Anti-man Read Free

Alaska."
        He looked up reluctantly and folded the papsheet. "That's a helluva place." He shivered and grimaced. "Had a duty station with the airline there for two months once. Cold. Snow. Wind like you wouldn't believe. Threatened to quit, so they transferred me."
        "We have relatives there," I said, trying to sound as natural as I could. I am not the greatest thespian to walk the boards since Burton, believe me. My feet freeze, and my head turns to mud when I have to speak to a group of interns. Perhaps that's why I am so tough and hard-boiled around them: because they scare me. Despite my shyness, I had been surprised these last few days how easily I could fool people when my life was staked on pulling the wool over their eyes. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but naked fear was the bitch that gave birth to my coolness.
        "Ticket?" He looked us over thoroughly while I fumbled for the two yellow pieces of paper, the cigarette bobbling in his mouth, the ash dangerously long. I was afraid that somewhere in his simple brain-box two synapses would flop open, and he would connect pictures he had seen in the papsheet with the two rumpled men standing before him. Over the week He and I had been playing cat and mouse with the World Authority, running and running like mechanical wind-up toys, trying to gain time for Him to develop Himself to the point where He wouldn't have to run, our pictures and descriptions had graced the front pages of every papsheet in the world at least six out of the seven days. Here we were spotted in Lisbon, here in Acapulco, here in New York City. Luckily, the debarking officer on this ship seemed the type to skip the news sections and dwell on the gossip pages and the comics. For the first time in my life, I thanked the powers that be for anti-intellectualism.
        "Ticket," I repeated, finally producing our stubs and handing them over without so much as a single nervous tremor.
        "You're paid up clear into Roosha," he said, looking us over again. He had apparently never been taught that it was rude to peruse a person as thoroughly as you did a book. "Do you know that you're paid up clear into Roosha? Why pay up clear into Roosha if you were going to get off here?"
        "A last minute change of plans," I said. I was feeling the strain of two days and nights without sleep and without benefit of honest-to-Hippocrates warm food except for that meal we had gotten at the backstreet restaurant in San Francisco. I didn't know if my lies were coming out like lies or whether he would accept what I said at face value. Apparently, there was some degree of verisimilitude to my rantings, for he shrugged and carefully entered the numbers of our stubs in the departure book. If the World Authority crashed the fake names we were now using-and they certainly would, eventually-here was a record, a set of clerical footprints for them to seize upon and follow.
        "That capsule at the end," he said. He consulted a pendant watch that hung on a fine chain around his neck. "We'll be dropping you in eleven minutes."
        We moved down the line of egg-shaped, crimson globes that nested in the bays in the floor. The officer came after us, slid back the heavy cover on the last egg. "Dropped before?" he asked, obviously hopeful that we would say no and allow him to show his superiority with a long, detailed, condescending lecture.
        "Many times," I said. I wondered what he would have done if I had said fourteen times in the past week.
        "Remember to strap tight. Grip the padded wheel until the beam contact is made, and don't unstrap until ground control directs you to."
        I waited until He moved into the capsule and took the left seat, then I squeezed through the oval entrance-way and climbed into the right. The officer frowned. "Let's see you grip the wheel," he snapped. We gripped it, though there was no need to prepare this far ahead. "That's better," he