Manshape by John Brunner Page A

you go to see a man drink water? That is how you have persuaded me to waste my time!” Sweeping his robe around him, he strodeoff down the slope. Such was his air of command, people moved aside automatically.
    “Who’s that?” Angoss demanded. Alida told him that she knew of Long and his background in a few short sentences, admiring against her will the way in which people were making way for him as though by the same kind of reflex that dictated their reaction to Rungley’s snakes.
    Angoss got the point before she did, and with a wordless cry started out in Long’s wake. Even then she stood wondering and foolish for a moment before she too understood and hastened down the little hill.
    By the time they attained the stage—people not making way for them as they had for Long—it was too late to interfere. Where all the snakes had come from, Alida didn’t waste time guessing; any computer could no doubt have told her, but nobody had thought to ask the proper question, any more than they had remembered to inquire whether Rungley had the special enzyme which protected him. One could only ask the right questions when one knew most of the answer…
    At all events Long had beaten her and Angoss to the showdown.
    He had arrived at the stage just as yet another magnificent reptile was being passed up for the preacher to play with: a full-grown rattlesnake, its tail louder than its mouth.
    And snatched hold of it. His scorn was magnificent, too. He towered over Rungley, and the preacher quailed as the snake was swung dangling before his face.
    “This is not a man!” Long cried at the top of his voice. “Your Rungley is a charlatan! He knows he is immune to venom! He risks nothing when he allows a snake to strike him! His actions are a lie and a sham!”
    A swell of grumbling complaint at having their funinterrupted disturbed the crowd. He quelled it with a lordly scowl, the snake still hanging from his grasp like the whips which on his world had preceded the death of Jacob Chen.
    “I,” Long said, “do
not
know whether I’m immune. See
this!”
    And he shook his left arm bare of his loose sleeve and offered it to the ready fangs.

VIII

    Arriving in her office next morning after a sleepless night, Alida was for a long while unable to settle to work. Instead she paced around and around the table with the model city projected beneath its surface, powerless to take her eyes off the representation of Riger’s. Memory kept replaying for her last night’s events in the amphitheatre: the near-panic among the crowd, the arrival of the flying ambulance to carry off Long, the insistence of a handful of trouble-makers that Rungley continue with his act… which, on realising how they regarded him, he had refused to do.
    And that had come close to triggering a riot.
    Damn Angoss for regarding Rungley so lightly! He had apologised over and over, but what use were apologies now? And damn Jorgen too, for having been content to accept the advice of an outworlder instead of doing what he was supposed to: rely on his own judgment.
    Eventually she gave a sudden bitter chuckle and turned to the controls which projected captions and symbols upon the image of the city. A few moments’ work supplied seven words in luminous red letters.
    They read: WHY IS A MOUSE WHEN IT SPINS?
    After a while the answer didn’t seem funny any more.
    She compelled herself to sit down at her desk. Not long remained before ten hundred, when Hans Demetrios was due, but she ought at least to call the hospital where they had taken Thorkild. She gave the desk the necessary instructions.
    “What’s the chief therapist’s name?” she added.
    “Dr Lorenzo,” came the sweetly-inflected answer, and she tensed in dismay. How could she not have known? He had given expert evidence at the inquest following Saxena’s suicide; not only had they met face to face but she had taken up an hour of his time afterwards, pestering him for more and better explanations. Later,