“Well — ” said Constant, “is it really very crazy to tell a man who has access to the biggest space ship ever built that he’s going out into space?”
This bit of news, about the accessibility of a space ship to Constant, startled Beatrice. It startled her so much that she took a step back from the head of the staircase, separated herself from the rising spiral. The small step backward transformed her into what she was — a frightened, lonely woman in a tremendous house.
“You have a space ship, do you?” she said.
“A company I control has custody of one,” said Constant. “You’ve heard of The Whale?”
“Yes,” said Beatrice.
“My company sold it to the Government,” said Constant. “I think they’d be delighted if someone would buy it back at five cents on the dollar.”
“Much luck to you on your expedition,” said Beatrice.
Constant bowed. “Much luck to you on yours,” he said.
He left without another word. In crossing the bright zodiac on the foyer floor, he sensed that the spiral staircase now swept down rather than up. Constant became the bottommost point in a whirlpool of fate. As he walked out the door, he was delightfully aware of pull. lug the aplomb of the Rumfoord mansion right out with him.
Since it was foreordained that he and Beatrice were to come together again, to produce a child named Chrono, Constant was under no compunction to seek and woo her, to send her so much as a get-well card. He could go about his business, he thought, and the haughty Beatrice would have to damn well come to him — like any other bimbo.
He was laughing when he put on his dark glasses and false beard and let himself out through the little iron door in the wall.
The limousine was back, and so was the crowd.
The police held open a narrow path to the limousine door. Constant scuttled down it, reached the limousine. The path closed like the Red Sea behind the Children of Israel. The cries of the crowd, taken together, were a collective cry of indignation and pain. The crowd, having been promised nothing, felt cheated, having received nothing.
Men and boys began to rock Constant’s limousine. The chauffeur put the limousine in gear, made it creep through the sea of raging flesh.
A bald man made an attempt on Constant’s life with a hot dog, stabbed at the window glass with it, splayed the bun, broke the frankfurter — left a sickly sunburst of mustard and relish.
“Yah, yah, yah!” yelled a pretty young woman, and she showed Constant what she had probably never showed any other man. She showed him that her two upper front teeth were false. She let those two front teeth fall out of place. She shrieked like a witch.
A boy climbed on the hood, blocking the chauffeur’s view. He ripped off the windshield wipers, threw them to the crowd. It took the limousine three-quarters of an hour to reach a fringe of the crowd. And on the fringe were not the lunatics but the nearly sane.
Only on the fringe did the shouts become coherent.
“Tell us!” shouted a man, and he was merely fed up — not enraged.
“We’ve got a right!” shouted a woman. She showed her two fine children to Constant.
Another woman told Constant what it was the crowd felt it had a right to. “We’ve got a right to know what’s going on!” she cried.
The riot, then, was an exercise in science and theology — a seeking after clues by the living as to what life was all about.
The chauffeur, seeing at last a clear road before him, pressed the accelerator to the floor. The limousine zoomed away.
A huge billboard flashed by. LET’S TAKE A FRIEND TO THE CHURCH OF OUR CHOICE ON SUNDAY! it said.
chapter two
CHEERS IN THE WIREHOUSE
“Sometimes I think it is a great mistake to have matter that can think and feel. It complains so. By the same token, though, I suppose that boulders and mountains and moons could be accused of being a little too phlegmatic.”
— WINSTON NILES RUMFOORD