Herries leaned in the doorway, sagging with tiredness and the monstrous duty to survive. A gust of wind threw rain into his eyes. He heard dragons calling in the night.

“And you?” he said, for no good reason.

“I shall convey any final messages you may wish to send home,” said the dried-out voice.

Neat little footsteps clicked across the floor until the clerk paused beside the engineer. There was silence, except for the rain.

“Surely I will deserve to go home,” said Symonds.

And suddenly the breath whistled inward between teeth which had snapped together. He raised his hands, claw-fingered and screamed aloud: “You can let me go home then!”

He began running toward the supervisors’ barge. The sound of him was soon lost. Herries stood for a time yet in the door.

Clausius’ Chaos

Entropy, Shmentropy,
Rudolph J. Clausius
Proved universally
Chaos will show
Increase in processes
Thermodynamical.
Something that housekeepers
Already know.

Journey’s End

—doctor bill & twinges in chest but must be all right maybe indigestion & dinner last night & wasn’t audrey giving me the glad eye & how the hell is a guy to know & maybe i can try and find out & what a fool i can look if she doesn’t—

—goddam idiot & they shouldn’t let some people drive & oh all right so the examiner was pretty lenient with me i haven’t had a bad accident yet & christ blood all over my blood let’s face it i’m scared to drive but the buses are no damn good & straight up three paces & man in a green hat & judas i ran that red light—

In fifteen years a man got used to it, more or less. He could walk down the street and hold his own thoughts to himself while the surf of unvoiced voices was a nearly ignored mumble in his brain. Now and then, of course, you got something very bad, it stood up in your skull and shrieked at you.

Norman Kane, who had come here because he was in love with a girl he had never seen, got to the corner of University and Shattuck just when the light turned against him. He paused, fetching out a cigarette with nicotine-yellowed fingers while traffic slithered in front of his eyes.

It was an unfavorable time, four-thirty in the afternoon, homeward rush of nervous systems jangled with weariness and hating everything else on feet or wheels. Maybe he should have stayed in the bar down on San Pablo. It had been pleasantly cool and dim, the bartender’s mind an amiable cud-chewing somnolence, and he could have suppressed awareness of the woman.

No, maybe not. When the city had scraped your nerves raw, they didn’t have much resistance to the slime in some heads.

Odd, he reflected how often the outwardly polite ones were the foully twisted inside. They wouldn’t dream of misbehaving in public, but just below the surface of consciousness…Better not think of it, better not remember. Berkeley was at least preferable to San Francisco or Oakland. The bigger the town, the more evil it seemed to hold, three centimeters under the frontal bone. New York was almost literally uninhabitable.