V.

"Oh Christ."

Now, McClintic Sphere told himself, nobody goes and falls in love with a prostitute. Not unless he's fourteen or so and she's the first piece of tail he's ever had. But this Ruby, whatever she might be in bed, was a good friend outside it too. He worried about her. It was (for a change) that good kind of worry; not, say, like Roony Winsome's, which seemed to bug the man worse every time McClintic saw him.

It had been going on now for at least a couple of weeks. McClintic, who'd never gone along all the way with the "cool" outlook that developed in the postwar years, didn't mind as much as some other musicians might have when Roony got juiced and started talking about his personal problems. A few times Rachel had been along with him, and McClintic knew Rachel was straight, and there wasn't any jazzing going on there, so Roony must have genuinely had problems with this Mafia woman.

It was moving into deep summer time in Nueva York, the worst time of the year. Time for rumbles in the park and a lot of kids getting killed; time for tempers to get frayed, marriages to break up, all homicidal and chaotic impulses, frozen inside for the winter, to thaw now and come to the surface, and glitter out the pores of your face. McClintic was heading up for Lenox, Mass., for that jazz festival. He knew he couldn't stand it here. But what about Roony? What he was getting at home (most likely) was edging him toward something. McClintic noticed that last night, between sets at the V-Note. He'd seen the look before: a bass player he'd known in Fort Worth who never changed expression, who was always telling you "I have this problem with narcotics," who'd flipped one night and they took him away to the hospital at Lexington or someplace. McClintic would never know. But Roony had the same look: too cool. Too unemotional when he said "I have a problem with my woman." What was there inside for deep summer in Nueva York to melt? What would happen when it did?

This word flip was weird. Every recording date of McClintic's, he'd got into the habit of talking electricity with the audio men and technicians in the studio. McClintic once couldn't have cared less about electricity, but now it seemed if that was helping him reach a bigger audience, some digging, some who would never dig, but all paying and those royalties keeping the Triumph in gas and McClintic in J. Press suits, then McClintic ought to be grateful to electricity, ought maybe to learn a little more about it. So he'd picked up some here and there, and one day last summer he got around to talking stochastic music and digital computers with one technician. Out of the conversation had come Set/Reset, which was getting to be a signature for the group. He had found out from this sound man about a two-triode circuit called a flip-flop, which when it was turned on could be one of two ways, depending on which tube was conducting and which was cut off: set or reset, flip or flop.

"And that," the man said, "can be yes or no, or one or zero. And that is what you might call one of the basic units, or specialized 'cells' in a big 'electronic brain.'"

"Crazy," said McClintic, having lost him back there someplace. But one thing that did occur to him was if a computer's brain could go flip and flop, why so could a musician's. As long as you were flop, everything was cool. But where did the trigger-pulse come from to make you flip?

McClintic, no lyricist, had made up nonsense words to go along with Set/Reset. He sang them to himself sometimes on the stand, while the natural horn was soloing:

"Gwine cross de Jordan

Ecclesiastically:

Flop, flip, once I was hip,

Flip, flop, now you're on top,

Set-REset, why are we BEset

With crazy and cool in the same molecule . . ."

"What are you thinking about," said the girl Ruby.

"Flipping," said McClintic.

"You'll never flip."

"Not me," McClintic said, "whole lot of people."

After a while he said, not really to her, "Ruby, what happened after the war? That war, the world flipped. But come '45, and they flopped. Here in Harlem they flopped. Everything got cool - no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement. Every once in a while, though, somebody flips back. Back to where he can love . . ."

"Maybe that's it," the girl said, after a while. "Maybe you have to be crazy to love somebody."

"But you take a whole bunch of people flip at the same time and you've got a war. Now war is not loving, is it?"

"Flip, flop," she said, "get the mop."

"You're just like a little kid."

"McClintic," she said. "I am. I worry about you. I worry about my father. Maybe he's flipped."

"Why don't you go see him." The same argument again. Tonight they were in for a long spell of arguing.

"You are beautiful," Schoenmaker was saying.

"Shale, am I."

"Perhaps not as you are. But as I see you."

She sat up. "It can't keep going the way it's been."

"Come back."

"No, Shale, my nerves can't take this -"

"Come back."

"It's getting so I can't look at Rachel, or Slab -"