“You don’t know what it is to want things so bad you’ll do anything to have them,” Maish said. “You’re a white shvartzeh, that’s why you don’t understand the niggers. That makes you as bad as the rest of us, the white ones who just don’t give a damn because we’re thinking of number one. Or maybe you’re worse.” He turned and started for the subway kiosk.

I’m not, Spurgeon assured himself.

Neither is everybody else.

“THEY AREN’T ALL LIKE YOU, MEYERSON!” he shouted. “THEY AREN’T!” But Maish had already disappeared down the stairway.

An old lady with blue-gray hair struck him with an Anglo-Saxon look like a rock. “Hippies,” she said, shaking her head.

Against his will, he was drawn to the ghetto.

The wind blew from the south and before he had crossed the frontier the faint bitter perfume of burning entered the Volks. Not all the people had stayed home to watch Jimmy Brown.

He drove very slowly.

The boards over the store windows looked pathetically ineffectual by daylight. Some of them had been torn off. At a package store a metal protective gate had been pried away at its hinges. The plate glass was broken and inside he could glimpse bare shelves and ruin on the floor. A sign on the front door—SOUL BROTHER—had been X’d out and replaced by another: DAMN LIAR.

The first fire was not far from the Aces High, a tenement, no doubt torched by someone who had had enough of rats and roaches.

The second fire he came upon was half a mile beyond, and no longer a fire. Half a dozen firefighters played two hoses over the scene of a lost battle. All that was left was the blackened brick foundation and a few charred spars.

He parked the car and walked to the ruin. “What was this?” he asked a fireman.

The man glanced at him coldly but said nothing. One for Maish, he thought.

“A furniture store,” one of the other firemen said.

“Thank you.”

He squatted on his haunches and looked at the smoking remains for a while, and then he got up and began to walk.

It was more of the same, block after block of shops barricaded against the whirlwind. Most of the stores that were not boarded were vacant. One had a painted sign that made him smile: AID STATION. The door was unlocked and he went in and the smile faded. It was no joke. In a cardboard Kleenex carton there were rolls of crude bandages, hardly aseptic, cut no doubt from old shirts and aprons by black women in their tenements, part of the greater plan of some Panther Napoleon, probably a Vietnam veteran, who had not led the Big One this time but who undoubtedly was looking toward The Next Time.