And that kinda woke me up. I laid into him hard and kept at it. But it was getting a lot tougher. My right hand was swollen and sore, and I’ve never had a decent left, and the punk was still coming on.

I remembered Lanny saying, “This isn’t home,” and realiz

ing the naked fatal facts of that. I wasn’t home. I wasn’t anywhere else but where 1 was, and this was not only happening, it was gonna keep on happening until it ended. That thought, and the punk still coming on, got me a little scared.

Which is what I damn well should have been all along.

The first time 1 kicked him I got a few more boos, but by that time I didn’t give a shit. / was the one doing the fighting, and nothing else had seemed to work. So 1 kicked him some more, once in the chest and once toward his balls. I missed his balls—you almost always do—but his groaning wince as my booted toe slammed into his thigh muscles opened up his bloody face again. 1 tried one more right cross, laying all my weight and momentum in behind it, and missed his chin and hit his throat and felt something awful go crunch and collapse, and then he was down and turning blue and wheezing and everybody tried to help but they couldn’t get the windpipe clear in time and all of a sudden 1 had killed someone else.

It was quiet while they drug the body out and Lanny sat me down on a bench in front of Smada and the old general and the girls. Smada was clearly disgusted by something, and for a while 1 thought it was because it had taken me so long. And then 1 thought maybe it was on account of my using my feet. And then I didn’t know what the hell was bugging him and was starting to get a little pissed off myself and said so:

“You got something to say to me, old man?” 1 snarled, calling him what the punk had called him on purpose. “Then say it!” I added.

Smada sat up and eyed me coolly. “Very well, lad,” he began, and leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. “I don’t know where you are from. But in this land there are far too few opportunities to be gentle instead of murderous.” He paused, looked disgusted, added: “And you have just wasted one.”

Then he stood up and went to the outhouse.

Conversations lamely shuffled ahead after he had gone. Lanny sat down beside me and handed me a mug, which I downed thirstily in a couple of swigs. Under the sound from the others talking I leaned over to him.

“Do you know what he’s . . . ?” I began before Lanny shook his head to say, no, he didn’t understand what was bugging Smada either.

But now I think he did know. He was just too embarrassed to tell me. Lanny was always quicker than me, and 1 think he did see Smada’s point. The punk had been slow and ponderous and, while a jerk, still a harmless one. And we would have noticed how slow he was, as everyone else had, because everyone else had been paying attention to who was armed and drinking in a public inn from the first moment they had entered. You know, the way we should have been?

Smada reappeared suddenly with an apparent willingness to forget the whole exchange. “Now, pray tell, what is all this about a phone?” he asked gruffly. But he smiled as he did it. “Just what would a phone be, lads?”

We were tired and feeling a bit odd and, I dunno, glad that the snarling was over, so we did. We told him everything. We told the exact truth about what had happened. And we described America. We told all about it. About telephones and telegrams and television. About cassette decks and pornography. About panty hose and heart transplants and internal combustion and Watergate.

We described freeways and democracy and Walt Disney World and women’s lib. We sang them some rock and roll.

They loved it. 1 mean loved it. Not that they believed us much, 1 don’t think. But they ate it up anyway. Maybe Smada believed. He asked some incredibly penetrating questions anyhow.

What happened next was absolutely ... 1 don’t know. Stunning, I guess. What was stunning about it was the logic of their next question. Everybody listening agreed that this America was one helluva neat spot, all right. So the obvious question was: Why weren’t we still there?

Lanny and I just stared at them. Then at each other. So they tried again.

Was there a horrible war or plague?

No.

Were we driven out for siding with the wrong king? Nixon, was it?

No.

Were we being pursued because of having been involved in some indiscretion (read: crime)?

No.

Then why were we here?

We wanted to be.

Why?

We think this is better.

Long pause. Exchanged looks.

No kidding, we assured them. We like it here more.

And then they really didn’t believe us. Except Smada, I think, who looked at us like we were absolutely and completely stark raving stupid. And we were. We were.

And it was going to cost us.

But in the meantime we were just sitting around still getting drunk at the inn. The topic moved on to more important (or more believable) things, like the best whorehouse in the district and the worst way to break in a new slave. 1 tried to interest the prettiest whore in a little you-know-what. She was attentive enough. And friendly. But she never left Smada’s side. None of them did, spread around him on those pillows like a doughnut. It was discouraging as hell.

Lanny and Smada talked a long time. I don’t know about what, but at least some of it was a continuation of the America description and Smada’s resulting amazement at our choice.

It was starting to get really late. Most of the other folks had retired to their rooms or headed back out on the road. Only the old general & Co., Smada and the whores, and us were still about.

And drinking. I had to give Smada credit for that much, anyway. He was the most incredible drinker I had ever seen. Drank like it was water, like there was no tomorrow, like he was to be hung the next morning, like . . . well, you get the idea: The sonuvabitch could by God drink.

I got up to piss toward the end and offered to do the same for Lanny but he said, no, he needed the exercise, so we went together. The outhouse smelled just like what it was: an awful place where people put their awful things forever.

When we came back in, everyone else was gone.

Everyone else. We had to wake up the innkeeper to find out what was what. And when we did, we were pissed. There was nothing wrong with our rooms. It’s just that we didn’t need separate ones, seeing as how Smada had taken every single whore to bed with him.

Our first knocks on the broad oak door that was the entrance to his rooms (the best in the place, of course) were tentative and shy. But then we got mad, thinking that we had also paid for the damn women and therefore had a right to at least two of them! There was a lot of giggling from inside before a cute little redhead poked her head out and assured us that two of them would be out to join us in just a little while. Then she handed us another flagon and two more mugs and directed us to a little bench there in the hall to wait. We sat down, suckers that we were, and waited. She closed the door.

The giggling this time was a lot longer and louder. But we still just sat there with our little swords and our little mugs. And waited.

But even that wasn’t as dumb as the conversation we got into. How is that Lanny and I, just by talking, could screw things up still to come? Incredible.

We talked about Smada, of course, and what we really thought of him. Which wasn’t what we really thought of him at all. It was what we really wanted to think of him.

He had been a chickenshit with that young punk, no matter what he said.

“Right?”

“Right!”

And there really wasn’t anything stupid about us wanting to come here to this world, it was just our being so adventurous and all.