His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

To his left: "So Finkelstein finally meets Goldberg in the garment center and he grabs him like this by the lapel, and he yells, 'You louse, you rat, you no-good, what's this about you running around with my wife? I ought to—I ought to—say, you call this a button-hole?'"

Restrained and apprehensive laughter; Catholic, Protestant, Jew (choice of one), what's the difference I always say.

Did they have a Jewish Question still, or was all smoothed and troweled and interfaithed and brotherhoodooed—

Wait. Your formulation implies that they're in the future, and you have no proof of that. Think straighter; you don't know where they are, or when they are, or who they are. You do know that you walked into Big Maggie's resonance chamber to change the target, experimental indium for old reliable zinc

and

"Bartender," in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty-green el Greco sky which might be Brookhaven's heavens a million years either way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck, or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it wasn't.

It was the Seal.

So: they began seeping through after that. The Chapter wanted it back.

The Serpentists wanted it, period. Galardo had started by bargaining and wound up by threatening, but how could you do anything but laugh at his best offer, a rusty five-pound spur gear with a worn keyway and three teeth missing? His threats were richer than his bribes; they culminated with The Century of Flame. "Faith, father, it doesn't scare me at all, at all; sure, no man could stand it." Subjective-objective (How you used to sling them around!), and Master Newton's billiard-table similes dissolve into sense impressions of pointer readings as you learn your trade, but Galardo had scared hell out of you, or into you, with The Century of Flame.

But you had the Seal of the Chapter and you had time to think, while on the screen above the bar:

AUDIO

VIDEO

Paul: Stop, you fool!

Long shot down steep, cobble-stoned French village street. Pi-erre darts out of alley in middle distance, looks wildly around, and runs toward camera, pistol in hand. Annette and Paul appear from same alley and dash after him.

Pierre: A fool, am I?

Cut to Cu of Pierre's face; beard stubble and sweat.

Annette: Darling!

Cut to long shot; Pierre aims and fires; Paul grabs his left shoulder and falls.

Cut to Paul.

two-shot, Annette and Paul: Don't mind me. Take my

gun—after him. He's a mad dog, I tell you!

Dolly back.

Annette takes his pistol.

Annette stands; we see her aim down at Paul, out of the picture. Then we dolly in to a cm of her head; sheas smiling triumphantly.

A hand holding a pistol enters the cm; the pistol muzzle touches Annette's neck.

Dolly back to middle shot. Hark-rider stands behind Annette as Paul gets up briskly and takes the pistol from her hand.

Annette: This, my dear, is as good a time as any to drop my little masquerade. Are you American agents really so stupid that you never thought I might be—a plant, as you call it?

Harkrider: Golkov.

Sound: click of cocking pistol.

Drop it, Madame

Paul: No, Madame Golkov; we American agents were not really so stupid. Wish I could say the same for—your people. Pierre Tourneur was a plant, I am glad to say; otherwise he would not have missed me.

He is one of the best pistol shots hi Counterintel-ligence.

Cut to long shot of street, Hark-rider and Paul walk away from the camera, Annette between them. Fadeout.

Harkrider: Come along, Madame Golkov.

Music: theme up and out.

To his right: "It ain't reasonable. All that shooting and yelling and falling down and not one person sticks his head out of a window to see what's going on. They should of had a few people looking out to see what's going on, otherwise it ain't reasonable."

"Yeah, who's fighting tonight?"

"Rocky Mausoleum against Rocky Mazzarella. From Toledo."

"Rocky Mazzarella beat Rocky Granatino, didn't he?"

"Ah, that was Rocky Bolderoni, and he whipped Rocky Capa-cola."

Them and their neatly packaged problems, them and their neatly packaged shows with beginning middle and end. The rite of the low-budget shot-in-Europe spy series, the rite of pugilism, the rite of the dog walk after dinner and the beer at the bar with cocelebrant worshippers at the high altar of Nothing.

9:30. Shot of Red Top and a beer, positively the last one until you get this figured out; you're beginning to buzz like a transformer.

Do they have transformers? Do they have vitamins? Do they have anything but that glaring green sky, and the rock altar and treasures like the Seal and the rusty gear with three broken teeth? "All smelling of iodoform. And all quite bald." But Galardo looked as if he were dying of tuberculosis, and the letter from the Serpentists was in a sick and straggling hand. Relics of medieval barbarism.

To his left-