expeditions and join a local gang) waited for the Uterus Express to arrive. When it didn’t, interest flagged. They were left in that particular limbo that was reserved for newlyweds in Co-Op City. Few friends and a circle of acquaintances that reached only as far as the stoop of their own building. Richards did not mind this; it suited him. He threw himself into his work wholly, with grinning intensity, getting overtime when he could. The wages were bad, there was no chance of advancement, and inflation was running wild-but they were in love. They remained in love, and why not? Richards was that kind of solitary man who can afford to expend gigantic charges of love, affection, and, perhaps, psychic domination on the woman of his choice. Up until that point his emotions had been almost entirely untouched. In the eleven years of their marriage, they had never argued significantly.
He quit his job in 2018 because the chances of ever having children decreased with every shift he spent behind the leaky G-A old-style lead shields. He might have been all right if he answered the foreman’s aggrieved “Why are you quitting?” with a lie. But Richards had told him, simply and clearly, what he thought
The blackball began to roll. He’s dangerous. Steer clear.
During the next five years he had spent a lot of time rolling and loading newsies, but the work thinned to a trickle and then died. The Free-Vee killed the printed word very effectively. Richards pounded the pavement. Richards was moved along. Richards worked intermittently for day-labor outfits.
The great movements of the decade passed by him ignored, like ghosts to an unbeliever. He knew nothing of the Housewife Massacre in ’24 until his wife told him about it three weeks later-two hundred police armed with tommy guns and high-powered move-alongs had turned back an army of women marching on the Southwest Food Depository. Sixty had been killed. He was vaguely aware that nerve gas was being used in the Mideast. But none of it affected him. Protest did not work. Violence did not work. The world was what it was, and Ben Richards moved through it like a thin scythe, asking for nothing, looking for work. He ferreted out a hundred miserable day and half-day jobs. He worked cleaning jellylike slime from under piers and in sump ditches when others on the street, who honestly believed they were looking for work, did nothing.
Move along, maggot. Get lost. No job. Get out. Put on your boogie shoes. I’ll blow your effing head off, daddy. Move.
Then the jobs dried up. Impossible to find anything. A rich man in a silk singlet, drunk, accosted him on the street one evening as Richards shambled home after a fruitless day, and told him he would give Richards ten New Dollars if Richards would pull down his pants so he could see if the street freaks really did have peckers a foot long. Richards knocked him down and ran.
It was then, after nine years of trying, that Sheila conceived. He was a wiper, the people in the building said. Can you believe he was a wiper for six years and knocked her up? It’ll be a monster, the people in the building said. It’ll have two heads and no eyes.
But instead, it was Cathy. Round, perfect, squalling. Delivered by a midwife from down the block who took fifty cents and four cans of beans.
And now, for the first time since his brother had died, he was drifting again. Every pressure (even, temporarily, the pressure of the chase) had been removed.
His mind and his anger turned toward the Games Federation, with their huge and potent communications link to the whole world. Fat people with nose filters, spending their evenings with dollies in silk underpants. Let the guillotine fall. And fall. And fall. Yet there was no way to get them. They towered above all of them dimly, like the Games Building itself.
Yet, because he was who he was, and because he was alone and changing, he thought about it. He was unaware, alone in his room, that while he thought about it he grinned a huge white-wolf grin that in itself seemed powerful enough to buckle streets and melt buildings. The same grin he had worn on that almost-forgotten day when he had knocked a rich man down and then fled with his pockets empty and his mind burning.
MINUS 055 AND COUNTING
Monday was exactly the same as Sunday-the working world took no one particular day off anymore-until six-thirty.
Father Ogden Grassner had Meatloaf Supreme sent up (the hotel’s cuisine, which would have seemed execrable to a man who had been weaned on anything better than fast-food hamburgers and concentrate pills, tasted great to Richards) with a bottle of Thunderbird wine and settled down to watch
The second half of the program was markedly different. Thompson was smiling broadly. “After the latest tapes sent to us by the monster that goes under the name of Ben Richards, I’m pleased to give you some good news-”
They had gotten Laughlin.
He had been spotted in Topeka on Friday, but an intensive search of the city on Saturday and Sunday had not turned him up. Richards had assumed that Laughlin had slipped through the cordon as he had himself. But this afternoon, Laughlin had been observed by two kids. He had been cowering in a Highway Department road shed. He had broken his right wrist at some point.
The kids, Bobby and Mary Cowles, were shown grinning broadly into the camera. Bobby Cowles had a tooth missing. I wonder if the tooth fairy brought him a quarter, Richards thought sickly.
Thompson announced proudly that Bobby and Mary, “Topeka’s number one citizens,” would be on
Following were tapes of Laughlin’s riddled, sagging body being carried out of the shed, which had been reduced to matchwood by concentrated fire. There were mingled cheers, boos, and hisses from the studio audience.
Richards turned away sickly, nauseated. Thin, invisible fingers seemed to press against his temples.
From a distance, the words rolled on. The body was being displayed in the rotunda of the Kansas statehouse. Already long lines of citizens were filing past the body. An interviewed policeman who had been in at the kill said Laughlin hadn’t put up much of a fight.
Ah, how nice for you, Richards thought, remembering Laughlin, his sour voice, the straight-ahead, jeering look in his eyes.
A
Now there was only one big show. The big show was Ben Richards. He didn’t want any more of his Meatloaf Supreme.
MINUS 054 AND COUNTING
He had a very bad dream that night, which was unusual. The old Ben Richards had never dreamed.
What was even more peculiar was the fact that he did not exist as a character in the dream. He only watched, invisible.
The room was vague, dimming off to blackness at the edges of vision. It seemed that water was dripping dankly. Richards had an impression of being deep underground.
In the center of the room, Bradley was sitting in a straight wooden chair with leather straps over his arms and legs. His head had been shaved like that of a penitent. Surrounding him were figures in black hoods. The Hunters, Richards thought with budding dread. Oh dear God, these are the Hunters.
“I ain’t the man,” Bradley said.
“Yes you are, little brother,” one of the hooded figures said gently, and pushed a pin through Bradley’s cheek. Bradley screamed.
“Are you the man?”
“Suck it.”
A pin slid easily into Bradley’s eyeball and was withdrawn dribbling colorless fluid. Bradley’s eye took on a punched, flattened look.
“Are you the man?”
“Poke it up your ass.”
An electric move-along touched Bradley’s neck. He screamed again, and his hair stood on end. He looked like a comical caricature black, a futuristic Stepinfetchit.
“Are you the man, little brother?”
“Nose filters give you cancer,” Bradley said. “You’re all rotted inside, honkies.”
His other eyeball was pierced. “Are you the man?”
Bradley, blind, laughed at them.
One of the hooded figures gestured, and from the shadows Bobby and Mary Cowles came tripping gaily. They began to skip around Bradley, singing: “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf?”
Bradley began to scream and twist in the chair. He seemed to be trying to hold his hands up in a warding-off gesture. The song grew louder and louder, more echoing. The children were changing. Their heads were elongating, growing dark with blood. Their mouths were open and in the caves within, fangs twinkled like razor-blades.
“I’ll tell!” Bradley screamed. “I’ll tell! I’ll tell! I ain’t the man! Ben Richards is the man! I’ll tell! God… oh… G-G-God…”
“Where is the man, little brother?”
“I’ll tell! I’ll tell! He’s in-”
But the words were drowned by the singing voices. They were lunging toward Bradley’s straining, corded neck when Richards woke up, sweating.
MINUS 053 AND COUNTING
It was no good in Manchester anymore.
He didn’t know if it was the news of Laughlin’s brutal mid-western end, or the dream, or only a premonition.
But on Tuesday morning he stayed in, not going to the library. It seemed to him that every minute he stayed in this place was an invitation to quick doom. Looking out the window, he saw a Hunter with a black hood inside every old bearer and slumped taxi driver. Fantasies of gunmen creeping soundlessly up the hall toward his door tormented him. He felt a huge clock was ticking in his head.
He passed the point of indecision shortly after eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning. It was impossible to stay. He knew they knew.
He got his cane and tapped clumsily to the elevators and went down to the lobby.
