if I'd been able to think calmly, maybe if I'd just had
some breakfast or a little coffee inside me, or even if there'd been
some hot breakfast to eat at that moment, I'd have recognized my
irritation for the irrational, one-mosquito surge of negative feeling
that it was.

Even without breakfast, if I'd just had the knowledge that there was a
reasonably secure day ahead of me in which there'd be an opportunity for
me to straighten out my feelings, I wouldn't have been irked, or at
least being irked wouldn't have bothered me terribly.

But a sense of security is an even rarer commodity in the Deathlands
than a hot breakfast.

Given just the ghost of a sense of security and/or some hot breakfast,
I'd have told myself that she was merely being amusingly coquettish
about her bald streak and her hair, that it was natural for a woman to
try to preserve some mystery about herself in front of the man she beds
with.

But you get leery of any kind of mystery in the Deathlands. It makes you
frightened and angry, like it does an animal. Mystery is for cultural
queers, strictly. The only way for two people to get along together in
the Deathlands, even for a while, is never to hide anything and never to
make a move that doesn't have an immediate clear explanation. You can't
talk, you see, certainly not at first, and so you can't explain anything
(most explanations are just lies and dreams, anyway), so you have to be
doubly careful and explicit about everything you do.

* * * * *

This girl wasn't being either. Right now, on top of her other
gaucheries, she was unscrewing the comb from her wrist--an unfriendly if
not quite a hostile act, as anyone must admit.

Understand, please, I wasn't _showing_ any of these negative reactions
of mine any more than she was showing hers, except for her stopping
smiling. In fact _I hadn't_ stopped smiling, I was playing the game to
the hilt.

But inside me everything was stewed up and the other urge had come back
and presently it would begin to grow again. That's the trouble, you
know, with sex as a solution to the problem of the two urges. It's fine
while it lasts but it wears itself out and then you're back with Urge
Number One and you have nothing left to balance it with.

Oh, I wouldn't kill this girl today, I probably wouldn't seriously think
of killing her for a month or more, but Old Urge Number One would be
there and growing, mostly under cover, all