limmit called out to Adder in the other
room, “So what’s first on the agenda? What’s this big revenge plan of yours consist of,
anyway?” Adder appeared in the bathroom doorway. “You can’t say you don’t owe me
something, eh,” he said, kicking one of the dead gunman’s outstretched legs. “The
plan? All in good time. There’s some other business to take care of first.”
“Like what?”
“We’ve got to pay a little visit to the Adder Siege Front headquarters.”
Limmit felt his sphincter involuntarily narrow a fraction in diameter. Mary’11 be
there, he thought. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to see her again. “What for?” he
asked, standing up and flushing the toilet.
“Droit was a little short of cash when I talked to him. One of his sources of income
in Orange County just dried up, he said. I didn’t have any money to give him, so I’m
afraid the news of my being alive and walking again went for sale to other interested
parties.”
“Why should that matter?”
The thin cut of Adder’s smile flickered into existence briefly. “The notion that I was
preferable dead,” he said, “may be more popular than you think.”

She looks older, thought Limmit. More ... pared down, he realized, his viscera
clenching. Time is stripping us, like Adder, to our essentials. No message passed from
Mary’s brooding eyes to his, except a first spark of surprise and recognition.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Eddie Azusa, breaking the pall-like silence that
had fallen when Adder and Limmit had entered the room. “But we didn’t really know
whether to expect you here or not.”
Adder drew an empty chair away from the other side of the table and sat down
facing the committee. “I thought,” he said calmly, “you might enjoy a surprise visit
more than I would.” Azusa’s face trembled and broke into a nervous grin. “So? You
expected us to have some special reaction to the news of your being ... back, so to
speak?”
“Can the shit,” said Adder irritably, waving him off. “Save it for the Rattowners
you’ve sucked into this phony siege of yours.”
Limmit pulled out the chair at Adder’s left and sat down opposite Mary. Her eyes
did not meet his.
“Watch it, Adder,” said one of the other figures. “We’re in a tight situation here,
and there’s no room for bad elements, if you get my meaning.”
“Tight situation, my ass,” said Adder. “You know this siege is a load of crap.
There’s no threat from Mox, his MFers, or anyone else to this pile of shit. All that your
spaced-out little troops sitting on the building tops have to shoot at is each other.”
“You must like to think,” said Azusa, not smiling, “that you’re pretty well
informed.”
Adder grinned. “I get my info from the same place you do.” “But you’re missing
the point,” said Mary fervently, leaning across the table. “Sure, so the siege is a shuck—
so what? The thing is, we’ve extended something resembling revolutionary thought to
hundreds of people who up to this point had nothing on their minds but kainine,
fucking, and—you, Adder. It’s not so much in itself, but big enough when you consider
how close we are to the single largest source of revolutionary potential left in America,
Orange County.”
“Orange County?” snorted Limmit. Every face turned toward him in surprise—none
had expected him to speak. “Jesus Christ, go raise your armies out of fuckin’
graveyards,” he continued. “You’ve a better chance, if you can tell the difference to
begin with.”
“That’s not the point, either,” said Adder. “Look, I know more about what’s going
on than you think. I know that you and your friends here are more interested in
keeping this bullshit siege just the way it is, rather than getting to the improbable point
where you’d actually have to shit or get off the pot. It’s a lot more fun just to play
revolutionary generalissimo, and rake off a little on the side, too. And maybe you’ll be
able to keep the Rattowners’ interest up for the rest of your life and more, given my
attraction as your dead martyr. Oh yes, I know about that. No matter: it’s your problem,
I’m not interested in it. You see, the point really is that I’ve got my own plans, and it’s
your ass to ride out your personal shit-storms the best way you can.” “You came here to
tell us that?” asked Azusa, his face grown rigid and mottled with sullen anger. “Kinda
foolish of you to let us know.”
“Just a little affectation of mine.” Another menacing grin. “I’ve always liked telling
people just what I was about to do. I don’t want you to even interfere for a second,
trying to stop me.” He laid the flashglove on the table like an ominously humming
torpedo clenched into a fist. “Believe me, nothing can. ” Before any of the committee
members could speak, a woman’s voice came from the doorway behind Limmit and
Adder. “Nothing?” the voice called softly. A black-robed figure entered the circle of
light enclosing the table.
That must be her, thought Limmit, the one they call Mother Endure. What an effect
with the robes, he attempted to think cynically. Dredged up from some abandoned
costume shop, no doubt. So calculated, yet ... somehow, it’s for real. He saw Adder’s
eyes flare wide at the sight of the cowled face, then tighten down into slits again.
The woman stood beside Adder and looked down into his face. “What about those
in Rattown,” she said, almost serenely, “who aren’t in the siege? What about the less
fortunate, the downers?”
“All right,” rasped Adder harshly. “What about them?” “They’re safe here. They
will be—until your presence here is known to Mox. He crushed the Interface and
everyone on it just to get you; we all know that. He’ll do the same to these slums, once
he knows you’re here. A lot of innocent people, even more harmless than the others,
will die merely because you wouldn’t abandon your lust for revenge against Mox.” The
reedlike voice lapsed into composed silence.
“How do you know that’s what my plans are?”
Her placid manner faltered for a second. “What else would they be?”
“Hey,” broke in Azusa agitatedly. “That’s a whole different angle on this that we
hadn’t thought of. We don’t want any shit like that coming down on us. Uh, that is, it
would, I mean, wipe out the little progress we’ve made here in L.A. It’s premature —
we’re not ready for it.” He glanced around nervously at the other members for
confirmation.
Mother Endure ignored him. “Don’t you owe anything,” she said quietly to Adder,
“to anyone else? Or even just to me?” Limmit watched as Adder’s face hardened into a
rigid, cutting mask. “Yeah,” he said slowly, his voice dropping lower and more
ominous than Limmit had ever heard it, frightening in its intensity. “I owe you a whole
lot, too.”
“Aw, forget it, Mother,” said Azusa disgustedly. “I mean, in the revolutionary
cadres we’ve always appreciated the way you take care of the community’s, uh, less
capable members, but there’s nothing you can do with this schmuck. We’ll have to take
care of him in our own way.”
“Just try it, motherfucker,” said Adder, whirling around in his chair to face the
shorter man. The flashglove flexed and whined.
“You d-don’t dare kill me,” babbled Azusa near-hysterically. “I’ve got enough
followers of my own now to shoot you from out of your reach.” He regained his
composure to the point of a feeble sneer. “And even if you hide where a sniper can’t get
to you, we’ve got sneak-killers, too. You’ve got to sleep sometime, even with that thing
on your stump.”
“That’s all right,” said Adder. “I wasn’t planning on doing any sleeping for a while.
I’ve had a long rest.”
 “Let’s split,” said Azusa, pushing his chair away from the table. “We’ve got work
to do. Have fun, Adder. While you can.” The committee’s four men and Mary rose and
started for the door.
Adder grabbed hold of Mother Endure’s thin wrist as she turned away. “Wait
outside,” he said briskly to Limmit without looking at him, staring up instead at the
face half-hidden in the cowl of the black robes.

When the others had all left the room, Adder said quietly to the woman, “It’s been
a long time, Jing.”
“A long time,” she agreed, sitting down in the chair beside him. “It’s no use calling
me by that name—everything has changed.”
“Has it.”
She turned her face away. “Don’t. Don’t try to. Not after everything that’s
happened. Everything ... I became. You don’t know who I am now.”
“I thought I knew once,” said Adder, bitterness tinging his voice. “But that was
before Mox wheeled you into my office, doped out., and told me you were his wife.”
She said nothing, her cowled head inclining over the table. “Mox’s wife,” mused
Adder. “Quite a surprise. I’ve never yet figured out—and I used to spend a lot of time
thinking about it —why you loved both him and me, or why we both loved you.” “I
know why,” her whisper quavered. “I knew from the beginning. Because I was the
perfect receptacle for each of you to fill up with your own lives. So empty. For me it was
simply because no one else could even start to fill the vacuum inside me.”
“I hope you didn’t wonder, then,” said Adder, “why I did it.”
 “How could you have?” she cried, turning a tear-streaked face on him. “Can you
imagine what it was like to come up out of that haze, Mox straddling, bending over me,
and then that monster you turned my cunt into emerging like a shark from between my
legs. Christ, I can still see the blood, those dead-white teeth. That was the first and last
time I ever saw them emerging from their sheaths, but I still feel them there inside my
groin.”
“I can change that now,” said Adder softly. “I didn’t do it to you—it was Mox I was
after.”
“No,” she said, biting her lower lip and shaking her head. “Nothing, not you or
your scalpel, is ever going to touch me there again.”
“You’ll just go on, I suppose, here in Rattown, playing the Madonna of the
Cripples.”
Her eyes flashed sudden anger. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been taking care of Mox’s and
your victims for a long time now. Can’t you understand why I said what I did before?
Can’t you accept any responsibility for anything that’s happened because of you? Mox
told me himself that he slaughtered everyone on the Interface just to get you.”
“You’ve seen him?” Adder stiffened.
“No. I haven’t seen him for years. But we keep in touch. He still loves me, you
know. Just as you do. He supplies me with food and medicine, and some clothing, for
the ones I take care of. More than that: he’s wanted to wipe out Rattown for a long time
now, just out of thoroughness. His mind works like that. But he hasn’t—I asked him not
to, for love of me.”
“So that’s why you want me to give up my plans. You know that when I destroy
him the handouts stop. How are you going to play the saintly benefactress then? They
might, when they get hungry enough, even eat you. ”
“Oh, Ad, you stupid prick,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “Don’t you
understand anything? You’re going to fail. Whatever the plan is, it’ll end in your death. I
know both you and Mox. He’s already tricked you twice, beaten you. You won’t get
him this time—you’ll die.”
“Twice? What do you mean?”
“He tricked you with the flashglove. His plan wasn’t to get you to commit a crime
in buying it—he knew you could protect yourself against that easy enough. He’d been
building up his MFers for years, waiting for the chance to go in and raid the Interface.
But the others on the GPC exec board outvoted him, wouldn’t let him. After all, it was
their playground, too, wasn’t it? And it was safe for them to let the Interface go on
running; their computer analyses showed that your image wasn’t powerful enough to
present a serious threat to the psychic stability of Orange County, even though they’ve
been on a teetering balance over there for decades now—why do you think we get so
many mental refugees over here? But you were tolerable; in fact, a good safety valve.
Until, that is, Mox tricked you into buying the flashglove. That one factor, added to
your psychopublic image, was enough for the computers to reevaluate you as a
terminal threat to them. And then Mox had the proof that you bought it; that’s what the
bug was planted for. The other board members abandoned their warped libidos in
favor of their wallets, and gave the okay for the raid. And that’s what brought the shit
down on the Interface.”
Adder stared at his metal forearm, shining like an accusation. “What was the other
time that he tricked me?”
She hesitated, then spoke, her voice trembling. “He tricked you ... about me.
Tricked you into doing what you did to me. He was able to control what you saw when
you had him under the ADR; he was familiar with the stuff, somehow. Maybe he
learned from Gass himself. Who knows? But he was able to make you think that
castration was what he feared most, castration by the fanged snatch of the one he loved.
It wasn’t his nightmare—it was his dream. He’s insane, a fanatic; that’s where his power
comes from. You released him, in a way that satisfied his madness for a while, from all
the ties of flesh he despised. He knew all along what was between my legs that night.
Why else did he have his right-hand man waiting outside the door, like he had never
done before? His cock was the last thing blocking the reconciliation of his mind with his
subconscious drives. Without it, he was whole. On the side of death. And he tricked
you into doing it for him.”
 Adder sat motionless in the chair. A strange mixture of emotions had rapidly
surged through his facial muscles while he had listened to Jing, but had now melted
away, leaving only a blank mask. “Control,” he whispered.
“Control,” Jing echoed. “That’s right. He’s been in control all along. That’s why I
asked you to give up. Out of fear for you, not Mox. Do you think I rescued you,
bleeding in that alley, just so you could kill yourself on him?” Another tear plummeted
down one cheek. “It could never be like it was before,” she said slowly. “But stay here
with me. You could be a real doctor even. This could be your life—as it is mine. There
are so many people you could be needed, wanted by.”
His eyes grew wider with her last words, then he burst into raging vehemence. “All
my life,” he shouted, a drop of saliva flying, omenlike, onto her cowl, his rigid neck
muscles causing his head to quiver, “I’ve wanted everyone in the whole world to want
me, to need me, to come begging up to me, loving me, worshipping me! And I almost.
Had it.” His voice grew lower and hollower, as if some final message were being
dragged out. “And I wanted it, just so—just so that if I had it, somehow I could tell
everyone at the same time, L.A., Orange County, the whole world, to go fuck
themselves.”
He lapsed into silence, as if spent, then smiled grimly, his eyes lost in some interior
vision. He shook his head. “No thanks,” he said finally. “I’m going to ram it through.”
He got to his feet, looking down at her cowled head. “I’m better armed now—no
illusions.”
Long after the door clicked shut behind him, she sat at the table, inert.

Mary was waiting for Limmit outside the meeting room. All right, he thought
wearily. Lay it on me. Just till Adder’s done talking with that spook.
“You’re back,” she said calmly. Her eyes looked into him with their steady gaze.
“Since a couple of hours ago.”
“You look tired.”
Limmit kneaded the back of his neck. True enough, he thought. “Don’t worry
about me. I’ll endure.”
“Without me. Without anybody. Except Dr. Adder.”
“Shit,” said Limmit. “Is that all you’ve got to tell me? I suppose you were expecting
me to come back from the sewers clean and pure and dedicated to the revolution? I’m
real fuckin’ sorry, then.”
She sighed and shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what I expected. Except for
you to probably die down there, never make it back. I hoped though that you’d realize
finally Adder was dead.”
“Except he wasn’t.” There was no satisfaction in the words. “He’s alive.”
 “And you’re working for him again. The lucky fan who gets to be right up close to
him. Do things for him. His little functionary.” Her face darkened with scorn. “How
nice that he gave you your old job back. Just like on the Interface.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not that way now. I’m helping Adder with his plan against Mox
—for my own reasons.” Echoing Adder’s words. “After that, it’s over between him and
me.”
“Oh, E. Allen,” she said mournfully. “God, I wish I could believe that. But he’s
sucked so many others dry, consumed them. It’ll be the same way with you. I can’t
protect you forever.”
“Don’t, then,” he snapped, his own anger flaring. “Did I ever ask you to? Do you
have to wait until I just tell you to fuck off, before I get any slack from you?” The
emotion subsided, leaving him feeling more drained than before. “I’m sorry. It’s just
that whatever this plan of Adder’s is, it’s important to me. I can’t even think about us
until it’s over, one way or another.”
“Did you really think,” she said softly, “that I was only concerned about us?”
“Don’t tell me,” said Limmit exhaustedly. “The revolution.” “Yes, damn it. Sure,
Azusa and the others who were in there are a bunch of phony chickenshits—so what?
Can’t you see we’ve got a chance at last to really accomplish something? To do more
than just wipe out one man like Mox? Isn’t there anything more important to you than
your own fucked-up innards, something you’d sacrifice yourself for?”
“So that’s what’s important to you,” he said. “Fine. Go give your life to the ghost of
Lenin; it’s okay with me. Christ, you talk about being sucked dry. At least my vampires
are on this side of the grave.”
“Fuck you,” she said with a contemptuous gesture, “if you can’t tell any
difference.” She turned and strode away, her boots striking hollow on the concrete
floor.
I can’t tell, said Limmit to himself. Maybe you’re right—there is something wrong
with me. I wish, he thought suddenly and fervently, that there was some way I could
have told her to wait for me until this was all over. But this part seems finished anyway.
He propped one foot up beside the door to the meeting room, waiting for Adder to
emerge.

“I think before we go any further,” said Limmit, “you’d better let me in on your
plan.”
Adder paused on the stairway’s second-floor landing. The two of them had been
heading back to where the blind girl Melia was waiting. “You’ve got a point,” he said.
“There’s not much longer to go, anyway. In an hour or so, the plan will be on its
inexorable progress. So you’d better know now.”
 Limmit watched in silence as Adder reached into his jacket pocket and brought out
a small black leatherette case, like a wallet. Adder zipped it open and spread it between
his hands, displaying it to Limmit. In the landing’s thin light it was hard to make out
the contents, but Limmit could see several small vials and a syringe. “What is it?” he
asked.
“I didn’t go straight from here to where I waited for you,” said Adder. “I sneaked
over onto the Interface—it’s not hard, no one’s guarding it or anything. I fetched this
out of my old office. It’s the ADR.”
“What the hell good is that?” asked Limmit incredulously. Jesus, he thought,
maybe Adder didn’t come out of all this in one piece.
“With this,” said Adder, stroking the vials with one finger, “I can get right into
Mox’s own mind. As I did before. Only not to observe and find out, oh no. I can use it as
a weapon, the way Lester Gass did sometimes—to crush an enemy. To reach right
inside his innermost being and grapple with him on that great psychic/symbolic
meeting ground.” A strange, fervent tone had crept into his voice.
“Nice trick,” said Limmit drily, “but you’re here in Rattown and Mox is there in
Orange County. Forget that? Or were you planning a commando raid on his
headquarters? Strap him down and shoot him and yourself full of this stuff, I suppose.”
Composedly, Adder closed the case and replaced it in his pocket. “That’s hardly
necessary,” he said, the fervidness temporarily dissipated. “You see, I’ve got a direct
line from here straight into Mox’s skull. That’s what Melia discovered in the computer
banks, what she showed me. Mox isn't alive; he’s on tape there in the computers. After
the Interface raid, he had his entire mentality recorded that way. There was no risk—
nothing new; they’ve been doing that kind of thing for years.”
“I know,” said Limmit dazedly. Like Lars Kyrie, he thought. “Only Mox had
special autonomous personality circuits built in. The others on tape are without control
—they’re just turned on or off whenever they’re wanted. Mox, however, still functions
just as when he was alive; only a few members of the GPC exec board know that he’s
really only several hundred miles of magnetic oxide inside their computers. The
broadcast image everyone sees on their TVs is only computer graphics, a completely
convincing animated cartoon.”
“Yes,” said Limmit faintly. “I’ve heard of that.”
Adder observed critically the other’s paling face for a moment, then continued.
“Dosed with the ADR, Melia and I can go back up the TV cable and plug into Mox’s
mind. Both of us together will be enough to pull Mox into the visions. Since he’s been
under it before, the mental state the drug produces is still there, programmed into his
unconscious. Melia will serve as the pipeline and key into him for me; once there, I’ll
take on Mox while she stands aside.”
“But then what do you need me for?”
 “While Melia and I are under the ADR, we’ll both be helpless, unconscious here in
Rattown. You’re to help us find a safe hiding place and be ready to protect us from the
Siege Front’s triggermen. For several hours.”
“And that’s all?”
“Don’t worry,” said Adder with a tight smile. He started up the stairs again. “It’ll
be enough. Perhaps more than you’d care for.”
The room’s oppressive miasma of filth seemed to have dissipated slightly since the
last time Limmit had been in it. The old woman as well was nowhere to be seen. Limmit
had half expected to find her corpse on the floor, growing furry with dust.
“The old woman must’ve split after I left,” said Adder, as if hearing Limmit’s
thoughts. “That must be how she, Mother Endure, knew I was walking again. The old
bag ran and told her.”
The only occupant of the room was the young girl, sitting patiently on the couch,
her hands folded demurely in her lap. She was unaware of the two men’s entrance. To
Limmit she looked to be about fifteen or sixteen; he noticed that she had been washed,
degrimed from when he had seen her before, and her thin brown hair combed. Her skin
had the slightly pink look of one who has recently had old layers of dirt removed at last.
Adder must have done that, thought Limmit. Washed her— she’s almost pretty now.
And not said anything about doing it.
Adder walked over to the couch, picked up her right hand, and laid it on the
flashglove. Her face still looked straight into the vacant middle of the room, but lifted
into a smile. Her closed eyelids made her appear as if she were dreaming; the
expression hit Limmit like a blow. She loves him, he thought with sudden certainty.
And why not? First man she’s talked to in a dozen years.
He glanced up at Adder’s face. There was no corresponding trace of emotion. He
doesn’t even know, thought Limmit. He felt a wave of pity for the young girl. The cold
son-of-a-bitch— he washed her like he was sterilizing a scalpel.
“She’s seeing you through my eyes,” said Adder. “She already knows who you are.
I’ve told her all about the plan. Say hello to her—she’ll hear you, through me.”
Limmit looked straight into Adder’s warmthless eyes. “Hello, Melia.”
After a second, Adder spoke. “She says hello. I’m afraid she’s not very interested in
you, for some reason. Perhaps being isolated all this time damaged her sociability.”
You schmuck, thought Limmit. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Right,” said Adder, not noticing Limmit’s tone. “We don’t have much time.
Especially not here—we’ve got to find a hiding place fast.”
“I know one that might do,” said Limmit. “I hid out there for a day after the Raid,
until Mary Gorgon found me and took me to that other room. Just inside the slums. A
big empty warehouse or something, but with a lot of smaller offices and rooms above.”
“Sounds all right. There’s several rifles, with stocks of ammunition, in the other
room here. They must have belonged to Melia’s father—they’re oiled and sealed in
hermetic cases like only a psychotic would do. Take what you can; use the best.” Adder
pulled the girl up from the couch.
Through the door Adder had indicated Limmit found the weapons, standing
upright in dusty, glass-doored containers like coffins. He pulled one open, hearing the
short rush of air into the vacuum, and extracted a rifle identical to the one he had used
as a kid back in the army. Just like old times, he thought, weighing its remembered heft
in his hands. I’m still traveling in circles. He stored several boxes of rounds in his jacket
and headed out the door.

“Perfect,” pronounced Dr. Adder, surveying the empty warehouse. A group of

office-cubicles looked out over the warehouse’s floor from a height of twelve feet or
more, connected by a common walkway with guardrail. Anyone entering the building
from the ground would have to cross the entire floor over to the stairs on one side; the
only entrance from the office elevation or above opened onto the far end of the
connecting corridor. Both aspects in full view of someone standing guard outside the
cubicle into which he and Limmit had dragged the two cots. A clear shot, said Adder to
himself. I almost wish I’d be here to take advantage of it.
A muted babble of unfamiliar voices jerked him around from his position at the
guardrail. Inside the cubicle, Limmit had finished connecting to the cable outlet one of
the small portable televisions they had found, and switched it on. One of the TV
families was giggling through its miniaturized life-cycle on the screen. Adder relaxed,
seeing the tiny phosphor-dot figures. Shitfire, he thought. Take hold. Nothing to lose
sphincter control over yet—not even what Jing/Mother Endure told you.
He walked into the cubicle and picked up one of Melia’s hands, placing it on the
flashglove. Her face broke into its dreaming smile again as the thin fingers curved
around the metal surface. Through the weapon’s electronic network he “saw” the
feminine image she projected. Ready? he asked the image.
Yes, she replied, the image blushing like a young bride. If you are.
“Here,” said Adder, tossing a roll of white surgical tape to Limmit. He gently
pushed Melia down supine on the cot.
Limmit wordlessly brought the small television over and placed it on the floor
beside her. With the surgical tape he bound her hand and forearm to the set, looping the
tape completely around the set and across the figures on the screen. Adder lay down on
the other cot, placed alongside Melia; Limmit quickly and efficiently took her free hand
and placed it on the flashglove’s cool surface, then bound it similarly with the tape.
“There,” he said, straightening up from the task. “Off into the wild gray yonder.”
“Not yet,” said Adder from his horizontal position. He pulled out the black case
and extended it to Limmit. “Know how to use a hypodermic?”
 “Sure,” said Limmit, zipping it open. “Extensive practice on chickens, as a matter of
fact.” He extracted the syringe and plunged it through the sealing membrane of one of
the vials. He pulled up the plunger until the colorless liquid reached the indicated
point. More than enough here, he thought. All the vials are full—could send a whole
fuckin’ army into Mox’s electronic head. But not me, he decided. Not on your life.
“Her first,” said Adder. “Then me.”
Limmit located the vein in the crook of the girl’s arm strapped to the flashglove. He
observed silently the young girl’s rapt, eyes-closed expression, watching for a reaction
as he depressed the plunger. There was none. He refilled the syringe and repeated the
sequence into Adder’s flesh arm.
“Should only be a few minutes,” said Adder. Already it seemed as if whatever
animated him from inside was speaking from a slowly increasing distance, the voice
fading hollow. The eyes glanced over at the television; through the strips of tape he
could see that whatever program had been on had just ended, the credits crawling by
on the screen. “Hey,” said Adder, grinning faintly miles away. “Just thought of
something. It’s time for Mox’s nightly broadcast. Melia showed me that there’s no
outside control over him on that, or the graphics. If he doesn’t switch his broadcast off
himself, this whole thing might show up on all the TVs tied into the cable,
everywhere ...” The voice faded away, then surged back with a visible effort from him.
“What a comeback. You won’t want to miss it—” The eyes closed.

Right, Limmit said sourly to himself. Your TV debut, back from the grave. He
picked up the other portable television and carried it out, trailing the cord plugged into
the cable outlet, to the chair he had positioned by the guardrail. He suddenly noticed
how full his bladder was—the canned juices and fruit they had found here and made a
meal of had worked their way through his kidneys already. Just nervous, he decided.
I’d better take a piss before I get any more so.
 He stood up and looked around. I’ve never yet, he thought, found a urinal in L.A.
that really works. Probably why the streets smell like that. Screw it, he decided,
stepping over to the guardrail and unzipping his fly.
What a hero, he thought contemptuously as the first drops emerged. Good for
nothing except standing guard over L.A.’s leading mutilation artist, zonked
unconscious on his eponymous drug in his climactic bid for glory. Watching for
enemies who aren’t even going to come looking, most likely. I should have attacked
Mox’s headquarters myself when I was in Orange County, with my own piddly knife—
better for my self-esteem than this, at least. Ah, Limmit, you cowardly prick, he mused
bitterly, staring into the distance as the golden stream arced downward into the
semidarkness.
“Hey, you fuckhead!” screamed an outraged voice from the floor. “What’s the big
idea, pissing all over me?”
His flow shut off in alarm; Limmit grabbed the rail and peered down. Below, one of
Rattown’s crazies looked up from beneath his dripping hair, his mouth dropping open
as if recognizing Limmit from a description. He stood transfixed for a moment, then
scrabbled for a small, antennaed box clipped to his belt.
Walkie-talkies, thought Limmit, then absurdly: Christ, they’re well organized.
Move! something screamed inside him, and he snatched up the rifle propped against
the chair. It was still unloaded yet; he pulled out a clip from his jacket and fumbled it
sideways, upside down, and backward before at last jamming it into the rifle’s feed
connection.
The crazy below had the walkie-talkie already raised to his face before Limmit’s
first shot tore it and most of the fingers of one hand away. The Rattowner collapsed to
his knees, moaning in pain and shock.
Limmit slung the rifle over his shoulder by its strap, climbed over the guardrail,
and hung from the edge of the walkway before dropping down to the floor. He landed
painfully on his feet, then his ass. He unslung the rifle and scrambled over to the
wounded man. He placed the rifle’s muzzle beneath his chin. “All right,” Limmit said
crisply, jabbing him in the throat, “who knows you’re here? Tell me and I won’t blow
your head off.” “Nobody,” gasped the Rattowner. His eyes rolled, dazed. “We already
searched this area. I just snuck away to do myself up, honest.” His undamaged hand
opened, displaying several small capsules. Their red coloring had smeared off in the
sweat of his hands.
“Fine,” said Limmit, withdrawing the gun and swinging it to one side. “Then
nobody’s going to come looking for you here.” He reached into his boot and, before the
other could move, brought his blade up, into, and across his throat, the terrified gasp of
breath bubbling through a flow of blood. No need risking another shot anyway,
thought Limmit. They’ll probably think the first one was just some of their own
partying on a rooftop. I hope.
 Mounting the stairs back up to the walkway, the rifle cradled in one hand, Limmit
listened to the body’s last thrashes and gurgles, feeling the adrenaline high drain from
his body. You’re so fuckin’ ruthless, he said to himself, satisfied. Sticking that poor
dumb asshole like that. Reminds me of Spec. 4 Jetsam.
Inside the cubicle, Adder opened his eyes slowly and looked up at him. “What
was . . he whispered, the voice light-years away, “... the noise ...” The eyes closed again.
Doesn’t miss a thing, thought Limmit, impressed. “Pleasant dreams, Doctor,” he
said, and exited from the room and its two consciousless bodies.
He sat himself down in the chair on the walkway and propped the rifle against the
guardrail. Now I can watch the show with my mind at ease, he thought, wiping a spot
of blood from his hand. That pays him back for getting the assassin. He angled the
television between his feet up at himself, switched it on, and leaned back in the chair.
All this futzing around, he thought, in L.A. and Orange County even and I’ve never yet
been able to catch one of Mox’s broadcasts. At last I’m going to see what His Gray
Eminence looks like. His farewell performance, too: last chance. You can do it, Adder—
go, team, go. I must be going delirious, he thought as the television image swam into
focus.
The broadcast had already begun. For some reason the set had no sound. Even
without it, Limmit stared, suddenly transfixed, at the ancient yet immensely powerful-
looking white-haired visage, precisely mouthing his words. Limmit rose trembling to
his feet, his heart slamming frantically within him. He staggered against the guardrail,
gripping it in both white-knuckled hands. Convulsed with fear, he vomited with great
shuddering heaves, spattering the corpse below, the salt taste of the sweat drenching his
face seeping into the corners of his mouth and mixing with the vomitus’ acridity.
He turned around weakly and faced the television again. It was the first time in his
life he had ever been this afraid—afraid of more than death. “It’s him,” he whispered,
his voice a panicky vibrato. A rapid interior flash of a face in a helicopter looking down
at him, a child. He whirled around and yelled at the entrance of the cubicle where
Adder and the girl lay. “It’s him—it’s Gass! My father!”
He raced into the cubicle and knelt beside Adder’s cot. “You don’t have a chance,”
he babbled into the unconscious face. “He invented this stuff—Gass did, my father!
Can’t you see—” He pulled himself away with a jerk. Oh Jesus shit, he thought, shaking.
Maintain.
He stared at the television beside Melia, the strips of tape running across
Mox/Gass’ face. My father, he thought, the high peaks of panic subsiding, leaving the
sharp undercurrent of fear. That only I could have recognized. No wonder he wanted to
kill me. Limmit hoped it was not too late to stop Adder.
He pulled his blade out of his boot and bent down to the surgical tape binding
Melia’s hand to the flashglove. As soon as the point was inserted beneath the edge of
the tape, the flashglove emitted a high-pitched whine, the metal fingers curling into a
fist. Limmit saw the small red dots of the sensors, like points of blood, glowing. He
withdrew the knife and placed it against the tape holding Melia’s other hand against
the television by her side. The glove whined again, lifting slightly off the cot. There was
the same response when Limmit stepped across to the other side of the cubicle, to the
cable outlet. Some part of Adder’s subconscious, it dawned on Limmit, must have felt
I’d chicken out. An electronic watchdog—it’ll kill me if I try to stop him. On the
television screen a ripple of distortion passed over his father’s face like a wave of heat.
Adder and Melia had already penetrated that far.
He stared at the blood-red dots of the sensors, trying to order his chaotic thoughts.
Maybe, he thought in near-hysterical despair, I could find a phone and call the station.
Long distance to Orange County—would you mind telling the two poltergeists in your
circuits that the beloved John Mox is really the infamous Lester Gass?
He shook off the lunatic thoughts: realizing there was only one way. He bent down
and picked up the leatherette case containing the ADR from where he had dropped it
before.
After he had bound one arm to the limp flesh arm of Adder, he took the filled
hypodermic and injected its contents into the crook of his elbow. He lay down on the
floor beside the cot, the image of the three connected bodies reminding him absurdly of
a chorus line. Feeling the cubicle slowly begin to fade away from him, he thought,
Either the flashglove will set itself off anyway and kill me, or Azusa’s Rattowners will
come back and find us here unconscious and shoot us all. Or the likeliest: my father will
crush us all like gnats inside his skull, leaving these three empty husks to rot in an
abandoned warehouse in the slums. My warning will be too late, he realized dismally.
For Adder. Or any of us.

“How come you never got your side panel replaced?”

Edgar Endpoint one-handed the car into another lane, cruising slowly through the
early evening traffic. He shrugged without looking at his companion seated beside him.
“Aw, too much hassle,” Edgar said. “All the parts houses know me—they might have
turned me in to my father.” He accelerated in a sudden spurt, then slowed, moving to
the rhythm of the other cars. “Besides,” he said softly, “who cares?”
His friend nodded slowly, absorbing this information. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s
about how I feel nowadays.” He reached into his jacket and drew out a sheaf of dirty,
creased papers. “I tried to keep these out of the light, hoping they’d last longer. But they
faded anyway.” He threw them down on the console between the bucket seats, where
they fluttered limply, the breeze not enough to lift them.
Edgar took his eyes from the traffic ahead and looked at the sheets. He recognized
them as one of his Adder-paks, now wilted and completely blank. The sight depressed
him beyond endurance.
 After he had left his friend off at his residential complex, Edgar sat brooding in the
motionless vehicle. Maybe I shouldn’t have told them all, he thought. But they would
have found out anyway. And it was a weight—like carrying his corpse around on my
back. The last thing keeping us alive in this mortuary world. Mox’s video-men can
come film my life now—I Was a Teenage Corpse. He sighed and started the car up.
He left it in his old parking space beneath Casa del Solituda, and took the elevator
up to his family’s conapt. His key still worked. The old fart, he thought, didn’t even
change the lock. He probably knew I’d be back—after he found out what everyone
else’s kids were talking about. About Adder.... Yes, Dad, I’m ready to go get my
lobotomy now. I’ll be right out of the bathroom—soon as I’m done with this razor
blade.
Searching the rooms, he found the conapt empty except for his mother in her usual
coma in the bedroom. He yelled at her horizontal figure, getting no response. He
contemplated bouncing the alarm clock ofiF her forehead, but decided finally that he
preferred her this way. Peeking in his own bedroom, he saw that nothing had been
changed.
Wonder where my father is, he thought as he sat down in the living area before the
television. Probably out kidnapping more runaways for the SPS. He switched the set on,
settling back in the upholstered chair as the familiar gray face of John Mox faded in. All
I need, he thought grimly. Maybe I’ll appreciate it now. With a little help. From a cut-
glass candy dish on the coffee table he picked out several of his mother’s pink
barbiturate-analog capsules and downed them.
On the screen, Mox blathered on. A ripple like heat waves or some viscous liquid
over the screen appeared. Never saw that before, thought Edgar, as the fog started to
roll in. Technical difficulties, blah blah. Maybe it’s the ghost of Dr. Adder come back to
haunt you, John Mox, he announced melodramatically inside himself. We should be so
lucky. It’ll go away in a second.
It didn’t.

“Sieges come and go, but whores remain. Right, Leslie?”

“That’s why I didn’t go into the siege business, Mr. Endpoint.” You fat, intoxicated
asshole from Orange County.
The three men stopped in the dimly lit hallway, outside a door familiar to two of
them.
“The usual, Leslie?” asked Endpoint, his voice as sloppy as his rumpled hair and
clothes.
“That’s right,” said the young pimp coolly, extending a limpid palm. Endpoint
fumbled bills onto it from his wallet. The pimp pushed the shabby door open for the
two straights, then disappeared graciously down the hallway.
 “Wait’ll you see her,” chortled Endpoint, dragging his staggering companion into
the room. It was dark except for a soft blue-gray glow from a rectangular area in the
ceiling over the bed. “These long trippers are somethin’ else,” continued Endpoint, not
noticing his friend sinking, slack-faced, into one corner. “I use ta think double amputees
were my thing—loved the way you could roll their little legless asses any way ya
wanted. But now it really gets my rocks off to see these chicks so absorbed in their vizh-
ee-unz while I’m reamin’ the shit out of ’em. It’s like they’re—not even there! Dead or
somethin’. This one’s the best.” He waved an erratic hand at the motionless, naked
figure on the bed. “Nuts about TV—sees things, I guess. Haw! Leslie even had a TV
placed in the ceiling”—he gestured up at it—“so’s she could watch and fuck at the same
time. Wow.” Swaying slightly and sweating, he contemplated the angle-distorted face
of Mox in the overhead television. The screen was reflected as two gray dots in the
unmoving eyes of the girl on the bed. He reeled around, nearly falling over in the
process. “Wan’ first crack at her, Art?” he asked, then saw his companion crouched
unconscious in the corner.
“Mmm,” mused Endpoint. “It appears you’re a smedge too coshed for this right
now. ‘S all right—got all night.” He loosened his pants, dropping them into a puddle at
his feet.
The girl’s eyes flicked into his face briefly as he pressed his weight onto her.
“Daddy!” she whispered, her voice trailing off as her eyes wandered back to the screen,
visible over Endpoint’s sweaty shoulder.
“Dream on, kid,” he grunted. “You’re no kid of mine, dead bitch.”
Above his back, a liquid shimmering passed over Mox’s face on the screen.

He was walking down the Interface, passing through the swirling crowds of pimps
and whores, straights and hustlers, like a silent knife through flesh. I belong here,
thought Limmit with satisfaction, moving with the flow. Suddenly, he stopped in his
place on the sidewalk; the strangely yielding crowd parted and flowed past, unnoticing,
on all sides. Wait, he thought, remembered: the Interface is over—this is the ADR.
Someplace out of Mox and Adder’s minds. Got to find Dr. Adder. But how? He grabbed
someone, a pimp passing by one side, halting him. Christ, thought Limmit in dismay,
peering into the blank, zombielike face. This guy’s dead. He released the figure and
whirled around, facing the others walking toward him on the sidewalk. They’re all
dead, he thought. He noticed suddenly how silent it was: the constant shrieking babble
he remembered from his first nights in L.A. was absent. Alarmed, he pushed his way
through the walking figures to the curb. He stopped short at its edge, sick again with
fear.
The street was filled with the corpses from the Raid. But not dead. Their blood-
soaked and shattered bodies writhed in a shallow river, filled with a repellent white
substance. Pus, thought Limmit in nauseated horror. Their faces, or the remains of
them, held the same blank expressions as the figures on the sidewalk. The corpses
nearest the curb would reach up and attempt to snare the ankles of the walkers; if
successful, more dead hands would reach out for the tripped figure and pull it into the
street, where the thick white fluid seemingly transformed the figure into one of its
numbers, reaching out in turn for others on the sidewalk. After a moment, Limmit saw
also that some of the slowly churning corpses would pull themselves out of the street,
lifting themselves out onto the curb. There the pus and blood melted off, the body
became whole, and the figure rose and walked on, as if nothing had preceded or
interrupted his zombielike progression. The numbers of those leaving and entering the
street’s mire of dead bodies seemed equal; a constant cycle in and out of the corpse
world’s tributary.
Limmit looked down suddenly at his feet. A pair of red-spotted hands had
encircled one ankle. A girl’s face, missing the lower jaw so that the throat cavity gaped
open at him like an enormous, misshapen mouth, stared up at him, dead eyes
registering nothing. More hands reached up from the white fluid for him. In revulsed
panic, his heart thudding wildly, he kicked free and staggered back into the center of
the sidewalk. The corpse hands snared another figure, toppling it, then pulling it
headfirst into the street.
There was nothing left inside Limmit to vomit, so he doubled over in dry spastic
heaves. He stood up again, dizzied. I’ve got to find Adder, his mind repeated
obsessively. He’s somewhere, behind all this. But how can I find him?
From nowhere a thought struck him. Jostled on all sides by the figures on the
sidewalk, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the small yellow plastic radio
Droit had given him. His hands trembling, he switched it on and spun the dial. An
impassioned tenor voice burst out into the pseudo-interface’s oppressive silence. Not
that, thought Limmit, shaking the radio in frustration. He felt like he was going to burst
into tears. Abruptly, the music ended.
“Friends,” said the smooth, humane voice of KCID, “I know a lot of my listeners
will get a chuckle out of this one. How many of you out there know a certain E. Allen
Limmit? How many of you are him? Well,” he went on, clucking like a mother hen, “I
want to tell you that it takes a certain kind of dumb to stand on the sidewalk of L.A.’s
main drag and not be able to find Dr. Adder. Am I right, folks? And after he already
found him once before, not too long ago. Ah well, I suppose it takes all kinds. Now,
how about Wunderlich doing the first movement of Das Lied von der Erde? Ein Aff ist’s,
heh heh.” The music swelled back on.
Limmit switched the radio off, the silence rushing back up to him like a thick wave
of air. His office, he thought, replacing the radio in his jacket. The black iron gates.
Where else?
 He pushed his way through the somnambulent crowd and, after a moment’s
hesitation, up to the curb. He looked around till he located the well-remembered gates.
They were on the other side of the corpse-filled street.
Kicking away one dead hand reaching for him, he sighted either way to see which
end of the street lay closest. There were no visible ends to it. The pseudo-interface
appeared to stretch toward infinity in both directions, a limitless river of writhing
corpses bounded on either side by endlessly walking resurrections of pimps and
whores.
As he tried to shout across the street to the building behind the black gates, he
could feel his voice dissipate only inches from his lips, the sound not even penetrating
the sludgelike atmosphere. It’s no good, he thought despairingly, exhausted by his
strangulated yelling. I can’t get across—the corpses will start to pull down more than
can leave, until the sidewalks are empty and the river of pus spreads and swallows
everything, me and the buildings; then that’ll be the end.
Nothing to lose then, he decided, and stepped off the curb into the street.
The white fluid sloshed gluily to the top of his boots. The effort required to pull
them free and take another step was immense. The arms of the corpses mired around
him reached up to his thighs, grasping and pulling him down. God, he screamed in
sudden panic to himself, anything’s better than this! He swung frantically at the
corpses, knocking off their clinging hands. The curb he had left seemed miles away
when he looked back; no hope of scrambling back to it. The bodies behind pressed him
forward inexorably into the center of the street. He was no longer able to see either side
from here. Sobbing, he batted away the hands reaching from below, his own hands and
arms spotted with their blood.
I’m dying, he realized fearfully. There was no sensation in his feet; they’re dead, he
thought, submerged among the corpses. He tottered and fell upon his knees, amidst the
tangled, writhing bodies. The hands pawed at his chest and shoulders as he whimpered
and inched forward through the thickening fluid.
When the feeling was gone from his legs, he fell forward on his hands. How long,
he wondered in horror, has it been? Dead feet, dead legs, dead cock: how long until I’m
all dead. He pulled himself forward, through and over the corpses, feeling the rigidity
of their skeletons and the yielding softness of their spilled innards. His hands died. As
he pitched forward on his chest, he saw dimly the curb of the sidewalk before him, the
feet and legs walking upon it. I can’t reach it, he thought, gripped in paralyzing fear
and nausea as the blood-drenched hands pawed and clutched at his head straining to
keep above the white fluid. He felt the hands leaving smears of the street’s slime upon
his face, the surface skin starting to die and then decay.
 Dead, he thought dully; this is how it feels to be a corpse. He saw the arms of the
corpses around him reaching up to the feet on the sidewalk—saw hands that he
recognized as his own catching hold of a pair of ankles. My hands, he thought. Part of
the corpse world now, moving to its laws.
The figure on the sidewalk resisted being pulled into the street by Limmit’s corpse.
The dead hands held as if rigor mortis had set in, as the blank-faced figure stumbled
back, pulling Limmit partially up onto the sidewalk.
He felt his hands and forearms coming alive, as if blood were being pumped into
their tissues. He held on to the figure’s ankles, trying to gain a purchase on the sidewalk
with his elbows. Suddenly the figure tripped and fell; Limmit felt himself being pulled
back into the street. I’m still partially alive, he realized, so they want me back. Other
corpse hands had grabbed hold of the figure he had tripped and were pulling it in by its
arms. Limmit let go of its ankles and scrabbled to one side. He clawed at the sidewalk
desperately, the pus-filled street sucking at him from behind. “Please,” he whispered
hoarsely, twisting his head up agonizingly at the unnoticing figures, “somebody help
me.”
He slid slowly backward, the tips of his fingers burning across the rough sidewalk.
His fingernails caught in a hairline crack, stopping him momentarily, until the street’s
suction built up again as more dead hands clutched at him. Across the width of the
sidewalk he could see the bars of Dr. Adder’s black iron gates, impossible to reach, and
beyond them his silent motorcycle and the building’s front door. “Please,” he
whispered deliriously at the sight, the exhaustion of his strength dimming his eyes with
slowly expanding dark circles.
The iron gates parted and began, half real-time, to swing toward him. They
stopped only a couple of feet from him. The pull behind him increased hungrily—he
could feel the edges of the crack in the sidewalk begin to crumble beneath his clawlike
fingers. If I reach for the gate, he thought, and miss, I’ll fall back into the street and die
forever.
With his last strength he lunged for the black iron bars. His panic almost
overwhelmed him into unconsciousness as he felt himself being dragged back as his
hands flew for the gate. One hand caught, the other missing, then catching hold. He
tried to pull himself up, but only enough strength remained to cling, gasping, to the
bars.
The gates slowly started to swing shut, the half he was clinging to drawing him
with it across the sidewalk. Dazed, he could see his lifeless lower body emerging from
the grip of the street’s corpses. When his feet were free and out of reach from the street,
he dropped from the gate and lay panting on the sidewalk. The denizens of the pseudo-
interface stepped over him, zombielike. They had stopped, somehow automatically, for
the gates’ motion, and now resumed their dreamlike parade.
Gradually, he felt the life flowing back into his body, his mind too exhausted to
think anything. When the sensation had returned to his legs and only his feet remained
covered with blood, the puslike substance having melted without a trace from the rest
of his body, he sat up on the sidewalk. His shoulders jostled by the passing walkers, he
drew out on impulse the plastic radio and switched it on. A last fragment of music
faded away.
“And that,” said the voice of KCID cheerfully, “was the first movement of Mahler’s
Lied. Playing time of eight minutes, three seconds, in case any of my listeners out there
are keeping a clock on their daily activities. Better hurry, too, folks; I’m sure we’ve all
got a busy day ahead of us—I know I do!” More music began as Limmit switched off
the radio.
He wriggled his now-living toes inside his boots, then stood up shakily. He pushed
his way through the crowd and slipped inside the black iron gates.

Upstairs, Adder sat behind his desk in the dimly lit office. As Limmit opened the
door and peered in, he could see Adder and a young girl sitting in the chair beside the
desk. There was something familiar about the girl; her eyes followed him as he stepped
inside the room. It’s Melia, he realized, the image she made for herself.
“I’m sorry about what happened in the street,” said Adder as Limmit approached
the desk. “If I had been aware of your presence I could have helped you sooner.”
Limmit pulled another chair in front of the desk and collapsed into it, Adder
watching him expressionlessly. He’s not here, thought Limmit, gazing into the cold,
distance-filled eyes. Not all of him.
“That’s right,” said Adder, passing a hand slowly across his brow. “What’s behind
the desk is only a fraction of me. The ADR activates nearly the entire cerebral capacity,
or at least it’s doing so with Mox and myself. Because of relative ego strength you and
Melia are only observers in this world created by us.” He paused and turned his head
slightly as if listening to some inaudible signal. Then the penetrating gaze settled back
onto Limmit.
“Mox,” blurted Limmit. “I recognized him on the TV back in Rattown. He’s Lester
Gass. My father.”
Adder received the information impassively. “I was beginning to suspect as
much,” he said calmly. “Though it’s best that I know for sure.” He gazed over Limmit’s
head toward the window opposite. “So many things have become clear.”
Limmit sensed something happening behind him. He turned in his chair and saw
the window expanding and growing nearer, condensing like a telephoto lens the debris-
littered space between it and the desk. The window rushed up until Limmit felt himself
at the edge of a precipice; Melia, a few feet away, gazed unafraid at the view of the
Interface.
“Interface,” said Adder, “between Mox and myself. It’s a parallel of the world we
created between us in reality. His force and mine wrestle down there, stasis and action.
Only, he can’t make the corpses in the street completely dead, and I can’t make the
walkers on either side alive. But the struggle is real —you know that, Limmit, from
being down there among them.
“All this,” he continued, pointing his hand at the gaping window, “is either him or
me. Only this is already starting to pass away—the ADR is penetrating the layers of our
conscious minds, carrying us closer to the animal layers beneath. Look,” he
commanded.
Trembling, Limmit peered out the window. Below, the buildings lining the
Interface had become indistinct, blurring, changing into mountains of earth and rock-
cliff faces. Between two banks on which subhuman figures crawled mechanically,
reptilian forms thrashed in a stagnating river of the white fluid.
“Soon that whole metaphor, the one of a physical Interface between us, will go,”
said Adder faintly. “The ADR’s depth increases geometrically. Soon we’ll be down right
into the cellular level, the struggle between energy and nonenergy. Look at the sky,” he
commanded again.
Limmit looked up and saw there was none. Only a vast field of flames overhead,
curling and writhing through a dead-black, tangible vacuum. The abstract, moiling
battle spread until nothing but the churning flames and extinguishing vacuum could be
seen from the window.
“It’s draining me of too much effort,” said Adder, his voice growing distant, “to
maintain this image here.” Limmit looked around him and saw the walls and furniture
becoming murky, like a pencil drawing fading with erasure. The details of Adder’s face
were becoming indistinct, a line drawing showing only the sharp edge of his profile. “I
need everything for out there,” the figure continued. “Mox and I are more evenly
matched than either of us would have thought.”
“But what about us?” cried Limmit. He could feel alternating blasts of searing heat
and cold from behind him—the glass had already disappeared. “What are Melia and I
to do?” He glanced at the girl. She sat calmly upon her shadowy chair, the same
expression of trust and love that he had seen on her blind face in Rattown.
“I can’t help you,” said the almost completely faded image of Adder. “You do have
some control, some power here, though not much. Maybe together you can make some
kind of shell, a protection to ride out the storm in. Of course, if Mox wins, it won’t do
you much good. You’ll die just seconds after I do.” The last outlines of the image
wavered, then winked out. “... luck ...” whispered the air filling the space where he had
been.
Around Limmit and the girl the remains of the office started to shrink and run as if
melting. The faces in the skin magazines withered and disappeared.

The phone rang. Edgar picked up the extension in the living room, still keeping his
eyes on the television screen. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I’ve been watching it all
along. He’s alive. I don’t know—somehow.” Pause. “Yeah, that’s what I was going to
do, too. Before it’s all over.” He replaced the receiver and glanced at the churning
screen. The sharp, violent images of Dr. Adder had gradually abstracted themselves
into this visual inferno. Edgar nodded knowingly at the screen, as if it were reminding
him of something, then picked through the cut-glass candy dish for the last remaining
amphetamine-analogs. His muscles quivered for a second as the outnumbering blue
capsules overpowered the barbiturate, seemingly filling him with energy to the bursting
point.
Methodically, he took the ornate cigarette lighter from the coffee table and carried
it farther back into the conapt. With it he set fire to the large bed his mother lay
unconscious upon. He closed the bedroom door behind him. After starting other fires in
all the rooms, he ended by setting the lighter to the drapes and furniture surrounding
the television set. He watched the flames for a moment, then dropped the lighter to the
floor and ran out.
He pressed his palms fiat against the outside of the front door, feeling the heat
building up inside. Far down the hallway he could see other doors blackening and
bursting into flames. He tore himself away convulsively and ran for the elevator,
trembling with an excitement greater than that the blue capsules had given him. On the
television screen inside, the flames were seemingly being mirrored. The whore on the
bed in Rattown watched them intently, over the shoulder of Mr. Endpoint of Orange
County, who, his passion spent, had fallen asleep upon her breast. She was hardly
aware of his flabby weight—she was listening to the phosphor-dot flames. It was as if
they were burning through layer after layer of dreams and visions that had encrusted
around her like a pearl, until they reached the small, hard core in the center.

Endpoint didn’t wake up until he felt the fingers at his throat, the nails grown long
and sharp with inactivity. If he had been able to hear as the surprisingly strong hands
tore open his throat like pulpy fruit, he might have recognized the voice that told him
any father would suffice, if not the particular father who had driven his oldest son to
the Interface to have his sex changed (as with so many other of the whores on that
street), the beginning of a voluntary victim’s long descent. Above the two blood-
washed figures on the bed, the flames on the television screen writhed. Milch held his
hands a few inches away from the small television set, thinking he could perhaps feel
the heat from them. He straightened up from the set sitting on the walkway of the
empty warehouse, his rifle slung across his back.
He peeked into the cubicle, nodding in satisfaction at the three unconscious figures
bound together at the arms. He didn’t understand, but was willing to go on faith.
Outside the cubicle, he stepped over the figures of Azusa and two others, crumpled and
bloody in death, their rifles pinned beneath them. I knew, he thought, that I should
never have listened to that fucker Azusa. He felt a little ashamed now for the doubts he
once had. It was a good thing he and the others who had kept on believing had caught
the images on the TV, and been able to track Azusa and his men to this place, after
Azusa’s scout hadn’t reported in. Kicking at the short figure’s blood-crusted head, he
watched the flames’ small image on the television by the guardrail. Let the others, he
thought, celebrate. I’ll wait here until he awakens, comes back to his body. I should
have had faith, he brooded fiercely. All things will change again—that’s what the
flames mean. He glanced back through the door of the cubicle, in an almost childlike
agony of fear and hope.

The female geriatric whimpered and backed away from the fire-wreathed door, one
scarred leg dragging behind her, until she reached the window and screamed down at
the milling youths, their faces stark-lit by torches and small televisions. Somewhere
else, beneath an artificial mountain, the figures of dead whores coupled amidst the fires,
their plastic skin melting into unknown genitals. As, to the north, a storage annex
burned and collapsed, blocks away from Orange County Broadcast Central, the lips of a
short, white-haired mannequin vaporized and revealed a momentary grinning rictus.
 Limmit and Melia crouched together in the small shell they had formed around
themselves. Like an egg, thought Limmit, in a furnace. “How much longer?” he
wondered aloud, feeling on his back the alternating penetrations of heat and cold.
“Things must come to a conclusion,” said the girl evenly. “He explained it to me.
The ADR requires a cathartic expenditure of psychic energy before it dissipates out of
our bloodstreams.” She looked abstractedly at the shell’s thin skin.
Christ, thought Limmit miserably. We’re going to die right here, fry or be frozen
before the battle’s even over. If he wins, only Adder will wake up. And if he doesn’t
win.... Limmit shuddered convulsively. “How the fuck can you be so calm,” he shouted
at the girl, “when—”
“Quiet,” she ordered, her face taut. “Listen.”
Outside the shell the furious roars and silence of the struggle between Adder and
Mox had ceased: there was only a barely audible, tension-filled thrumming, extending
from the subsonic through all the pitches between to the hypersonic. “Is it over?”
whispered Limmit.
“No,” said the girl, intently listening to something more than the thrumming
sound. “He and Mox are deadlocked, their forces equal. I can tell; I’m closer to him than
you are.” A section of the shell grew transparent, reminding Limmit of the window in
Adder’s vanished office.
The flames and contorted vacuum were frozen, moving imperceptibly if at all.
“You mean this is it?” said Limmit, a slow horror growing within him. “We’re never
coming out of this? It’ll be like this forever?”
“No,” snapped the girl, turning a suddenly fierce and impassioned face on him.
“Don’t you see? A deadlock means Mox will win in just a few moments. Mox’s strength
is limitless, he’s part of the computer banks, but Adder’s strength will start to weaken
and die eventually, along with his body back in L.A.” She turned back to the shell’s
transparent section.
“Don’t open that,” shouted Limmit as he saw what she was doing. “You’ll weaken
it!” He dragged her as far away as he could from the section.
“I’m going to him!” she screamed as she pounded on his chest with her small fists.
“He needs me, like he did before!” “Don’t be an idiot,” said Limmit, struggling to
control her flailing limbs. “You’ll just die out there—what kind of strength like that
could you have?”
“More than you, chickenshit!” The shell was instantly covered with a net of hairline
fractures, then started splitting apart into fragments.
Limmit released her in sudden panic, feeling himself suspended, helpless, over the
abyss. He had one glimpse of her image shooting away in a long, arcing fall, before the
fear closed his eyes and squeezed him into a fetal ball. There was no protection for him
now, the last lucid portion of his mind realized, even if Melia could help Adder.
 The vibration grew louder and more intense, and he felt the first layers of his skin
start to peel away.
His blood seeped away into the flames. Not fire, but warmth enveloped him. Blind,
he felt himself still alive, immersed in a greater blood that pulsed with electricity.
It's his blood. The thought broke through Limmit’s fear as he hung suspended,
motionless. My father's. The same as mine.
Without sight, he felt his father’s blood penetrating to his center, seeking the spark
of energy there. A blood tie, thought Limmit. He wants me to join him, be him. Live forever
when we win this fight. The comforting warmth narrowed closer to his spine.

This is what you really wanted. A whispering thought that he could barely tell from
his own. To become your father.
“No.” Limmit spoke and the blood lapped against his teeth. The hate swelled out of
the pit of his stomach, as the warmth around him hissed like steam and drew away.
“We’re not the same blood!” He spat out the choking mouthful. “You die—not me.”
He uncoiled himself, his hands ripping through the darkness. The whisper that
he’d heard, his father’s voice, screamed with its own hatred and pain at the wound his
son tore open.
Then Limmit felt himself outside his father again, no longer held suspended in
blood, but falling into flames.
 ❖

“I came to, eventually, in the warehouse.”

“How did you feel?” asked Mary. She watched Limmit’s profile, turned away from
her. Perhaps the conversation could be prolonged. They were sitting in the little room in
Rattown they had shared for a little while, she on the bed and he on the chair beside it.
He had come to look for something (he had said) and had found her there.
“Like shit,” he said. “Trembling all over. I could barely walk. Adder, though, had
come out of the ADR a few minutes before, and was sitting there, calm and steady as
possible. Relaxed, even. The girl was dead, her hand still strapped to the TV.” He
paused and studied his own hands, wondering for a second if the tremor would ever go
away completely. “There’s a certain unconscious spark, a force of will, that keeps your
heart beating and stuff, keeps you alive. It’s what pulled me through after all the rest
had been burned away. That’s what she gave him, at the end. It was enough, I guess.
Mox was dead even before Broadcast Central went up.” He fell silent, then turned and
saw her regarding him with her large, now unsmiling eyes. “What are you going to do
now?” he asked.
She looked away, to the room’s grimy window. Through it floated spasmodic and
distant sounds. “I might go back,” she said, “rejoin Anna Manfred. If there’s any of the
Midwestern Liberation Front left. There’s nothing possible for me to do in L.A. now—I
saw some of the things that were on the TV last night, and how the Rattowners reacted
to it.”
Another silence stiffened around them for several seconds. “Coming here,” said
Limmit, “I ran into Droit. He told me that Mother Endure has started to lead most of her
downers into the sewers below. Those that would still go with her. He said he was
getting ready to go down into the Sump Line himself. Heading up north—beyond the
Visitor. Not that he had ever heard of there being anything up there.” He paused,
seemingly unable to extract any more words to drop into the vacuum. He inclined his
head at the yellow plastic radio softly humming on the window sill. “Is that the right
frequency?”
She nodded. “We’ll hear him as soon as he comes on.” Staring out the window. “I
keep hoping that he’ll be ... different now.” She turned her face to look at him. “What
are your plans?” she asked quietly.
 “I should go back to Phoenix,” he said, meeting and holding her level gaze.
“There’s not much left for me here. If anything.” He shook his head slowly. “I don’t
know. Everything’s possible now.”
Outside, beyond the alleys, the noises grew louder.

Dr. Adder sat behind a dust-covered desk in one of the empty warehouse’s
cubicles, next to the one that still held Melia’s body. A pair of cans that had once held
peaches, grown long ago somewhere else, and now containing only clear syrup, sat on
the desktop.
I wonder whatever became of my motorcycle, thought Adder, leaning back in the
chair and planting his feet between the empty cans. Probably still up there where I
dropped it outside Betreech’s place. Covered with mold by now, lichens on the tank
and fungus sprouting from the leather.
A person he had never seen before appeared in the doorway of the cubicle. He
looked as if he had been once, long ago, a stocky, even portly figure, but had condensed
with accumulating age, the network of fine lines on his face absorbing the excess. He
lugged a large black suitcase with him.
“How,” said Adder, looking at the apparition in mild curiosity, “did you get past
that Milch character out there?”
 “He’s one of my most faithful listeners,” said the ancient figure, smiling at him.
“KCID,” said Adder, recognizing the voice. “So you’re it.”
“That’s right,” the old man said. He lifted the case onto a corner of the desk and
opened it. “Portable, self-contained transmitter,” he said, noticing Adder’s small
interest. “One of Lester Gass’ lesser known devices. I found it here in L.A.; been using it
for my own purposes for years.” He winked at Adder. “Right, radioland?”
“So what the fuck do I want with it?”
The old man pulled out a microphone from inside the case and held it before
himself. “They’re all waiting, Dr. Adder,” he announced dramatically into the device. A
red rectangle marked ON THE AIR glowed inside the case. “All your old fans, and
everyone else, who never worshipped you until now. All through the streets of L.A.,
and even in the smoking ruins of Orange County, people are clustered around radios,
waiting to hear you, back from the dead. I broadcast the announcement earlier that
you’d be with me today. The word has reached everyone, I assure you.” He paused.
“What do you have to tell them, Dr. Adder?”

Adder gazed into the withered face for a silent moment. There was no mockery
there; he saw that the old man was just doing his self-appointed job in the best way he
could. And that he knew already.
 “Yeah,” said Adder finally, grinning and swinging his feet off the desktop. He
reached for the microphone. Everyone; L.A., Orange County, the whole world. “Yeah,
I’ve got something to say to them.”
 AFTERWORD
—PHILIP K. DICK

“Sir, you have written a dirty book, sir!”

Which writer does Mrs. Grundy have in mind now? James Joyce for his
masterpiece ULYSSES? Or Henry Miller for his two TROPICS novels? The shriek of
dismay from the prudes of the world is eternal. And this shriek has prevented the
publishing of K. W. Jeter’s extraordinary novel DR ADDER for literally years—until a
courageous publisher finally stepped forth and said,
“We’ll publish it.”
I did not know K. W. Jeter when I first read DR ADDER in 1972. The well-known
figure in science fiction academic circles Dr. Willis McNelly brought me the manuscript
and said, “One of the students wrote this. I think it’s good. I’d like to know what you
think.” And left it with me to read.
If there’s one thing I hate it’s having novels brought to me to read... because,
frankly, there are so few novels these days that are worth reading. I must admit I
considered reading this manuscript an imposition—until I read the first third of it, and
having read that first third of DR ADDER my life was permanently changed. Here was
not just a good novel; here was a great novel. It picked up where the dazzling power of
the DANGEROUS VISIONS stories (in Harlan Ellison’s anthologies) had left off. Very
simply, it is a stunning novel and it destroys once and for all your conception of the
limitations of science fiction. This is, of course, why so many years had to pass before it
saw print. It’s not dirty. Mrs. Grundy is wrong. Yes, it deals not only with sexual
perversions but with fantastic sexual perversions: dreams of sexual perversions which
are dreams you and I never supposed existed. But—is a murder mystery usually
accused of advocating death? Is a science fiction novel about the end of the world
construed by its readers as expressing a desire on the part of the author to see the world
end?
Did the movie Jaws advocate biting children in half?
I don’t wish to fall back on the easy statement that DR ADDER was ahead of its
time. It wasn’t. It was right on the nose. What was wrong was this: the field of science
fiction was behind the times. I have no doubt that if DR ADDER had been published in
1972 it would have been a blockbuster of a commercial success, and what is more, its
impact on the field would have been enormous. The field has been growing weak. It has
for years become ossified. A stale timidity has crept over it. Endless novels about sword
fights and figures in cloaks who perform magic—in other words clones of the Hobbit
books— have been cranked out, published, sold, and the field of science fiction has been
transmuted into a joke field—certain exceptions to the contrary such as Tom Disch’s
CAMP CONCENTRATION and Norman Spinrad’s THE IRON DREAM admitted.
 Now, I ask you, aren’t you tired of reading about magic and wizards and little
people with turned-up fuzzy feet? Consider this, then: you have been deprived for
many years of the opportunity to read powerful, original, daring novels such as DR
ADDER. A few months ago I heard a major figure in the science fiction field argue at a
lecture that “no good s-f novel ever went unpublished.” How tragically untrue! You, as
the reader, must take my word for it: good s-f novels do go unpublished because there
are relatively few brave publishers these days. But now DR ADDER is in print and you
are holding it in your hands. This fits my personal view of the workings of the universe:
the mill of the gods grinds slow, but it will eventually grind out justice. What you now
hold in your hands proves it.
I could make a case for the unfair misery that K. W. Jeter has been forced to
undergo from 1972 until this publication now, at long last, of DR ADDER, but I think
the case that you as the reader have been mistreated is a more important case. However,
I think you should know that it is a dreadful experience psychologically to have written
a masterpiece, a truly wonderful novel, and then find that no publisher in the United
States or England or France (Mr. Jeter even tried France, where almost everything gets
published!) will stand up, be counted, face the judgment of history and publish the
goddam thing.
Earlier this year I talked to an Editorial Assistant at a certain publisher. “Are you
going to publish DR ADDER?” I asked, knowing that they had the manuscript at that
moment. He said, “What if we lose our shirt?” To this I said, “History is going to judge
you.”
History does judge you, publisher, author and reader alike. Consider this. I myself
—I am, in my opinion, defamed in DR ADDER (there is a character, KCID, who is based
on me). But as far as I am concerned, this is not important. I have to admit that the
portrait of me made me acutely uncomfortable. But which is more important, that I
keep my self-serving image going, or that a great novel be published? I tell you this so
you will understand how little I have personally to gain by advocating the publishing of
DR ADDER. In fact in a sense I have something to lose; I show up in it as a worn-out
old fart with scrambled wits. So don’t show up at my door and tell me I’m
recommending DR ADDER because I’m a friend of the author. Well, I am a friend of the
author; after I read DR ADDER I got to know K. W. and we see a lot of each other. But I
am writing this Afterword for you the reader, not for K. W. Jeter. I am writing this to
tell you, Forget your timid preconceptions of what a science fiction novel should be like.
Forget the little people with fuzzy turned-up feet and sword fights on imaginary
planets. This novel is about our world and so it is a dangerous novel in the sense that
Harlan’s DANGEROUS VISIONS stories were, by and large, dangerous. Which is
terrific. This is precisely what we need.
Well, I have rattled on enough; time for you to return to the novel itself. I’d like to
add a few words about K. W., however, since I know him so well. He’s a tall, gloomy
person with the most brilliant wit of anyone I know (gloomy people usually have the
flair for wit). His ex-wife once said that she thought he looked like John Barrymore. I
think he looks like Richard the Third, plotting to overthrow everyone ahead of him in
line to the royal throne. And in a literary sense K. W. has done precisely this. He has
worked and waited years—not to get to the throne of power but to the throne of getting
an important and exciting and dramatic and, above all, interesting novel published,
against overwhelming odds. He never gave up, although many times his morale
dropped to a low ebb. We, his friends, cheered him up as best we could, but, really,
only one thing could cheer him. And that one thing is what you hold in your hands
now: a published copy of his masterpiece DR ADDER.
Consider yourself warned. This novel is gut-destroying. It is not a creampuff novel;
it is not empty sweetness. I enjoyed it. I loved it. Mrs. Grundy is going to run off
shrieking when she reads it, but let her run off. James Joyce and Henry Miller survived
her, and so will K. W. Jeter. And so will a courageous publisher, whose imprint appears
on this book. I wish to thank that publisher. And, above all, I wish to thank K. W. for his
valor. And his genius.
—Santa Ana, California
August 1, 1979