Oh, sure! But no mention of the fact that there were kids in there, hm? No mention of the fact that ‘I’ hapto be sitting safely a hundred meters up in a gun-ship armed with self-seeking missiles and thousand-watt laser-guns! I’d like to see some of the killers brought down to ground level and turned loose with hands and feet and teeth against the people who were mashed to pulp in that block of apts! That’s what I’d call ‘being an individual’!”
Dismayed by Conroy’s fierceness, Flamen said, “Ah-yes, but surely the safety of the greatest number is a primary.”
The words sounded mealy-mouthed after Conroy’s vehemence, and ran dry.
“Well?” Conroy said, turning to face him. “I must say I didn’t expect to hear you, a spoolpigeon, speaking out in favor of the established order.”
“But this is the world we’ve got,” Flamen said faintly. He could not recall being so much at a loss since he was in college and had to deal with an instructor who bullied rather than led his students towards knowledge. “We have to try and decide what is and what isn’t worth keeping, and if we do think something’s worth keeping we have to try and protect it.”
“So name what’s worth keeping,” Conroy countered. “This convenience we’re riding in-this skimmer? Sure, but did it have to be manufactured in Detroit by people whose skins guarantee they can’t market their skills anyelse in the country? How secure do you feel in your annual skimmer when you take off in it for the first time? How certain are you that some melanist fanatic hasn’t been around the dispatch field sabotaging the skimmers destined for blank purchasers, so that they’ll crash after the first thousand miles? What’s going to protect you against that? The police can’t! Neither can your local Gottschalk, for all the guns he can offer you. No wonder people hardly talk to their friends face to face any more, but call up to save going across the street in case they get shot by a passing knee.”
A bleep signifying they were over their destination, the Hilton Undertower, saved Flamen from having to reply at once, and he was grateful all over again. It was years since he had come up against anyone with such strong feelings as Conroy’s, and he was obscurely troubled, as though the battering words had struck a long-forgotten chord in his memory.
A few minutes for checking in and having his bag sent to his room, and Conroy was holding forth anew in the hotel’s main bar, his rodomontade proof against any attempt by Flamen to interrupt with more details of his plot to undermine Mogshack.
“As I said earlier, even up in relatively civilized Canada I find the traces of Mogshack’s teachings regardless of who actually formed the last link in the chain of comto my students. How do you feel, for exabout murders on campus?”
“Well, I-”
“We’ve had two this year: a jealous homosexual boy stabbed his lover because he was seen with a girl, and a crazy father came up and shot his daughter because a friend of hers-some friend!-told him she was sleeping with a boy who had some Indian blood. Iroquois, to be exact. Me, I’d have been rather pleased; they were a distinguished tribe in their day, the Iroquois. But thank goodness I don’t have a daughter and my sons are both safely married. Irrelevant I was talking about campus murders. What’s happened to us that we take killings for granted among our children? Don’t give me that hog-wash about students at college haying to be treated as adults-there’s nothing adult about playing with guns and grenades!”
He had dialed a beer and now poured the whole of it down his throat in a single thirsty gobble as though washing away an unpleasant taste. Flamen said, caught up in the discussion in spite of his own preoccupations,
“Yes, but adolescence has always been the most emodisturbing time, and-”
“Who sold that crazy father a gun to go shoot his daughter with?” Conroy interrupted. “Some ’emotionally disturbed’ adolescent at the corner store where he cobtogether lasers in a one-man workshop? The hell! That was a late-model Gottschalk gun; I saw it myself in the dean’s office, later.”