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beyond.”
    “Yeah,” Stuart murmured, maintaining his remoteness, doing his duty only, no more; he pushed the cart and that was all. Just because I’m pushing you, he thought, doesn’t mean I have to converse with you.
    “The first time it happened,” the phoce went on, but Stuart cut him off.
    “I’m not interested.” He added, “I just want to get back and see if they fired off the rocket yet. It’s probably in orbit by now.”
    “I guess so,” the phoce said.
    At the intersection they waited for the light to change.
    “The first time it happened,” the phoce said, “it scared me.” As Stuart pushed him across the street he went on, “I knew right away what it was I was seeing. The smoke and the fires … everything all smudged. Like a mining pit or a place where they process slag. Awful.” He shuddered. “But is this so terrific the way it is now? Not for me.”
    “I like it,” Stuart said shortly.
    “Naturally,” the phoce said. “You’re not a biological sport.”
    Stuart grunted.
    “You know what my earliest memory from childhood is?” the phoce said in a quiet voice. “Being carried to church in a blanket. Laid out on a pew like a—” His voice broke. “Carried in and out in that blanket, inside it, so no one could see me. That was my mother’s idea. She couldn’t stand my father carrying me on his back, where people could see.”
    Stuart grunted.
    “This is a terrible world,” the phoce said. “Once you Negroes had to suffer; if you lived in the South you’d be suffering now. You forget all about that because they let you forget, but me—they don’t let me forget. Anyhow, I don’t want to forget, about myself I mean. In the next world it all will be different. You’ll find out because you’ll be there, too.”
    “No,” Stuart said. “When I die I’m dead; I don’t have a soul.”
    “You, too,” the phoce said, and he seemed to be gloating; his voice had a malicious, cruel tinge of relish. “I know.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because,” the phoce said, “one time I saw you.”
    Frightened in spite of himself, Stuart said, “Aw—”
    “One time,” the phoce insisted, more firmly now. “It was you; no doubt about it. Want to know what you were doing?”
    “Naw.”
    “You were eating a dead rat raw.”
    Stuart said nothing, but he pushed the cart faster and faster, down the sidewalk as fast as he could go, back to the store.

    When they got back to the store they found the crowd of people still in front of the TV set. And the rocket had been fired off; it had just left the ground, and it was not known yet if the stages had performed properly.
    Hoppy wheeled himself back downstairs to the repair department and Stuart remained upstairs before the set. But the phoce’s words had upset him so much that he could not concentrate on the TV screen; he wandered off, and then, seeing Fergesson in the upstairs office, walked that way.
    At the office desk, Fergesson sat going over a pile of contracts and charge tags. Stuart approached him “Listen. That goddam Hoppy—”
    Fergesson glanced up from his tags.
    “Forget it,” Stuart said, feeling discouraged.
    “I watched him work,” Fergesson said. “I went downstairs and watched him when he didn’t know I was. I agree there’s something unsavory about it. But he’s competent; I looked at what he’d done, and it was done right, and that’s all that counts.” He scowled at Stuart.
    “I said forget it,” Stuart said.
    “Did they fire the rocket off?”
    “Just now.”
    “We haven’t moved a single item today, because of that circus,” Fergesson said.
    “Circus!” He seated himself in the chair opposite Fergesson, in such a manner that he could watch the floor below them. “It’s history!”
    “It’s a way of you guys standing around doing nothing.” Once more Fergesson sorted through the tags.
    “Listen, I’ll tell you what Hoppy did.” Stuart leaned toward him. “Up at the café, at Fred’s