m. Had she heard the tale that was
going around that South America and the French Riviera had survived the
Last War absolutely untouched?--and the obviously ridiculous rider that
they had blue skies there and saw stars every third night? Did she think
that subsequent conditions were showing that the Earth actually had
plunged into an interstellar dust cloud coincidentally with the start of
the Last War (the dust cloud used as a cover for the first attacks, some
said) or did she still hold with the majority that the dust was solely
of atomic origin with a little help from volcanoes and dry spells? How
many green sunsets had she seen in the last year?

* * * * *

After we'd chewed over those racy topics and some more like them, and
incidentally got bored with guessing and fabricating, we might, if we
felt especially daring and conversation were going particularly well,
even take a chance on talking a little about our childhoods, about how
things were before the Last War (though she was almost too young for
that)--about the _little_ things we remembered--the big things were much
too dangerous topics to venture on and sometimes even the little
memories could suddenly twist you up as if you'd swallowed lye.

But after that there wouldn't be anything left to talk about. Anything
you'd risk talking about, that is. For instance, no matter how long we
talked, it was very unlikely that we'd either of us tell the other
anything complete or very accurate about how we lived from day to day,
about our techniques of surviving and staying sane or at least
functional--that would be too imprudent, it would go too much against
the grain of any player of the murder game. Would I tell her, or anyone,
about how I worked the ruses of playing dead and disguising myself as a
woman, about my trick of picking a path just before dark and then
circling back to it by a pre-surveyed route, about the chess games I
played with myself, about the bottle of green, terribly hot-looking
powder I carried to sprinkle behind me to bluff off pursuers? A fat
chance of my revealing things like that!

And when all the talk was over, what would it have gained us? Our
minds would be filled with a lot of painful stuff better kept
buried--meaningless hopes, scraps of vicarious living in "cultured"
communities, memories that were nothing but melancholy given concrete
form. The melancholy is easiest to bear when it's the diffused
backg