t the orange
soup, which was _one_ thing that hadn't changed a bit so far, and I got
to wishing like a baby that it wasn't there and to thinking how it
blanketed the whole Earth (stars over the Riviera?--don't make me
laugh!) and I heard myself asking, "Pop, did you rub out that guy that
pushed the buttons for all this?"

"Nope," Pop answered without hesitation, just as if it hadn't been four
hours or so since he'd mentioned the point. "Nope, Ray. Fact is I
welcomed him into our little fellowship about six months back. This is
_his_ knife here, this horn-handle in my boot, though he never killed
with it. He claimed he'd been tortured for years by the thought of the
millions and millions he'd killed with blast and radiation, but now he
was finding peace at last because he was where he belonged, with the
murderers, and could start to do something about it. Several of the boys
didn't want to let him in. They claimed he wasn't a real murderer, doing
it by remote control, no matter how many he bumped off."

"I'd have been on their side," Alice said, thinning her lips.

"Yep," Pop continued, "they got real hot about it. _He_ got hot too and
all excited and offered to go out and kill somebody with his bare hands
right off, or try to (he's a skinny little runt), if that's what he had
to do to join. We argued it over, I pointed out that we let ex-soldiers
count the killings they'd done in service, and that we counted
poisonings and booby traps and such too--which are remote-control
killings in a way--so eventually we let him in. He's doing good work.
We're fortunate to have him."

"Do you think he's really the guy who pushed the buttons?" I asked Pop.

"How should I know?" Pop replied. "He claims to be."

I was going to say something about people who faked confessions to get a
little easy glory, as compared to the guys who were really guilty and
would sooner be chopped up than talk about it, but at that moment a
fourth voice started talking in the plane. It seemed to be coming out of
the violet patch on the North America screen. That is, it came from the
general direction of the screen at any rate and my mind instantly tied
it to the violet patch at Atla-Hi. It gave us a fright, I can tell you.
Alice grabbed my knee with her pliers (she changed again), harder than
she'd intended, I suppose, though I didn't let out a yip--I was too
defensively frozen.

* * * * *

The voice was talking a lan