“Nowadays we’d have a hard time living that slowly though, don’t you think?”

“Uh-huh.”

There’s something lacking in this conversation. Jim is about to ask his companions if they have brains at home they can plug in but forgot to bring, or if they have to pretend like this all the time, when Tashi interrupts. “Hey McPherson,” he says from the French doors to the game room. “Come take up the paddle.”

Of course this is Jim the Fool they’re requesting. His ping-pong style is a bit unorthodox, call it clumsy in fact; but that’s okay. Any request is better than none.

Arthur Bastanchury is just finishing off Humphrey Riggs, and Humphrey, Jim’s boss at the real estate office, hands over the sweaty paddle to Jim with a muttered curse. Jim’s up against the Ping-Pong King.

Arthur Bastanchury, the Ping-Pong King, is about six feet two, eyes of blue, dark-haired and wide-shouldered. Women like him. He’s also a dedicated antiwar activist and underground newspaper publisher, which Jim admires, as Jim has socialist ideas himself. And an all-round Good Guy. Yes, Arthur, in Jim’s opinion, is someone to reckon with.

They take a long warm-up, and Jim discovers he has blinked the wrong amount of Pattern Perception. He can see the cat’s cradle in time that he and Arthur are creating, but only well after the fact, and the contrail-like after-images of the white ball are distracting. It looks like trouble for McPherson.

They start and it turns out to be even worse than he expected. Jim’s got quick hands, but he is awkward, there’s no denying it. And his fine-tuning is badly out of order. Giving up, more or less, he decides to go recklessly on the attack, thinking Let’s get this fucking pinko, which is funny since he actually agrees completely with what he knows of Arthur’s political views. But now it’s useful to go into a redkiller mindset.

Also useful not to care about appearances; Arthur is a power player with a monster slam, and Jim has to make some, well, funny moves—twists and contortions, dives into the walls and such.… In fact, Angela hears he’s playing and comes in to move her plants out of danger. Fine, more room to maneuver.

Still, Jim is losing badly when he tries a vicious topspin and smacks himself right in the forehead with the edge of his paddle. General laughter accompanies this move; but actually, after the pain recedes and the black lights leave his vision, the blow seems to have stimulated something inside Jim’s brain. Synapses are knocked into new arrangements, new axons sprout immediately, the whole game suddenly becomes very clear. He can see two or three hits ahead of time where the ball is destined to go.