She nodded. “It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn’t easy, and going on the dole after a few years’ working on a prison farm; exconvicts can’t get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which they’d put up for bail, but the government would’ve gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.
“So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.”
“And what did the bodysnatcher get?”
“He himself probably didn’t get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn’t have very much-”
“What happens if they get caught?”
“Not a chance.” She laughed. “The communes provide over half the country’s produce-they’re really just an unofficial arm of the government. I’m sure the CBI knows exactly where they are.. . . Dad grumbles that it’s just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.”
“What a weird setup.”
“Well, it keeps the land farmed.” She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. “And they’re eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.”
After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a “cultural translation” of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn’t allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any blurry-eyed nostalgia over it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I’d seen, and some of the physical feats performed were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.
We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.
It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun-pistol over their heads.
It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.
The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.
The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.
“What hap-” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Whwhat was he doing?”
I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing
• . . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give freely.
Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brainwipe you!”