“Sure,” Blaine said. “Could you explain a little more about the hunt?”

“Nothing to explain. It's just a standard hunt. But don't go around talking about it. I'm not sure if hunts are still legal. I wish Congress would straighten out the Suicide and Permitted Murder Acts once and for all. A man doesn't know where he's at any more.”

“Yeah,” Blaine agreed.

“They'll probably discuss the legal aspects at the briefing,” Franchel said. “The hunters will be there, and the Quarry will tell you all you need to know. Say hello to Ray for me if you speak to him again. Tell him I'm sorry he got killed.”

“I'll tell him,” Blaine said. He decided not to ask any more questions for fear his ignorance might cost him the job. Whatever hunting involved, he and his body could surely handle it. And a job, any job, was as necessary now for his self-respect as for his dwindling wallet.

He thanked Franchel and left.

That evening he ate dinner in an inexpensive diner, and bought several magazines. He was elated at the knowledge of having found work, and sure that he was going to make a place for himself in this age.

His high spirits were dampened slightly when he glimpsed, on the way back to his hotel, a man standing in an alley watching him. The man had a white face and placid Buddha eyes, and his rough clothes hung on him like rags on a scarecrow.

It was the zombie.

Blaine hurried on to his hotel, refusing to anticipate trouble. After all, if a cat can look at a king, a zombie can look at a man, and where's the harm?

This reasoning didn't prevent him from having nightmares until dawn.

Early the next day, Blaine walked to 42nd Street and Park Avenue, to catch a bus to the briefing. While waiting, he noticed a disturbance on the other side of 42nd Street.

A man had stopped short in the middle of the busy pavement. He was laughing to himself, and people were beginning to edge away from him. He as in his fifties, Blaine judged, dressed in quiet tweeds, bespectacled, and a little overweight. He carried a small briefcase and looked like ten million other businessmen.

Abruptly he stopped laughing. He unzipped his briefcase and removed from it two long, slightly curved daggers. He flung the briefcase away, and followed it with his glasses.

“Berserker!” someone cried.

The man plunged into the crowd, both daggers flashing. People started screaming, and the crowd scattered before him.

“Berserker, berserker!”

“Call the flathats!”

“Watch out, berserker!”

One man was down, clutching his torn shoulder and swearing. The berserker's face was fiery red now, and spittle came from his mouth. He waded deeper into the dense crowd, and people knocked each other down in their efforts to escape. A woman shrieked as she was pushed off balance, and her armload of parcels scattered across the pavement.

The berserker swiped at her left-handed, missed, and plunged deeper into the crowd.

Blue-uniformed police appeared, six or eight of them, sidearms out. “Everybody down!” they shouted. “Flatten! Everybody down!”

All traffic had stopped. The people in the berserker's path flung themselves to the pavement. On Blaine's side of the street, people were also getting down.

A freckled girl of perhaps twelve tugged at Blaine's arm, “Come on, Mister, get down! You wanna get beamed?”

Blaine lay down beside her. The berserker had turned and was running back toward the policemen, screaming wordlessly and waving his knives.

Three of the policemen fired at once, their weapons throwing a pale yellowish beam which flared red when it struck the berserker. He screamed as his clothing began to smoulder, turned, and tried to escape.

A beam caught him square in the back. He flung both knives at the policemen and collapsed.

An ambulance dropped down with whirring blades and quickly loaded the berserker and his victims. The policemen began breaking up the crowd that had gathered around them.

“All right, folks, it's all over now. Move along!”

The crowd began to disperse. Blaine stood up and brushed himself off. “What was that?” he asked.

“It was a berserker, silly,” the freckled girl said. “Couldn't you see?”

“I saw. Do you have many?”

She nodded proudly. “New. York has more berserkers than any other city in the world except Manila where they’re called amokers. But it's all the same thing. We have maybe fifty a year.”

“More,” a man said. “Maybe seventy, eighty a year. But this one didn't do so good.”

A small group had gathered near Blaine and the girl. They were discussing the berserker much as Blaine had heard strangers in his own time discuss an automobile accident.

“How many did he get?”

“Only five, and I don't think he killed any of them.”

“His heart wasn't in it,” an old woman said. “When I was a girl you couldn't stop them as easily as that. Strong they were.”

“Well, he picked a bad spot,” the freckled girl said, “42nd Street is filled with flathats. A berserker can't hardly get started before he's beamed.”

A big policeman came over. “All right, folks, break it up. The fun's over, move along now.”

The group dispersed. Blaine caught his bus, wondering why fifty or more people chose to berserk in New York every year. Sheer nervous tension? A demented form of individualism? Adult delinquency?

It was one more of the things he would have to find out about the world of 2110.

15

The address was a penthouse high above Park Avenue in the Seventies. A butler admitted him to a spacious room where chairs had been set up in a long row. The dozen men occupying the chairs were a loud, tough, weatherbeaten bunch, carelessly dressed and ill at ease in such rarefied surroundings. Most of them knew each other.

“Hey, Otto! Back in the hunting game?”

“Yah. No money.”

“Knew you'd come back, old boy. Hi, Tim!”

“Hi, Bjorn. This is my last hunt.”

“Sure it is. Last ‘til next time.”

“No, I mean it. I'm buying a seed-pressure farm in the North Atlantic Abyss. I just need a stake.”

“You'll drink up your stake.”

“Not this time.”

“Hey, Theseus! How's the throwing arm?”

“Good enough, Chico. Que tal?”

“Not too bad, kid.”

“There's Sammy Jones, always last in.”

“I'm on time, ain't I?”

“Ten minutes late. Where's your sidekick?”

“Sligo? Dead. That Asturias hunt.”

“Tough. Hereafter?”

“Not likely.”

A man entered the room and called out, “Gentlemen, your attention please!”

He advanced to the center of the room and stood, hands on his hips, facing the row of hunters. He was a slender sinewy man of medium height, dressed in riding breeches and an open-necked shirt. He had a small, carefully tended moustache and startling blue eyes in a thin, tanned face. For a few seconds he looked the hunters over, while they coughed and shifted their feet uncomfortably.

At last he said, “Good morning, gentlemen. I am Charles Hull, your employer and Quarry.” He gave them a smile of no warmth. “First, gentlemen, a word concerning the legality of our proceedings. There has been some recent confusion about this. My lawyer has looked into the matter fully, and will explain. Mr. Jensen!”

A small, nervous-looking man came into the room, pressed his spectacles firmly against his nose and cleared his throat.

“Yes, Mr. Hull. Gentlemen, as to the present legality of the hunt: In accordance with the revised statutes to the Suicide Act of 2102, any man protected by Hereafter insurance has the right to select any death for himself, at any time and place, and by any means, as long as those means do not constitute cruel and unnatural abuse. The reason for this fundamental ‘right to die’ is obvious: The courts do not recognize physical death as death per se, if said death does not involve the destruction of mind. Providing the mind survives, the death of the body is of no more moment, legally, than the sloughing of a fingernail. The body, by the latest Supreme Court decision, is considered an appendage of the mind, its creature, to be disposed of as the mind directs.”