ahead. My fingers itched for a pencil to mark up that contact sheet, sharpening the phrases, cutting out the dullness, inserting see-hear-taste-feel words with real shock. It could use it. The door of the booth sprang open; my ten minutes were up. I hastily flushed the contact sheet down the drain and went out into the day room. Herrera was still in the trance before the set. I waited some twenty minutes. Finally he shook himself, blinked, and looked around. He saw me, and his face was immobile granite. I smiled and nodded, and he came over. “All right, companero?” he asked quietly. “All right,” I said. “Any time you say, Gus.” “It will be soon,” he said. “Always after a thing like that I plug in for some trance. I cannot stand the suspense of waiting to find out. Some day I come up out of trance and find the bulls are beating hell out of me, eh?” He began to sleek the edge of his slicer with the pocket hone. I looked at it with new understanding. “For the bulls?” I asked. His face was shocked. “No,” he said. “You have the wrong idea a little, Jorge. For me. So I have no chance to rat.” His words were noble, even in such a cause. I hated the twisted minds who had done such a thing to a fine consumer like Gus. It was something like murder. He could have played his part in the world, buying and using and making work and profits for his brothers all around the globe, ever increasing his wants and needs, ever increasing everybody’s work and profits in the circle of consumption, raising children to be consumers in turn. It hurt to see him perverted into a sterile zealot. I resolved to do what I could for him when I blew off the lid. The fault did not lie with him. It was the people who had soured him on the world who should pay. Surely there must be some sort of remedial treatment for Consies like Gus who were only dupes. I would ask-no; it would be better not to ask. People would jump to conclusions. I could hear them now: “I don’t say Mitch isn’t sound, but it was a pretty farfetched idea.” “Yeah. Once a Consie, always a Con-sie.” “Everybody knows that. I don’t say Mitch isn’t sound, mind you, but-” The hell with Herrera. He could take his chances like everybody else. Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears.
nine Days went by like weeks. Herrera talked little to me, until one evening in the dayroom he suddenly asked: “You ever see Gallina?” That was Chicken Little. I said no. “Come on down, then, I can get you in. She’s a sight.” We walked through corridors and leaped for the descending cargo net. I resolutely shut my eyes. You look straight down that thing and you get the high-shy horrors. Forty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten, Zero, Minus Ten- “Jump off, Jorge,” Herrera said. “Below Minus Ten is the machinery.” I jumped. Minus Ten was gloomy and sweated water from its concrete walls. The roof was supported by immense beams. A tangle of pipes jammed the corridor where we got off. “Nutrient fluid,” Herrera said. I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling. “Concrete and lead. It shields cosmic rays. Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer.” He spat. “No good to eat for people. You got to burn it all if you don’t catch it real fast and-” He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meat by “catch.” He swung open a door. “This is her nest,” he said proudly. I looked and gulped. It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive. Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her. I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.” His two-handed