V.

Charisma came in, two beady eyes peering through burnholes in the blanket. He spotted Mafia, moved toward her. The green wool mound began to sing:

“It is something less than heaven

To be quoted Thesis 1.7

Every time I make an advance;

If the world is all that the case is

That's a pretty discouraging basis

On which to pursue

Any sort of romance.

I've got a proposition for you;

Logical, positive and brief.

And at least it could serve as a kind of comic relief:

[Refrain]

Let P equal me,

With my heart in command;

Let Q equal you

With Tractatus in hand;

And R could stand for a lifetime of love,

Filled with music to fondle and purr to.

We'll define love as anything lovely you'd care to infer to.

On the right, put that bright,

Hypothetical case;

On the left, our uncleft,

Parenthetical chase.

And that horseshoe there in the middle

Could be lucky; we've nothing to lose,

If in these parentheses

We just mind our little P's

And Q's.

If P [Mafia sang in reply] thinks of me

As a girl hard to make,

Then Q wishes you

Would go jump in the lake.

For R is a meaningless concept,

Having nothing to do with pleasure:

I prefer the hard and tangible things I can measure.

Man, you chase in the face

Of impossible odds;

I'm a lass in the class

Of unbossable broads.

If you'll promise no more sticky phrases,

Half a mo while I kick off my shoes.

There are birds, there are bees,

And to hell with all your P's

And Q's.”

By the time Profane finished his beer, the blanket covered them both.

Twenty days before the Dog Star moved into conjunction with the sun, the dog days began. The world started to run more and more afoul of the inanimate. Fifteen were killed in a train wreck near Oaxaca, Mexico, on 1 July. The next day fifteen people died when an apartment house collapsed in Madrid. July 4 a bus fell into a river near Karachi and thirty-one passengers drowned. Thirty-nine more were drowned two days later in a tropical storm in the central Philippines. 9 July the Aegean Islands were hit by an earthquake and tidal waves, which killed forty-three. 14 July a MATS plane crashed after takeoff from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, killing forty-five. An earthquake at Anjar, India, 21 July, killed 117. From 22 to 24 July floods rampaged in central and southern Iran, killing three hundred. 28 July a bus ran off a ferryboat at Kuopio, Finland, and fifteen were killed. Four petroleum tanks blew up near Dumas, Texas, 29 July, killing nineteen. 1 August, seventeen died in a train wreck near Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen more died the 4th and 5th, in floods in southwest Pennsylvania. 2161 people died the same week in a typhoon which hit Chekiang, Honan and Hopeh Provinces. 7 August six dynamite trucks blew up in Cali, Colombia, killing about 1100. The same day there was a train wreck at Prerov, Czechoslovakia, killing nine. The next day 262 miners, trapped by fire, died in a coal mine under Marcinelle, in Belgium. Ice avalanches on Mont Blanc swept fifteen mountain climbers into the kingdom of death in the week 12 to 18 August. The same week a gas explosion in Monticello, Utah, killed fifteen and a typhoon through Japan and Okinawa killed thirty. Twenty-nine more coal miners died of gas poisoning in a mine in Upper Silesia on 27 August. Also on the 27th a Navy bomber crashed among houses in Sanford, Florida, and killed four. Next day a gas explosion in Montreal killed seven and flash floods in Turkey killed 138.

These were the mass deaths. There were also the attendant maimed, malfunctioning, homeless, lorn. It happens every month in a succession of encounters between groups of living and a congruent world - which simply doesn't care. Look in any yearly Almanac, under "Disasters" - which is where the figures above come from. The business is transacted month after month after month.

IV

McClintic Sphere had been reading fakebooks all afternoon. "If you ever want to get depressed," he told Ruby, "read through a fakebook. I don't mean the music, I mean the words."

The girl didn't answer. She'd been nervous the past couple of weeks. "What is wrong, baby," he'd say; but she'd shrug it off. One night she told him it was her father who was bugging her. She missed him. Maybe he was sick.

"You been seeing him? A little girl should do that. You don't know how lucky you are to have your father."

"He lives in another city," and she wouldn't say any more.

Tonight he said, "Look, you need the fare? You go see him. That's what you ought to do."

"McClintic," she said, "what business does a whore have going anywhere? A whore isn't human."

"You are. You are with me, Ruby. You know it; we aren't playing any games here," patting the bed.

"Whore lives in one place and stays there. Like some little virgin girl in a fairy tale. She doesn't do any traveling, unless she works the streets."

"You haven't been thinking about that."

"Maybe." She wouldn't look at him.

"Matilda likes you. You crazy?"

"What else is there? Either the street or all cooped up. If I do go see him I won't come back."

"Where does he live. South Africa?"

"Maybe."