“Would you like to see a collection of chaste and ornate snuff boxes?” Alys inquired. “Felix has a terribly fine collection. All antiques, in gold, silver, alloys, with cameo engravings, hunting scenes—no?” She seated herself opposite him, crossed her long, black-sheathed legs; her high-heeled shoe dangled as she swung it back and forth. “One time Felix bought an old snuff box at an auction, paid a lot for it, brought it home. He cleaned the old snuff out of it and found a spring-operated lever mounted at the bottom of the box, or what seemed to be the bottom. The lever operated when you screwed down a tiny screw. It took him all day to find a tool small enough to rotate the screw. But at least he got it.” She laughed.

“What happened?” Jason said.

“The bottom of the box—a false bottom with a tin plate concealed in it. He got the plate out.” She laughed again, her gold tooth ornamentation sparkling. “It turned out to be a two-hundred-year-old dirty picture. Of a chick copulating with a Shetland pony. Tinted, too, in eight colors. Worth, oh, say, five thousand dollars—not much, but it genuinely delighted us. The dealer, of course, didn’t know it was there.”

“I see,” Jason said.

“You don’t have any interest in snuff boxes,” Alys said, still smiling.

“I’d like—to see it,” he said. And then he said. “Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. Why doesn’t anybody else know?”

“Because they’ve never been there.”

“Where?”

Alys massaged her temples, twisted her tongue, stared blankly ahead, as if lost in thought. As if barely hearing him. “You know,” she said, sounding bored and a little irritable. “Christ, man, you lived there forty-two years. What can I tell you about that place that you don’t already know?” She glanced up, then, her heavy lips curling mischievously; she grinned at him.

“How did I get here?” he said.

“You—” She hesitated. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

Loudly, he said, “Why not?”

“Let it come in time.” She made a damping motion with her hand. “In time, in time. Look, man; you’ve already been hit by a lot; you almost got shipped to a labor camp, and you know what kind, today. Thanks to that asshole McNulty and my dear brother. My brother the police general.” Her face had become ugly with revulsion, but then she smiled her provocative smile once again. Her lazy, gold-toothed, inviting smile.

Jason said, “I want to know where I am.”

“You’re in my study in my house. You’re perfectly safe; we got all the insects off you. And no one’s going to break in here. Do you know what?” She sprang from her chair, bounding to her feet like a superlithe animal; involuntarily he drew back. “Have you ever made it by phone?” she demanded, bright-eyed and eager.

“Made what?”

“The grid,” Alys said. “Don’t you know about the phone grid?”

“No,” he admitted. But he had heard of it.

“Your—everybody’s—sexual aspects are linked electronically, and amplified, to as much as you can endure. It’s addictive, because it’s electronically enhanced. People, some of them, get so deep into it they can’t pull out; their whole lives revolve around the weekly—or, hell, even daily!—setting up of the network of phone lines. It’s regular picturephones, which you activate by credit card, so it’s free at the time you do it; the sponsors bill you once a month and if you don’t pay they cut your phone out of the grid.”

“How many people,” he asked, “are involved in this?”

“Thousands.”

“At one time?”

Alys nodded. “Most of them have been doing it two, three years. And they’ve deteriorated physically—and mentally—from it. Because the part of the brain where the orgasm is experienced is gradually burned out. But don’t put down the people; some of the finest and most sensitive minds on earth are involved. For them it’s a sacred, holy communion. Except you can spot a gridder when you see one; they look debauched, old, fat, listless—the latter always between the phone-line orgies, of course.”

“And you do this?” She did not look debauched, old, fat, or listless to him.

“Now and then. But I never get hooked; I cut myself out of the grid just in time. Do you want to try it?”

“No,” he said.

“Okay,” Alys said reasonably, undaunted. “What would you like to do? We have a good collection of Rilke and Brecht in interlinear translation discs. The other day Felix came home with a quad-and-light set of all seven Sibelius symphonies; it’s very good. For dinner Emma is preparing frog’s legs … Felix loves both frog’s legs and escargot. He eats out in good French and Basque restaurants most of the time but tonight—”

“I want to know,” Jason interrupted, “where I am.”

“Can’t you simply be happy?”

He rose to his feet—with difficulty—and confronted her. Silently.

20

The mescaline had furiously begun to affect him; the room grew lit up with colors, and the perspective factor altered so that the ceiling seemed a million miles high. And, gazing at Alys, he saw her hair come alive … like Medusa’s, he thought, and felt fear.

Ignoring him, Alys continued, “Felix especially likes Basque cuisine, but they cook with so much butter that it gives him pyloric spasms. He also has a good collection of Weird Tales, and he loves baseball. And—let’s see.” She wandered off, a finger tapping against her lips as she reflected. “He’s interested in the occult. Do you—”

“I feel something,” Jason said.

“What do you feel?”

Jason said, “I can’t get away.”

“It’s the mes. Take it easy.”

“I—” He pondered; a giant weight lay on his brain, but all throughout the weight streaks of light, of satori-like insight, shot here and there.

“What I collect,” Alys said, “is in the next room, what we call the library. This is the study. In the library Felix has all his law books … did you know he’s a lawyer, as well as a police general? And he has done some good things; I have to admit it. Do you now what he did once?”

He could not answer; he could only stand. Inert, hearing the sounds but not the meaning. Of it.

“For a year Felix was legally in charge of one-fourth of Terra’s forced-labor camps. He discovered that by virtue of an obscure law passed years ago when the forced-labor camps were more like death camps—with a lot of blacks in them—anyhow, he discovered that this statute permitted the camps to operate only during the Second Civil War. And he had the power to close any and all camps at any time he felt it to be in the public interest. And those blacks and the students who’d been working in the camps are damn tough and strong, from years of heavy manual labor. They’re not like the effete, pale, clammy students living beneath the campus areas. And then he researched and discovered another obscure statute. Any camp that isn’t operating at a profit has to be—or rather had to be—closed. So Felix changed the amount of money—very little, of course—paid to the detainees. So all he had to do was jack up their pay, show red ink in the books, and barn; he could shut down the camps.” She laughed.

He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered all through him, piercing every part of his body.

“But the big thing Felix did,” Alys said, “had to do with the student kibbutzim under the burned-out campuses. A lot of them are desperate for food and water; you know how it is: the students try to make it into town, foraging for supplies, ripping off and looting. Well, the police maintain a lot of agents among the students agitating for a final shootout with the police … which the police and nats are hopefully waiting for. Do you see?”

“I see,” he said, “a hat.”

“But Felix tried to keep off any sort of shootout. But to do it he had to get supplies to the students; do you see?”