ket devils of the Atomites, and a dozen other groupings
clearly prefiguring Deathlander psychology. Those cults had all been as
unpredictable as Thuggee or the Dancing Madness of the Middle Ages or
the Children's Crusade, yet they had happened just the same.

But cultural queers are good at overlooking things. They have to be, I
suppose. They think they're humanity growing again. Yes, despite their
laughable warpedness and hysterical crippledness, they actually
believe--each howlingly different community of them--that they're the
new Adams and Eves. They're all excited about themselves and whether or
not they wear fig leaves. They don't carry with them, twenty-four hours
a day, like us Deathlanders do, the burden of all that was forever lost.

* * * * *

Since I've gone this far I'll go a bit further and make the paradoxical
admission that even us Deathlanders don't really understand our urge to
murder. Oh, we have our rationalizations of it, just like everyone has
of his ruling passion--we call ourselves junkmen, scavengers, gangrene
surgeons; we sometimes believe we're doing the person we kill the
ultimate kindness, yes and get slobbery tearful about it afterwards; we
sometimes tell ourselves we've finally found and are rubbing out the one
man or woman who was responsible for everything; we talk, mostly to
ourselves, about the aesthetics of homicide; we occasionally admit, but
only each to himself alone, that we're just plain nuts.

But we don't really understand our urge to murder, we only _feel_ it.

At the hateful sight of another human being, we feel it begins to grow
in us until it becomes an overpowering impulse that jerks us, like a
puppet is jerked by its strings, into the act itself or its attempted
commission.

Like I was feeling it grow in me now as we did this parallel deathmarch
through the reddening haze, me and this girl and our problem. This girl
with the blue eyes and the jaunty scar.

The problem of the _two_ urges, I said. The other urge, the sexual, is
one that I know all cultural queers (and certainly our time traveler)
would claim to know all about. Maybe they do. But I wonder if they
understand how intense it can be with us Deathlanders when it's the only
release (except maybe liquor and drugs, which we seldom can get and even
more rarely dare use)--the only complete release, even though a brief
one, from the overpowering loneliness and from the tyranny of th