What Shep led him to was just another Belly Rave house. A wheezing old crone crept around the living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace, and water bubbling hi a blackened kettle. Restaurant?
Shep took a couple of rations from his pocket. He never seemed to be without a dozen or so. They were easy enough to get from the R.C.; you could claim you had a dozen dependents and he would apathetically list you for 273 rations
a week. If you could lift them, they were yours. There was plenty of food. V_
And plenty of circuses.
Shep split the two-by-three-by-six plastic box with his thumbnail and Norvell clumsily followed suit. Things tumbled out. Shep tossed one of the “things”—an unappetizing little block of what looked like plastic-wrapped wood—to the crone.
She caught it and gobbled it down with desperate hunger, choking on crumbs.
“Business not so good?” Shep asked casually. In his voice there was an undertone of contempt
She glared at him wordlessly. She bailed water out of the kettle with a rusted can and slopped it into his plastic ration box. Shep popped open a little envelope and sprinkled a dark powder on the water.
Coffee! The magic smell made Norvell suddenly ravenous. He handed the crone a similar block from bis own ration, got his water, made his coffee, and greedily explored the other things that had come out of the box.
Biscuits. A tin of meat-paste. A chewy block of compressed vegetables. Candy. Cigarettes. The combination was one he hadn’t encountered before; the meat-paste was highly spiced and salty, but good.
Shep watched as he gobbled. Shep sighed, at last, “When you’ve eaten each menu ten thousand times—well, I won’t discourage you.”
Outside, Norvell asked shyly what in the world the old woman thought she was doing for a living.
“It’s simple,” said Shep. “She gets her rations and trades them for firewood. She uses the wood to heat water—for coffee, or bouillon, or tea, or whatever. She trades the water for rations. She keeps hoping that some day she’ll come out ahead on the deal. She never has.”
“But why?”
Shep didn’t speak for a long minute as they sauntered along in the afternoon sun. At last he said, “No offense. But it’s easy to see you’re a come-lately, Bligh- Why does she do it? Because it makes her feel like a human being.”
“But——”
“But hell. It makes her feel as though she were master of her fate, captain of her soul. It’s hard to starve to death in
Belly Rave, but in a bad week she comes close to it. She thinks she’s a Rockefeller or a Weeks in miniature. Risking her capital in the hope, of gain. Well, she is! What if she always loses? She’s doing something—not just sitting and waiting for the ration day to roll around again. You’ve heard of hell?”
Norvell nodded. Like practically everybody else he was a member of the Reformed Rationalist Church of the Inchoate Principle, but hell had been mentioned in sermons now and then.
“Well, if a man who said that hell is a perpetual holiday was right, then this is it. Belly Rave, mister. Belly Rave.”
Norvell nodded again. It made sense; he could see how it would make irresistible, unarguable sense, after the ten-thousandth sampling of each menu. The crone would try—anything. Being a crone; being an old woman with no talents and no hopes. Those who could do anything, anything at all, would try anything. Anything at all.
It gave him a clue to the enigma named Shep. He said com-prehendingly, “So she has her restaurant, and you have your art, and——”
The giant turned on him, picked him up by the lapels and shook him like a kitten.
“You little louse,” Shep growled shakily between the broken teeth. “You fool! What do you know? Listen to me, little louse! If you ever say, or hint, or think that I’m just piddling around to kill the time, I’ll snap you hi two!” He slammed Norvell down on the pavement so hard his arches ached”, he stood glaring at Norvell, arms akimbo.
Strangely, Norvell was not frightened. In a clear, intuitive flash he realized that he had said the unspeakable, that the offense was terribly his.