She gave him a tighter hug and smiled happily at him. 'It gets to be a shut-off being with normals, doesn't it?' she said.
'And how,' he said. 'I wanted to kick the soccer team instead of the ball this morning.'
She laughed.
He had been depressed since the sing; now he felt released and happy and taller. 'I found a girlfriend,' he said, 'and guess what; I fucked her without the least bit of trouble.'
'Hate.'
'Not as extensively or as satisfyingly as we did, but with no trouble at all, not twenty-four hours later.'
'I can live without the details.'
He grinned and ran his hands down her sides and clasped her hipbones. 'I think I might even manage to do it again tonight,' he said, teasing her with his thumbs.
'Your ego is growing by leaps and bounds.'
'My everything is.'
'Come on, brother,' she said, prying his hands away and holding onto one, 'we'd better get you indoors before you start singing.'
They went into the plaza and crossed it diagonally. Flags and sagging Marxmas bunting hung motionless above it, dim in the glow of distant walkways. 'Where are we going anyway?' he asked, walking happily. 'Where's the secret meeting place of the diseased corrupters of healthy young members?'
'The Pre-U,' she said.
'The Museum?'
'That's right. Can you think of a better place for a group of Uni-cheating abnormals? It's exactly where we belong.
Easy,' she said, tugging at his hand; 'don't walk so energetically.'
A member was coming into the plaza from the walkway they were going toward. A briefcase or telecomp was in his hand.
Chip walked more normally alongside Snowflake. The member, coming closer—it was a telecomp he had— smiled and nodded. They smiled and nodded in return as they passed him.
They went down steps and out of the plaza.
'Besides,' Snowflake said, 'it's empty from eight to eight and it's an endless source of pipes and funny costumes and unusual beds.'
'You take things?'
'We leave the beds,' she said. 'But we make use of them now and again. Meeting solemnly in the staff conference room was just for your benefit.'
'What else do you do?'
'Oh, sit around and complain a little. That's Lilac's and Leopard's department mostly. Sex and smoking is enough for me. King does funny versions of some of the TV programs; wait till you find out how much you can laugh.'
'The making use of the beds,' Chip said; 'is it done on a group basis?'
'Only by two's, dear; we're not that pre-U.'
'Who did you use them with?'
'Sparrow, obviously. Necessity is the mother of et cetera. Poor girl, I feel sorry for her now.'
'Of course you do.'
'I do! Oh well, there's an artificial penis in Nineteenth Century Artifacts. She'll survive.'
'King says we should find a man for her.'
'We should. It would be a much better situation, having four couples.'
'That's what King said.'
As they were crossing the ground floor of the museum-lighting their way through the strange-figured dark with a flashlight that Snowflake had produced—another light struck them from the side and a voice nearby said, 'Hello there!' They started. 'I'm sorry,' the voice said. 'It's me, Leopard.'
Snowflake swung her light onto the twentieth-century car, and a flashlight inside it went off. They went over to the glinting metal vehicle. Leopard, sitting behind the steering wheel, was an old round-faced member wearing a hat with an orange plume. There were several dark brown spots on his nose and cheeks. He put his hand, also spotted, through the car's window frame. 'Congratulations, Chip,' he said. 'I'm glad you came through.' Chip shook his hand and thanked him. 'Going for a ride?' Snowflake asked.
'I've been for one,' he said. 'To Jap and back. Volvo's out of fuel now. And thoroughly wet too, come to think of it.' They smiled at him and at each other.
'Fantastic, isn't it?' he said, turning the wheel and working a lever that projected from its shaft. 'The driver was in complete control from start to finish, using both hands and both feet.'
'It must have been awfully bumpy,' Chip said, and Snow-flake said, 'Not to mention dangerous.'
'But fun too,' Leopard said. 'It must have been an adventure, really; choosing your destination, figuring out which roads to take to get there, gauging your movements in relation to the movements of other cars—'
'Gauging wrong and dying,' Snowflake said.
'I don't think that really happened as often as we're told it did,' Leopard said. 'If it had, they would have made the front parts of the cars much thicker.'
Chip said, 'But that would have made them heavier and they would have gone even slower.'
'Where's Hush?' Snowflake asked.
'Upstairs with Sparrow,' Leopard said. He opened the car's door, and coming out of it with a flashlight in his hand, said, 'They're setting things up. Some more stuff was put in the room.' He cranked the window of the door halfway up and closed the door firmly. A wide brown belt decorated with metal studs was fastened about his coveralls. 'King and Lilac?' Snowflake asked. 'They're around someplace.'
Chip thought, Making use of one of the beds—as the three of them went on through the museum. He had thought about King and Lilac a good deal since seeing King and seeing how old he was—fifty-two or -three or even more. He had thought about the difference between the ages of the two—thirty years, surely, at the very least—and about the way King had told him to stay away from Lilac; and about Lilac's large less-slanted-than-normal eyes and her hands that had rested small and warm on his knees as she crouched before him urging him toward greater life and awareness.
They went up the steps of the unmoving central escalator and across the museum's second floor. The two flashlights, Snowflake's and Leopard's, danced over the guns and daggers, the bulbed and wired lamps, the bleeding boxers, the kings and queens in their jewels and fur-trimmed robes, and the three beggars, filthy and crippled, parading their disfigurements and thrusting out their cups. The partition behind the beggars had been slid aside, opening a narrow passageway that extended farther into the building, its first few meters lit by light from a doorway in the left-hand wall. A woman's voice spoke softly. Leopard went on ahead and through the doorway, while Snowflake, standing beside the beggars, sprung pieces of tape from a first-aid-kit cartridge. 'Snowflake's here with Chip,' Leopard said inside the room. Chip laid a piece of tape over his bracelet plaque and rubbed it down firmly.
They went to the doorway and into a tobacco-smelling stuffiness where an old woman and a young one sat close together on pre-U chairs with two knives and a heap of brown leaves on a table before them. Hush and Sparrow; they shook Chip's hand and congratulated him. Hush was crinkle-eyed and smiling; Sparrow, large-limbed and embarrassed-looking, her hand hot and moist. Leopard stood by Hush, holding a heat coil in the bowl of a curved black pipe and blowing out smoke around the sides of its stem.
The room, a fairly large one, was a storeroom, its farther reaches filled with a ceiling-high mass of pre-U relics, late and early: machines and furniture and paintings and bundles of clothing; swords and wood-handled implements; a statue of a member with wings, an 'angel'; half a dozen crates, opened, unopened, stenciled IND26110 and pasted at their corners with square yellow stickers. Looking around, Chip said, 'There are enough things here for another museum.'
'All genuine too,' Leopard said. 'Some of the things on display aren't, you know.'
'I didn't.'
A varied lot of chairs and benches had been set about the forward part of the room. Paintings leaned against the walls, and there were cartons of smaller relics and piles of moldering books. A painting of an enormous boulder
