cause he's done a killing or two. Religion or no
religion, pride's a sin."

Alice and me ate it all up like we was a couple of kids and Pop was
telling us fairy tales. That's what it all was, of course, a fairy
tale--a crazy mixed-up fairy tale. Alice and me knew there could be no
fellowship of Deathlanders like Pop was describing--it was impossible as
blue sky--but it gave us a kick to pretend to ourselves for a while to
believe in it.

* * * * *

Pop could talk forever, apparently, about murder and murderers and he
had a bottomless bag of funny stories on the same topic and character
vignettes--the murderers who were forever wanting their victims to
understand and forgive them, the ones who thought of themselves as
little kings with divine rights of dispensing death, the ones who
insisted on laying down (chastely) beside their finished victims and
playing dead for a couple of hours, the ones who weren't so chaste, the
ones who could only do their killings when they were dressed a certain
way (and the troubles they had with their murder costumes), the ones who
could only kill people with certain traits or of a certain appearance
(red-heads, say, or people who read books, or who couldn't carry tunes,
or who used bad language), the ones who always mixed sex and murder and
the ones who believed that murder was contaminated by the least breath of
sex, the sticklers and the Sloppy Joes, the artists and the butchers, the
ax- and stiletto-types, the _com_pulsives and the _re_pulsives--honestly,
Pop's portraits from life added up to a Dance of Death as good as
anything the Middle Ages ever produced and they ought to have been
illustrated like those by some great artist. Pop told us a lot about his
own killings too. Alice and me was interested, but neither of us wasn't
tempted into making parallel revelations about ourselves. Your private
life's your own business, I felt, as close as your guts, and no joke's
good enough to justify revealing a knot of it.

Not that we talked about nothing but murder while we were bulleting
along toward Atla-Hi. The conversation was free-wheeling and we got onto
all sorts of topics. For instance, we got to talking about the plane and
how it flew itself--or levitated itself, rather. I said it must generate
an antigravity field that was keyed to the body of the plane but nothing
else, so that _we_ didn't feel lighter, nor any of the objects in the
cabin--it just w