on the city squares (I call 'em cultural
queers) and what sort of screwed-up fatheads they are, but just the same
for a man to quit killing he's got to quit lone-wolfing it. He's got to
belong to a community, he's got to have a culture of some sort, no
matter how disgusting or nutsy."

"Well," Pop said, "don't us Deathlanders have a culture? With customs
and folkways and all the rest? A very tight little culture, in fact.
Nutsy as all get out, of course, but that's one of the beauties of it."

"Oh sure," I granted him, "but it's a culture based on murder and
devoted wholly to murder. Murder is our way of life. That gets your
argument nowhere, Pop."

"Correction," he said. "Or rather, re-interpretation." And now for a
little while his voice got less old-man harsh and yet bigger somehow, as
if it were more than just Pop talking. "Every culture," he said, "is a
way of growth as well as a way of life, because the first law of life is
growth. Our Deathland culture is devoted to growing _through_ murder
_away from_ murder. That's my thought. It's about the toughest way of
growth anybody was ever asked to face up to, but it's a way of growth
just the same. A lot bigger and fancier cultures never could figure out
the answer to the problem of war and killing--_we_ know that, all right,
we inhabit their grandest failure. Maybe us Deathlanders, working with
murder every day, unable to pretend that it isn't part of every one of
us, unable to put it out of our minds like the city squares do--maybe us
Deathlanders are the ones to do that little job."

"But hell, Pop," I objected, getting excited in spite of myself, "even
if we got a culture here in the Deathlands, a culture that can grow, it
ain't a culture that can deal with repentant murderers. In a _real_
culture a murderer feels guilty and confesses and then he gets hanged
or imprisoned a long time and that squares things for him and everybody.
You need religion and courts and hangmen and screws and all the rest of
it. I don't think it's enough for a man just to say he's sorry and go
around glad-handing other killers--_that_ isn't going to be enough to
wipe out his sense of guilt."

Pop squared his eyes at mine. "Are you so fancy that you have to have a
sense of guilt, Ray?" he demanded. "Can't you just see when something's
lousy? A sense of guilt's a luxury. Of course it's not enough to say
you're sorry--you're going to have to spend a good part of the rest of
your life mak