those people down the streetl’ If you-uh-follow me.”
“Well, Danty and Lora aren’t a hundred per cent typical,” Magda murmured, taking a cigarette from the dis-penser on the dash. The EMPTY light came on as she removed it; as though by reflex, she felt for her own pack and slipped a couple into the store to compensate. The light went out. There was almost nothing on the dash that related to the operation of the car-the speedometer and the ignition-on light were almost buried among the ancillaries, the radiation-counter, the rain-detector light, the controls for the radio, and the sir-conditioning instruments.
Clearly from the back: “Oh, Dan-ty-y-y . . !”
“You don’t get it,” Magda said, having drawn and let go the first puff of her cigarette.
“Frankly, no,” Sheklov grunted, and twisted the wheel the few degrees necessary to carry them through a wide curve.
“It’s like I was saying,” Magda answered with a shrug. “When things become intolerable, the obvious way is out. In our case, you can’t go out-not unless you’re prepared never to come back. And Lora wasn’t joking when she talked about the risk of being shot at the border. Except that treading on a mine is probably a bigger risk, and then of course the-uh-the private enterprise bit is unpredictable.”
“The what?”
“Private enterprise. Lots of privately financed organisations patrol the borders, too. And mine them. Security doesn’t approve, and sometimes they get hauled into court on the grounds that if they don’t trust the official patrols they can’t be loyal. But usually they get let off with a nominal fine and a warning, because patriotism with a capital P is the excuse for anything.”
“I -I don’t believe I ever heard about that,” Sheklov admitted, wondering when the border in his mind was
going to be crossed, the one between Sheklov and Holtzer, who was fading moment by moment as he struggled with the problem that had troubled him since his arrival . . .
I’m on a fool’s errand here! It’s as though they’d sent me to an asylum three thousand miles wide! An idea that is brand-new could be new because it’s insane, couldn’t it?
Suppose 1’d walked into one of the “private enterprise” patrols when 1 came ashore?
Hell! Mavbe 1 did!
“Getting tired? Like me to spell you?” Magda said. He realized with a wrenching sense of panic that he had let his attention drift from the wheel, and crossed into another lane alreadv crammed with cars.
“Uh-no,” he forced out. “No. I’m fine.”
Providentially. in the lane just vacated, a car howled past with its governor cut out, doing far more than the legal maximum. and he was able to jerk his head at it.
“Saw him coming up-thought I’d better move over.”
“Ah-yes ” Magda said. and took another drag on her cigarette. A few heartbeats later, she continued with what she had been saying as though there had been no distraction.
“Yes! There are two ways to go, assuming you want to go somewhere and aren’t just content to be forced into the official mould. You can go insane, and that’s the easy one. You can buy Koenig’s. and keep a gun on the dash” -there was one in this car and she tapped it with long, sharp nails-“and convince yourself you’re taking the ordinary, reasonable precautions a human being has to take to protect himself. That’s what I meant when I said you can go out of the world other people share.”
“But surely,” Sheklov hazarded, “other people do share that world.”
“You miss my point. They share the idea that the world mustn’t be shared. Tap a friend on the shoulder when you meet him on the street, he whirls around and pulls a gun, doesn’t he? Likely a gas-gun. that onlv blinds and doesn’t kill, but a gun nonetheless. And he fires before he looks to see whether you’re known to him.”
“Yes,” Sheklov said at length, a mile of dark road later. “I’m with you.”
“It’s a whole pattern,” Magda said. “And it’s crazy. Like with warts on. You know-you ever hear-of any sane species whose worst natural enemy was himself?”
“Man?”
“Natural species?”