Nowhere Read Online Free PDF Page A

visited Saint Sebastian, and an old newsman, a stringer for some wire service, named Clyde McCoy. McCoy has apparently stayed there for years, due to the low cost of living and his high capacity for alcohol, cheap in Saint S. He’s not exactly a trench-coated swashbuckler, I gather, not to mention that there’s never been much that could be called noteworthy news from the place.”
    “ I certainly have never heard of it,” I iterated, though well aware that I would be annoying Rasmussen in so doing.
    He glared at me briefly, pulling his lips back slightly from the pipe, to display two rows of rather spiky teeth: he was probably of that breed who eventually gnaw a hole in the hard-rubber stem. I seem to part with the rest of the human race in my instinctive distrust of a pipesmoker. “But then, how much do we hear of San Marino and Andorra?” he asked the ceiling of the van—in which incidentally I could spot no much-needed air vent. “Then these bombings began suddenly, as of last month, in certain American cities. I refer to those for which credit has been claimed by the Sebastiani Liberation Front, and not those others that have been the self-proclaimed work of the various other terrorist groups, though one or two explosions are in doubt, being boasted of by two organizations who have apparently no connection with each other, for example, when a series of small charges blew the genitalia off the nude male statuary in the National Gallery, credit was publicly taken by both the Amazon Army, whose cause should be obvious, and the Testosterone Society, an aggregation of militant macho men who performed the mutilation of marble, they said, to highlight society’s daily severing of real gonads.”
    Rasmussen had the execrable taste to grin at this point: I suspected that the last example was apocryphal, his feeble essay at wit. I snorted, and he resumed.
    “You can pooh-pooh terrorism in the interests of some schoolboy slogan about the perfectibility of man, but the fact is that violence is just about the only thing that will make you sit up and take notice. We’re all in pretty much of a coma nowadays, wouldn’t you say, what with mainlining, speedballing, herpes lesions, fear of getting AIDS from a handshake with a kid brother, dioxin-contaminated barbecue pits, over-the-counter medicaments dosed with poison by embittered loners.” He produced an anguished gasp: apparently he took modern life as hard as any of us. “Hell, man, it takes an explosion to cut through all that shit!”
    I wondered again, as I had in the past, whether we were getting the finest types of men for our government bureaus or whether they were going instead into the much more lucrative field of pornographic videocassettes.
    “Rasmussen,” I asked, “would you mind opening a door or turning on a fan?” I coughed and beat my hands. “Your pipe is asphyxiating.”
    “Aha,” said he, “you reveal a weakness.”
    “Yes. I’m afraid I breathe air.”
    He sighed and propped his pipe against a panel of switches and dials. “My point is, if the Sebastiani Liberation group thinks it worth their while to come all the way over here and blow up a dump like the late building in which you made your squalid home, perhaps we should return the favor and examine what it is they are protesting against. Then we might throw our weight to whichever side looks as though it’s going to win, instead of getting entangled in ideologies, which is always a sucker’s game. What I say is, let’s take a look at this bozo close up, this Prince Sebastian. What makes him tick? Maybe if Sebastian comes up clean, it’ll bring back the divine right of kings. World could use a new angle on the whole political ball of wax: a rerun of old-fashioned benevolent despotism might be the answer we’re all looking for. On the other hand, maybe it will make more sense to fund this Liberation bunch, which might favorably impress various oil-rich fanatics in the Middle East.”