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get a picture of this deformed bull. I’d take some shots of your set-up here, only I can’t. My camera and stuff caught the plane.’
    He wanted Donagon to have a drink with him and hear the anecdote, but the biophysicist was wanted elsewhere.
    A voice behind Bob asked him what he felt.
    ‘I feel…my right foot…’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Oh, you know how it is with workbooks.’
    ‘And now?’
    ‘A strawberry, all glowing with starry lenses, a starberry…recapitulation of the plot of some old man…buns, for instance…’
    Major Fouts stood watching from half-way across the room, where Donagon manned a bank of switches. Between them and the operation was a forced-air curtain to maintain sterility. It was strange to see a man talking away with half his head sawed off and a group of surgeons peering and probing within. It made Fouts feel the sharpness of his own foot-bones.
    ‘This is a buckle collection…this is supposed to be a father…bank statements or…Is there anyone here named General Motors?’ In an altered voice Bob delivered a message of hope to the motor corporation.
    ‘Is this guy in any danger?’ Fouts whispered.
    ‘None at all. Shhh.’ Donagon threw more switches. A kind of phonograph arm beside the chair swung around, lowered its needle, and began to ‘play’ the brain.
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Shh. Nothing.’
    ‘Marge!’ Bob shouted. ‘As a strawberry blonde…history as a garbage truck…Now look! I’m not going to say it again…this is lumpy.’ He wept.
    ‘Now what do you feel?’
    ‘My picture in the atlas…the strawberries are…funny how the old school holds up…the old Lion Oil Company…arrested!…I hear you think…’
    He sang a few bars of something no one could identify.
    ‘There’s an old saying around here: please wash hands before returning to work…a man disappears, but his ghost…he had it, he paid the death…in the movie freeze rabbit…U.S. Grant, the truth experiment…attaches…the bank hath changed its bank…the railroad egg trial…Dixie cups full of penetrating truth, remember?…smell that?’
    ‘What do you feel like now?’
    ‘I feel like picking my nose.’
    ‘You
are
picking your nose. What…?’
    The door slammed back and four men walked in. Donagon rushed to meet them.
    ‘You’ll have to go into the visitors’ room,’ he said, smiling.
    ‘No we don’t.’
    ‘I—what? Which paper are you from?’
    ‘This one.’ The tallest man hauled out an old revolver and slapped him with it.
    Fouts jumped to the alarm button. When the bell went off, the other three strangers pulled their guns.
    ‘Okay, fat boy, where are they?’
    ‘Where are what?’
    ‘The nigger-babies! The test tubes!’
    One of the intruders drove the surgeons away from Bob. ‘Aw, Wes, look! Jesus Christ, they cut this guy’s head open!’
    The one with the big greasy pompadour leveled his gun at Fout’s belt. ‘How about it, Fats? This one of your nigger expeermints?’
    ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But I do know you’re gonna do a stretch in Leavenworth, pal. Better lay down the sidearms and make it a short visit.’
    ‘I think…I think I hear a bell,’ Bob volunteered.
    ‘I know your kind,’ said the pompadour. ‘Tryin’ to put a nigger brain into that pore mother!
Come on, boas, let’s mess up the place!’
He wheeled and fired a shot into the nearest memory cabinet.
    ‘I smell a shot…’ said Bob, still picking his nose.
    Fout’s auto-destruct mechanism worked almost perfectly. The tape-reader charge misfired, but the other three went off as planned, as soon as one of the unauthorized persons tried to yank open a cabinet.
    One charge was in the main memory bank. One was in the control console. They rendered the computer completely useless to Wes Davis and the Mud Flats Ramblers.
    The third, slightly bigger charge was embedded in the soft padding of Bob’s chair, at about ear level. The chair had been designed by an orthopedic