her eyes now. They were blue. It's a
color you never see. Almost no dusts have a bluish cast, there are few
blue objects except certain dark steels, the sky never gets very far
away from the orange range, though it is green from time to time, and
water reflects the sky.

Yes, she had blue eyes, blue eyes and that jaunty scar, blue eyes and
that jaunty scar and a dart gun and a steel hook for a right hand, and
we were walking side by side, eight feet apart, not an inch closer,
still not looking straight at each other, still not saying a word, and I
realized that the initial period of unadulterated watchfulness was over,
that I'd had adequate opportunity to inspect this girl and size her up,
and that night was coming on fast, and that here I was, once again, back
with _the problem of the two urges_.

I could try either to kill her or go to bed with her.

* * * * *

I know that at this point the cultural queers (and certainly our
imaginary time traveler from mid Twentieth Century) would make a great
noise about not understanding and not believing in the genuineness of
the simple urge to murder that governs the lives of us Deathlanders.
Like detective-story pundits, they would say that a man or woman murders
for gain, or concealment of crime, or from thwarted sexual desire or
outraged sexual possessiveness--and maybe they would list a few other
"rational" motives--but not, they would say, just for the simple sake of
murder, for the sure release and relief it gives, for the sake of wiping
out one recognizable bit more (the closest bit we can, since those of us
with the courage or lazy rationality to wipe out ourselves have long
since done so)--wiping out one recognizable bit more of the whole
miserable, unutterably disgusting human mess. Unless, they would say, a
person is completely insane, which is actually how all outsiders view us
Deathlanders. They can think of us in no other way.

I guess cultural queers and time travelers simply _don't_ understand,
though to be so blind it seems to me that they have to overlook much of
the history of the Last War and of the subsequent years, especially the
mushrooming of crackpot cults with a murder tinge: the werewolf gangs,
the Berserkers and Amuckers, the revival of Shiva worship and the Black
Mass, the machine wreckers, the kill-the-killers movements, the new
witchcraft, the Unholy Creepers, the Unconsciousers, the radioactive
blue gods and roc