The shaggy head of an older man, his seamed face slathered with dripping ceremonial face paint, rises up before them in the mental window, massive, obscuring the scene in the cavern, smiling benignly. In a warm, blissful voice that booms in their throbbing skulls, he announces:
“Your petition has been received and will be evaluated by the Planetary Committee.”
He goes on smiling at them for a while, the way people on television smile at an audience they can’t see, and then his head sinks back out of sight again. The vision of the conference room fades. The remaining Professor Long exhales shakily, pressing one hand to her temple. Professor Budshah, panting, looks at her. He puts his arm around her shoulders and helps her over to the bed. She flops down, drawing deep breaths.
Within a few hours, the remaining Professor Long has recovered enough to keep down some hot water—she can’t look at a cup of tea—and a few pieces of flatbread. The apartment is nearly bare; nobody currently lives here, and there are only a few sticks of furniture. She eats in the kitchen and then makes her way wearily back to the bedroom to rest, her head splitting, leaving Professor Budshah with his notebook on the little kitchen table. After a brief nap, she wakes up feeling surprisingly improved. The sun is low in the sky, the room has grown dark with a peculiar reddish darkness. She raises the blinds a little and opens a window. The smoking orange, setting there. Then she wanders into the center of the small bedroom, her mind blank, looking numbly around her. Something white rests on the bare floorboards at her feet, a little to her left. She bends down to examine it, a piece of white fluff, like a milkweed tassel or a down feather. As she kneels to pick it up something goes whuff across her back and a sharp noise, like a hammer knocking a wooden board. She looks in the direction of the sound and immediately notices a hole in the wall directly in front of her, neatly framed in the middle of the shadow her head casts, where there had been no hole before and she freezes in place. Her heart seems to shrivel and her insides run cold. If she hadn’t knelt to look at that piece of fluff on the floor there would be a hole in her now. She can feel the probe of the hunting eye behind her. She needs to lie prone, but her terror has frozen her joints and they refuse to relax. It takes a violent effort of will to make them unbend, telling herself that her head might not be low enough yet, uncertainly trying to conjure an image in her mind of the buildings opposite, if they are tall enough so that someone could get up high enough to see down into the room, to the floor, and as she moves there’s another knock no louder than before but deafening to her, so that she cries out in terror. Professor Budshah charges in wearing a t-shirt, his face full of shaving cream with a single rectangular notch in the lather on his left cheek, and she screams at him to get down. He looks around in wild confusion.
“Get on the floor!” she screams, scrabbling over to him on hands and knees, all her rigidity gone. She lunges up and grabs him by the waist, dragging him down. As she does, she hears another crack and the patter of plaster bits sprinkling onto the floor; Professor Budshah’s body slackens and for a heart-wrenching instant she believes he’s been hit. No, he’s only letting himself swim out forward onto his stomach. He is glaring fiercely at the newest hole in the apartment wall. Three holes ...
In her avidity to prevent his being shot, she has broken the spell of her fear and she waves him back into the hall.
Professor Budshah, in no danger of being shot from his current position, awkwardly crabwalks backwards into the hallway, followed by the remaining Professor Long. She sits up the moment she is past the threshold and turns a face full of bewilderment fear and anger at him. He is about to say something, then stops, his eyes widening.
“What?”
She doesn’t hear it then, but she does feel it—a regular thudding of feet pounding in the building. Professor Budshah jumps up into an odd half-crouch and gestures to her—into the kitchen. He points at the kitchen window.
“... fire escape!” he says.
She clambers over the table and out the window, then starts hustling down the fire escape, Professor Budshah right behind her.
The kitchen window is on the opposite side of the building from the bedroom and overlooks a courtyard with a view of some one-story shops across the street. They rush down, dislodging flower pots and overturning planters, scaring a cat, surprised eyes in a blubbery white face, a naked couple a woman with her hands on the window sill and another woman behind her, then the last landing, the apartment evidently empty Professor Budshah expertly lowers the ladder and she goes down first, momentarily locking eyes with the woman from further up who is leaning out her window staring down at them. Only when she is safely on the ground does he get on the ladder himself. The two of them look around for a moment, uncertain. One of the naked women, who has now climbed entirely out onto the fire escape, waves curiously to them, her lover’s blonde head poking out of the window now; the naked woman is a young Latina with tattooed arms and waist and vermillion streaks in her hair, with a huge fake penis strapped to her body. She points. They follow her finger and notice a notch in a slab barrier fencing off a vacant lot. They remember the view they had of the lot from the kitchen window—cross through it and they won’t have to go around to the front of the building. The woman on the fire escape nods, turning to say something to her lover who remains in the window.
Feeling completely exposed herself, the remaining Professor Long hurries across the lot, lifting her feet high to avoid stumbling over tufted weeds, empty beer bottles, cardboard sheets and other trash. They head for the only gap on the street side of the lot. Throwing a glance back over her shoulder, the remaining Professor Long sees something dark moving in Professor Budshah’s window. The naked woman is still standing on the fire escape; the remaining Professor Long half turns and, still running awkwardly, points, and the woman looks up. She starts visibly, apparently seeing the shadowy form there at the window above her head. Having taken her eyes from the ground, the remaining Professor Long trips over a hunk of particle board, and would have fallen flat on her face if Professor Budshah hadn’t grabbed and righted her. They keep fleeing, but she looks back again and is astonished to see the woman is climbing up toward Professor Budshah’s window; moving fast, she is already on the floor below. There is nothing in the window now, but in her brief look the remaining Professor Long does seem to detect a commotion in the kitchen. The woman has reached their landing now, approaching the window with caution and brandishing a bright pink and purple erection adorned with fluttering ribbons.
Professor Budshah clambers over the horizontal wooden boards and into the street, then helps her over. The street is deserted, but they run up a driveway between two private homes and framed by squat brick pillars each topped with a cement ball; they might have held up a heavy pair of iron gates once.
They come into an alley that runs through the interior of the block. The fenced back lots of the buildings all open out onto it. Just ahead is an active boulevard lined with stores and busy with shoppers, looking like safety. She is about to tell Professor Budshah to wipe the shaving cream off his face when she hears the scrape of a foot behind her. An umbrella spike is thrusting out at her. With a strangled cry, she recoils at the onslaught of a big man, his beefy upper body seeming even bigger in his down jacket, a shaved head with a lozenge-shaped lump at the crown. He jabs at her with the umbrella again, holding it like a spear. She is dimly aware of Professor Budshah apparently confronting someone else. He shoves this other person, a thick-featured man with a moustache, two enemies from among the supine phalanxes of the Misled, and the two of them run out into the boulevard.
Professor Budshah starts scraping the foam from his face with his hand, tossing it into the gutter as he goes, but neither of them dare to stop. Neither of those men are following them, that they can see. It all flashed by, incredibly. They both have to put some distance between themselves and that place.
They have no money, nothing. Professor Budshah is wearing his dress shoes, slacks, and a t shirt, tucke
d in of course. He has arms like a dancer, she thinks. Long muscles. She is still wearing her clothes of a few days ago, now much disarranged and rumpled.
Broken, jangled conversation, still weaving in and out among people who stare at the remaining smears of foam on his face, some pointing to their own, trying to let him know, thinking he must be unaware. Everything is still too jaggedly excited, conversation is ridiculous. They begin making sense around the time Professor Budshah is saying they should go to the police. But they looked like police. Thick, heavy, active, seedy, short-haired, they could have been police, or organized crime, or political party machine thugs, or latter-day fascist goons, or soldiers, or all of the above. American, Israeli, Russian, Italian, English, Irish, German, Serbian, Greek, Swiss, Polish, Spanish—what were they? Not muggers, not acting at random. Agents of the deadly conformity of the Misled. But what do they know about this kind of thing, what is movies and what is reality doing movie impressions?
Professor Budshah has his subway card with him. The first Professor Long will go back to campus and stay there. It may be necessary to leave. That is, they should consider leaving the country. Why should they consider that? Professor Budshah was able to get through to Professor Crest yesterday, but only briefly—their signal kept crumbling into vocal tiles—but he will make sure Professor Aughbui gets the message, and Professor ... nevermind.
The subway is elevated at Rotha Station; the platform is nearly empty. The first Professor Long peers down the rails uncertainly. She doesn’t know what to do with these incessant inner urgings to run, act. Intense fear has stretched her all out of shape, so that she alternately twitches in contractions of purely reflexive fright and then sags in an unnaturally exaggerated relaxation that pulls out her shape like thumbing down modelling clay. Everything shimmers with extra realness. They’re all shouting at her: the garbage can, the blue sky, the edge of the corrugated tan subway barrier against the blue sky, the tangle of rails and sleepers between the platforms, the mustard yellow edge, the X’s in the canopy supports. Look out! Look!
There’s a tidy older man with a salt and pepper beard perched on the edge of one of the benches. Despite the heat, he wears a hat and a little scarf neatly folded under his chin; his left hand rests lightly on the handle of an aluminum cane, and he is reading a folded newspaper which he holds in his right hand. There’s another man in white jeans peering at his phone further down the platform, leaning against the corrugated metal barrier smoking, an old lady with a laundry trolley, a huge homeless man sprawled on the second bench apparently stupefied or sleeping with his mouth wide open, wearing conspicuously new-looking shoes. No answer yet from Professor Crest, no word from Professor Aughbui. The rattling squawk of the arriving train almost drowns out the sirens.
Urtruvel’s face on a poster, advertising his latest diatribe. The long face, the mouth closed of course and now adorned with a stern moustache, the boiled-egg eyes levelled frankly, the unbullshitable truth-telling hero who will indignantly shut down all posers and deflate all pious falsehoods. Black Albinos: On the Bankruptcy of Currency Reform. The poster is a hot slab of malevolent enchantment like a fruiting body exhaling a fine mist of spores lightly dusting passersby and washing over anyone who pauses to look at it. Actually opening the book is like bursting a chaotic evil puffball with your face. A gush of malignantly psychedelic invective inundates your head, whirling in the brain to form mental twisters that are autonomous hate elementals herding the thoughts, driving the thoughts before them, raking the mental air with alarms and searchlights and snarling police dogs that send hapless fantasies, emotions, and other mental personnel scrambling for safe places to hide. It’s a takedown book, of course, a weapon aimed at the idea of animal money and those responsible for it, designed to transform them into figures of public ignominy, making an example of them. The point is not, as some might think, merely to discredit Professor Aughbui, Professor Budshah, Professor Crest, the late Professor Long, and the remaining Professor Long; the deeper purpose here is to demonstrate that, correct or incorrect, right or wrong, anyone associating themselves with animal money will be a target for ruthless public lambasting. The line has been drawn and animal money is entirely outside the pale, relegated to an intellectual no-man’s land haunted by footnotes like Fourier, and underfootnotes like Winstanley. As for those mountebanks responsible for this trash ...
The man in white jeans is suddenly much closer, the woman has left her cart, clutching a long umbrella like a spear. White jeans is reaching into his jacket and his eyes flash with annoyance as the train rolls in, but they’ve tipped their hand, their targets are alerted. The remaining Professor Long chokes and her body goes stiff. Professor Budshah backs warily away from the umbrella tip homing in on his heart.
The tidy older man has risen to his feet also, a snapping, suppressed automatic in the hand that an instant before had held the folded newspaper. Firing from the hip he punches two holes in white jeans’ down jacket, first in the abdomen, the second in the left breast, each spouting pulverized feathers. The bald man wheezes, the pistol he’d been pulling drops to the platform with a splat, and he begins flapping his arms and curling this way and that. The doors of the train open and the woman, now straightened up taller than Professor Budshah, lunges with her umbrella and a man with a grey moustache charges out of the subway car, drawing a pistol he aims at the remaining Professor Long. Professor Budshah recoils from the umbrella, which grazes the surface of a black shield embossed all over with extremely fine gold engraving like the decorations framing a dollar bill. A lightly-built older black man in a blue windbreaker, and wearing a kind of a tricorn hat, just stepped from the same subway car, and has serenely interposed the shield between Professor Budshah and his attacker, holding his shield carefully in both hands, one high, one low. Behind his back, the remaining Professor Long is looking right down the barrel of a Glock her face blank. She doesn’t see where the other woman comes from; only that she is suddenly there beside the doughy other man. This strange woman plants her right foot with a slam that shakes the platform and punches the man with the gun in the stomach, hitting him so hard the blow lifts him off his feet. The gun goes off. The noise is so ferocious the remaining Professor Long can’t say whether she has been hit or not. Somehow the man keeps himself from falling or dropping the gun, by pinwheeling his arms, doubling forward his face wrenched in pain. In a single stride the woman closes in, dips a bit to his level in one smooth motion uppercutting him—he falls over flat on his back and stays there. The tidy older man shoots the woman with the umbrella in the back. The red behind the brown in her face disappears, and her demonic grimace is wiped away. She dwindles. Bubbles are rising into the air from the hole in her back. A strange woman has emerged from the train and now she holds up her black shield, twin to the other one, to protect the remaining Professor Long.
The woman who punched the moustache man out says—
“Professor Long. Professor Budshah. We’re from the Institute. Board this car, please.”
The fight took no longer than a typical stop. The doors close behind them and the train rumbles out of the station.
The car is empty. Professor Long and Professor Budshah are still accompanied by the shield bearers, and by the woman who spoke to them. The tidy older man does not seem to have boarded the train.
The man who defended Professor Budshah is named Tony. The female shield bearer is Rubilyn. The very solid woman taking charge of them is Arieto. While the shield bearers are dressed more or less in street clothes, Arieto is wearing an all black outfit of heavy fabric that looks like the sort of protective gear open-hearth workers wear, with heavy boots, a thick fabric apron, gloves, and a brimless flat cap that comes down to just above her eyebrows. Her thick neck is wrapped in a black kerchief wound round it several times, so only her sooty face and small red ears are exposed. Whenever she moves her arms, her sleeves strain over slabs of muscle.
“Spend,” she says, holding out her hand to them in turn.
“They nearly got you,” she says.
They sit down and she lists to one side, pulling a wallet from her side pocket. She opens it and hands it first to the remaining Professor Long, then to Professor Budshah; inside there is a black metal shield like a miniature replica of the ones Tony and Rubilyn are carrying, and still hold up to either side of them like bookends. Around the central boss, the golden words “Economist Defense Directorate” swirl in a filmy wreath.
“You OK?” Arieto asks heartily, and lightly swats the remaining Professor Long on the knee. “Still rattled?”
The remaining Professor Long smiles feebly and nods.
“That’s all right,” Arieto says. “This is all a bit much.”
“Who were they?” Professor Budshah asks.
Arieto shrugs. “Trying to kill you, or kidnap you.”
“Can’t you tell me who they were?”
“Don’t know.”
She indicates the two shield bearers with the back of her hand, first one, then the other, then herself.
“We’re defenders. We don’t investigate.”
“What are we going ...?” the remaining Professor Long asks.
“Our orders are to accompany you to a place of safety, not—”
She raises her hand to silence him.
“—Not to sit here gabbing with you.”
“Do you know anything about Professor Crest?” the remaining Professor Long asks.
The train dives underground and they have to raise their voices.
“Or Professor Aughbui?” Professor Budshah shouts.
Arieto nods.
“They’re OK,” she says.
Professor Budshah and the remaining Professor Long fill out the receipt Arieto gives him from Protective Services. It seems unnecessary, considering their continuing to be alive sufficient indication of having been protected, but then again, they might have escaped on their own, while the defenders did nothing, relaxing over frothy fountain drinks instead of doing their jobs. Folding the form, he returns it to Arieto, who stuffs it into a tube, then into a special tubular pocket, one of many in her apron, designed to hold important documents.
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