Mallory felt the foolish insult gall him to the quick. "Your head's full of phantoms, boy! 'History'! You think you should have a title and estates and I should rot in Lewes making hats. There's nothing more to it than that! You little fool, the Rads don't care tuppence for you or Marx or Collins or any of your poetic mummeries! They'll kill the lot of you here like rats in a sawdust pit."
"You're not what you seem," the Marquess said. He had gone as white as paper. "Who are you? What are you?"
Mallory tensed.
The boy's eyes widened. "A spy." He went for his gun.
Mallory punched him full in the face. As the Marquess reeled back, Mallory caught his arm and clubbed him, once, twice, across the head, with the heavy barrel of the Ballester-Molina. The Marquess fell bleeding.
Mallory snatched up the second pistol, rose, glanced about him.
The Negro stood not five yards away.
"I saw that," Jupiter said quietly.
Mallory was silent. He leveled both guns at the man.
"You struck my master. Have you killed him?"
"I think not," Mallory said.
The Negro nodded. He spread his open palms, gently, a gesture like a blessing. "You were right, sir, and he was quite wrong. There is nothing to history. No progress, no justice. There is nothing but random horror."
"That's as may be," Mallory said slowly, "but if you cry out I will have to shoot you."
"If you had killed him, I should have certainly cried out," the Negro said.
Mallory glanced back. "He's still breathing."
There was a long silence. The Negro stood quite still, his posture stiff and perfect, undecided, unmoving, like a Platonic cone balanced perfectly upon its needle tip, waiting for some impetus beyond causality to determine the direction of its fall.
The Negro sighed. "I'm going back to New York City, " he said. He turned on one polished heel and walked away, unhurried, vanishing into the looming barricades of goods.
Mallory felt quite certain that the man would not cry out, but he waited a few moments for the evidence that would confirm that belief. The Marquess stirred where he lay, and groaned. Mallory whipped the paisley kerchief from the man's curly head and gagged him with it.
It was the work of a moment to shove him behind a massive terra-cotta urn.
The shock of action had left Mallory dry. His throat felt like bloodied sandpaper. There was nothing to drinkexcept of course that silver flask of quack potion. Mallory dragged it by feel from the Marquess's jacket-pocket, and wet his throat. It left a numbing tingle at the back of his palate, like dry champagne. It was vile, but it seemed to be bracing him, somehow. He helped himself to a number of swallows.
Mallory returned to the lecture-area and took a seat beside Fraser. The policeman lifted one brow in silent query. Mallory patted the butt of the Marquess's pistol, lodged within his waistband opposite the Ballester-Molina. Fraser nodded, by a fraction.
Florence Russell Bartlett was continuing her harangue, her stage-manner seeming to afflict her audience with an occult paralysis. Mallory saw to his shock and disgust that Mrs. Bartlett was displaying quack devices intended to avert pregnancy. A disk of flexible rubber, a wad of sponge with a thread attached. Mallory could not avoid the dark imagining of coitus involving these queer objects. The thought made his gut lurch.
"She killed a rabbit a moment ago," Fraser hissed from the corner of his
mouth. "Dipped its nose in essence of cigar."
"I didn't kill the boy, " Mallory whispered in return. "Concussed, I think " He watched Bartlett as her rant drifted into queer plans for selective breeding to improve the stock of humanity. In her futurity, it seemed, proper marriage would be abolished. "Universal free love" would replace chastity. Reproduction would be a matter for experts. The concepts swam like dark shadows at the shore of Mallory's mind. It struck him then, for no seeming reason, that this daythis very afternoon in factwas the time specified for his own triumphant lecture on the Brontosaurus, with kinotrope accompaniment by Mr. Keats. The fearful coincidence sent a queer shiver through him.
Brian leaned suddenly across Fraser, seizing Mallory's bare wrist in a grip of iron. "Ned!" he hissed. "Let's get out of this damned place!"
"Not yet," Mallory said. But he was shaken. A mesmeric flow of sheer panic seemed to jolt into him, through Brian's grip. "We don't know yet where Swing is hiding; he could be anywhere in this warren"
"Comrades!" Bartlett sang out, in a voice like an iced razor. "Yes, you four, in the back! If you must disturb usif you have news of such pressing interestthen surely you should share it with the other comrades in the Chautauqua!"
The four of them froze.
Bartlett raked them with a Medusa glare. The other listeners, freed somehow from their queer bondage, turned to glare backward with bloodthirsty glee. The eyes of the crowd glowed with a nasty pleasure, the relief of wretches who find their own destined punishment falling elsewhere