Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 by Humans (v1.1) Page B

money while you wait to get on the quota.
Or is that too long a time for you?”
                “No,” she said slowly, wondering if
it was wise to reveal so much to this stranger. But he felt safe, somehow. She
said, “I believe my name is on some lists.”
                “Lists?”
                “As an activist,” she explained. “A
few years ago, when my husband—back then, I joined some political groups.
Activist groups.”
                “Breaking windows,” he suggested,
this time openly laughing at her. “Handing out leaflets. Picketing opera
openings.”
                “It seemed important,” she said
miserably. “But now my name is on the lists.”
                ‘There’s one way, of course,” he
said, “that none of that matters.”
                “What way?”
                “If you were married to an
American.”
                Behind her, John Auston dozed over
his filled-in forms. His presence suddenly filled the plane like a life raft
inflating. “That’s impossible,” Maria Elena said.
                 
                 

          Ananayel
     
     
                Well; interesting.
                My ongoing experiences with
machinery, I mean. “Men would be Angels,” as Pope said, in a somewhat different
context, and that would certainly appear to be true.
                Just look at all these ponderous
machines, gawky and oafish, with which latter-day man has surrounded himself.
What are they, after all, but efforts to perform, with great cumbersome
expenditures of energy, what we do
smoothly, effortlessly, and by nature? My first airplane was so much more
unwieldy than my normal fashion of traveling through the air as to beggar
comparison, and as for these automobiles, like the one with which I drove Li
Kwan away from the policemen I’d set on him, what possible advantage can humans
believe such monstrosities offer them over their own legs? To get them there
faster? To get them where faster? And
why? What do they want with time, these ephemera?
                All these tangled intricate
prosthetics with which these humans try to be us. Telephones. Light bulbs, and lamps to put them into, and huge
destructive hydroelectric dams to plug the lamps into. Refrigerators. Oh, the
weary toil of it all. They 3 !! probably be glad to lay their burdens
down, poor things.

7
     
                 
     
                There was a bus stop across the road
from the entrance to the prison, but Frank Hillfen didn’t want to wait for the
bus there. Everybody going past in cars, and the people on the bus, too, when
it came, and the driver of the bus, they would all know what he was. No one ever
gets on the bus at that stop except cons—ex-cons, okay—and visitors of cons,
and one look would tell anybody in the world that Frank Flillfen was not
somebody who visited people. Con ,
they would say, looking at the slump of his shoulder, the dry hardness of his
jaw, the hands as large as a workingman’s but soft and pudgy as a baby’s. Habitual , they would say, driving by,
windows rolled up to keep the cold air in. He’ll
be back , they would say, and glance once in the rearview mirror, glad they
weren’t Frank Flillfen, and drive on.
                Frank crossed the road toward the
bus stop, to be that much farther away from the tall tan wall in the sunlight.
Three P.M., summer, sunny,
moderately warm. Walking weather.
                A madonna and child were the only
people in the shade of the bus shelter. She was short, plump, pretty,
black-haired and black-eyed, and she held the infant high in her arms,
murmuring to it in some dialect descended a long way from the Latin; some
variant of Spanish, probably She looked up to watch Frank cross toward her, his
worldly goods in the black warm-up bag that said HEAD at