and shot two wood pigeons from a dripping tree.
A sharp sickening smell. In the middle of a red carpeted room I see a plot of ground about six feet square where strange bulbous plants are growing. Centipedes are crawling among limestone rocks and from under a rock protrudes the head of a huge centipede. I arm myself with a cutlass and someone I can't see clearly picks up a piece of firewood. I kick the rock over but the centipede digs deeper and I can see that it is huge, perhaps three feet long. Now it is under my bed and I wake up screaming. I know that I must make preparations for a war I thought had ended.
Please to use studio
postulated to you
We arrive at Ba'dan around midnight local time. The space front is stacked with garbage under sputtering blue arc lights. Garbage collectors' strike. Someone is always on strike in Ba'dan.
Smugglers of every variety are moored at Ba'dan. The skippers all get together at the annual Skipper Party and award a gold cup to the all-around 'Vilest Skipper of the Year.' Skipper Krup von Nordenholz will win hands down. There are also cops of every variety making deals with the skippers and arresting anyone who doesn't have the fix in.
We hail a cab. 'Where's the action here, Pops?'
'Wal, I reckon you boys want to go to Fun City. Better pick some artillery first.'
He stops at a neon-lighted all-night gun shop. The shopkeeper has all the old western models and some of the new-fangled double-action 38's. These guns shoot an aphro charge that can disable or kill. Neck and heart shots are fatal, stomach, solar plexus and genital hits are knockabout shots.
Audrey selects a snub-nosed 38 in a quick-draw holster. Pu slips a 41 Derringer into his vest pocket and straps on a Smith & Wesson 44.
'It's a much better load than the 45, old sports.'
Fun City is on a plateau that falls steeply on one side down to the river that separates Ba'dan from Yass-Waddah. On this slope is a vast casbah—the houses are connected by catwalks, trapdoors, and tunnels—that contains the largest per capita criminal population ever seen anywhere. Ba'dan breaks a lot of records.
We walk into a leather bar called the Stretch Nest. A goodly crowd is there—four feet deep at the bar, waiting in line for openings at the gambling tables, going up the wide red-carpeted stairs to private hanging rooms followed by waiters with trays of drinks and buckets of champagne.
The usual costume is boot and chaps, bare ass and crotch. Some have tight-fitting chamois pants up to midthigh and shirts that come to the navel. Many are naked except for boots, gun belts, and hang-noose scarves. Nooses dangle every ten feet from a beam down the center of the room.
A hang fistfight draws a circle of cheering onlookers, as two kids smash each other in the face—lips cut, eyes black, noses broken, spurting blood. One kid is down—he tries to get up and falls on his side.
The winner bends down and ties his arms with a noose scarf. Next thing, the kid is hanged and his semen spatters the bar. The bartender wipes it off with his bar rag.
Now an old rooster, strapped into his corsets, comes in a-gunning for some kids to hang at his debutante daughter's coming-out party. He settles on Pu who has seen him a-coming and has the Derringer palmed.
'Fill your hand, you young varmint,' the old gun drawls. Pu shoots him in the neck with the Derringer and he falls farting and shitting, the corsets bursting off him.
'Lucky thing he had his clothes on, old sports.'
A naked fifteen-year-old sticks his head in the bar.
A great bestial whoop goes up from the bar. The patrons shove and jostle out past hanged corpses, slipping in sperm. And they head for the O.K. Corral ... there it is right beside it a gallows that can service thirteen at a time.
The Clantons and the Earps walk towards each other, naked except for gun belts and boots,
