oice said, "Done a murder, hey?"

Advancing briskly around the skewily grounded plane from the direction
of the cracking plant was an old geezer, a seasoned, hard-baked
Deathlander if I ever saw one. He had a shock of bone-white hair, the
rest of him that showed from his weathered gray clothing looked fried by
the sun's rays and others to a stringy crisp, and strapped to his boots
and weighing down his belt were a good dozen knives.

Not satisfied with the unnerving noise he'd made already, he went on
brightly, "Neat job too, I give you credit for that, but why the hell
did you have to set the guy afire?"

CHAPTER 3

_We are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals.
None of us stands outside humanity's black collective shadow._

--The Undiscovered Self,
_by Carl Jung_

Ordinarily scroungers who hide around on the outskirts until the
killing's done and then come in to share the loot get what they
deserve--wordless orders, well backed up, to be on their way at once.
Sometimes they even catch an after-clap of the murder urge, if it hasn't
all been expended on the first victim or victims. Yet they _will_ do it,
trusting I suppose to the irresistible glamor of their personalities.
There were several reasons why we didn't at once give Pop this
treatment.

In the first place we didn't neither of us have our distance weapons. My
revolver and her dart gun were both tucked in the cave back at the edge
of the freeway. And there's one bad thing about a bugger so knife-happy
he lugs them around by the carload--he's generally good at tossing them.
With his dozen or so knives Pop definitely outgunned us.

Second, we were both of us without the use of an arm. That's right, the
both of us. My right arm still dangled like a string of sausages and I
couldn't yet feel any signs of it coming undead. While she'd burned her
fingers badly grabbing at the gun--I could see their red-splotched tips
now as she pulled them out of her mouth for a second to wipe the Pilot's
blood out of her eyes. All she had was her stump with the knife screwed
to it. Me, I can throw a knife left-handed if I have to, but you bet I
wasn't going to risk Mother that way.

Then I'd no sooner heard Pop's voice, breathy and a little high like an
old man's will get, than it occurred to me that he must have been the
one who had given the fu