A Flash of Green by John D. MacDonald Page A

where you’re heading with it. I know damn well you’re not fishing for compliments, so I’ll give you an honest answer. On the whole, I think you’ve been of more benefit than Elihu Kibby would have been. Will that do?”
    Bliss made a soft sound of amusement. The lamplight was strong across his mouth and left his eyes in semishadow. His sports shirt was a soft shade of green-gray, with a tiny monogram on the breast pocket in black.
    “Playtime is over, Jimmy,” Elmo said. “We’ve had the four years of fun.”
    Jimmy Wing knew he had been invited into another room in that structure which was Elmo Bliss. Another door had been opened—another degree of intimacy. He could look back at all the other lighted rooms, at the connecting doors which stood wide open, and remember the time when each had been opened for him. Now here was another degree of closeness, yet with the inference there were still other rooms beyond. He felt a degree of excitement and alarm which he could not rationalize. Somehow closeness was in ratio to menace, as though, in the ultimate room, the door would slam shut and there would be darkness and a knife. He told himself that the suggestion of menace came merely from the awareness that it was contrived—that Bliss opened the doors for his own purposes when the time was right, that Bliss was using him.
    “Four years of many things,” Jimmy said, smiling, stalling.
    “And four more years to come, and four after that, and God knows where we’ll be by then, boy. Depends on the size bite I can take. I learned in a lot of hard ways that the way you set your teeth, and the timing of it, they’re the only things that count. Bite too big and you strangle on it. Bite too small and you starve.”
    “Is that all there is to it, Elmo? The jungle approach?”
    Elmo took a long time in unwrapping a slim cigar, lighting it. “I play a game, Jim. Nobody knows I’m playing it. What I do, I make out I’m the man I’m talking to. I add up all I know about him and I try to become him and look out of him at Elmo Bliss and see what he sees. You’ve got simple ideas about me, I think. You think I’m some kind of animal. Now when I look at you, maybe I see some kind of animal too, but sort of a sorry animal.”
    “Thanks a lot, Elmo.”
    “Because you got a weak connection between your teeth andyour head. You worry so much about what you should want, you lose track of what you really want. You’re a mixed-up animal, like a vegetarian dog. But that’s the way most people are, Jimmy.”
    “Maybe my wants are small.”
    “Maybe it pleasures you to think they’re small. Up in Georgia we had a school catalogue with the snap courses marked, so we wouldn’t have to put too big a strain on our football brains. I took a marked one in philosophy. Ethics it was called, a lecture course by a man named Hoosin. Now don’t bug your eyes at me like that, boy, it’s downright impolite. The lessons didn’t take hold on me. I listened good, but I thought it was a lot of crap. Those lessons didn’t jell until my time on the road gang, with Pete Nambo beating on me of an evening, whistling between his teeth and grunting when he wound up for a good one. I came up with my own ethic right about then. I want satisfaction, Jimmy. And I want to know when I’m having it, and keep track of what it costs. I want the most people possible saying ‘Here comes Elmo’ and ‘There goes Elmo.’ I want people anxious to make sure I’m comfortable. I want all the pretty things—like people writing down what I say, and motorcycle escorts, sirens, steaks, secretaries, dollar cigars, mahogany boats, clothes tailored to fit, my name in books, little girls fussing to pleasure me. To get it all, and keep it coming, I have to take the right-size bite at the right time.”
    He leaned into the light and banged his fist on the desk with a force which startled Jimmy Wing. “I want the world knowing I’m here, and I want it excited about