else. I no longer believe in humanity, either. Or care about them. I think we’re a doomed race. Like the dinosaurs. We just don’t know it. I guess the brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus didn’t know it either, when they were feeding. We’ve overspecialized ourselves out of existence. Like they did.”
“When did you decide all this?”
“I don’t know. Sometime after I was hit. I was sitting on a hill, watching them all fighting, down below in the valley.”
“It’s pretty bleak,” Curran said. “I hope you’re wrong.”
“Yes. Well, I’m not,” Landers smiled. “It’s pretty bleak, all right,” he agreed. “Especially when you find you don’t care. We’ve overspecialized ourselves in war. A war will do us.”
“You think this war?” Curran said quickly.
“No. Probably not. But it doesn’t matter. Some later one will. The human causes no longer matter.”
“You think human causes no longer matter?” Curran asked quickly.
“Nope. Not as long as we continue to kill each other over them.”
Curran nodded.
Still standing behind his desk, Curran moved his feet, and shifted his weight, awkwardly. Hesitantly, he brought his right hand halfway up.
“You should be out of here by the first of the year. We’ll probably have a chance to talk again. But in case we don’t—” He held the hand out shyly.
Landers took it and shook it. It felt warm and cool and dry. But then, his own hand was, too.
As he closed the glassed door, he looked back and grinned inwardly again, over what he saw. Curran was already seated back at his desk, writing furiously, on papers out of Landers’ file.
Fuck him, he thought with vast amusement. Let him write it all down for the bastards.
He felt pretty much that same way about everything else. And everybody. Except for Strange, and occasionally Bobby Prell. Certainly he didn’t give a damn about Winch. Or the people at the Peabody suite. None of them cared, really, about anybody else.
And now Strange had more or less dropped him, and dropped everybody else, for this woman. This Frances Highsmith. That he was hanging out with.
And Bobby Prell appeared to have dropped them all, too. Including himself and Strange. Prell was getting around a little bit now on his legs, the least little bit, but he never came into town with them, and never came up to the Peabody. One day, riding into town in the taxi with Strange, Strange told Landers that Prell had told him that he Prell was going to get married.
“Married?” Landers said, and then grinned. “Married? Who the hell to?”
“To that little girl on his ward he’s been doing. Been hanging around with.”
“When?”
“I don’t know,” Strange said, staring out at the slow winter rain. “He didn’t say when.”
“He’s crazy,” Landers said, definitively.
“Probably,” Strange said, softly.
But in the taxis riding in was about the only time Landers got to see Strange. Or so it seemed, any more.
He didn’t mind. It was as if he were saying good-by to all of them, in a finite way. Their time together was running out. Their common interests changed. He would be alone, when he went back into the fire. As they all would be. If they went back at all to it.
At least he knew how long he had. Curran had told him he had until around the first of the year. That was less than a month. That wasn’t too long. On the other hand, Landers did not know what he wanted to do, or could do, for a whole month.
It was funny but in each case it was a woman who had pulled them away. Females. Pussy. Cunt. Had split the common male interest. Cunt had broken the centripetal intensity of the hermetic force which sealed them together in so incestuous a way. Their combat. Cunt vs combat. In his cups Landers decided he had discovered quite by accident the basic prevailing equation of the universe.
If the universe is represented by a floating compass, and the cock is a sliver of iron rubbed on a magnet, it will always point due North to cunt. Always. No matter what.
This was the equation modern man had broken, to his peril, with his creation and introduction of mechanized, social, group combat, for some fucking damned cause or other.
But sobered up he didn’t think so much of it.
And half-sobered up he suddenly remembered when he was a boy his father when he was drunk had this song he sang, “Those Wedding Bells/Are Breaking Up/That Old Gang of Mine.” That was the only line Landers could remember. But he