that oration started up my sickness again and irked me
not a little. Dammit, what right had Pop to talk about how all us
Deathlanders _had to_ kill (which was true enough and by itself would
have made me cotton to him) if as he'd claimed earlier _he'd_ been able
to quit killing? Pop was, an old hypocrite, I told myself--he'd helped
murder the Pilot, he'd admitted as much--and Alice and me'd be better
off if we bedded the both of them down together. But then the second
part of what Pop said so made me want to feel pleasantly sorry for
myself and laugh at the same time that I forgave the old geezer.
Practically everything Pop said had that reassuring touch of insanity
about it.

So it was Alice who said, "Shut up, Pop"--and rather casually at
that--and she and me went on to speculate and then to argue about which
buttons we ought to push, if any and in what order.

"Why not just start anywhere and keep pushing 'em one after
another?--you're going to have to eventually, may as well start now,"
was Pop's light-hearted contribution to the discussion. "Got to take
some chances in this life." He was sitting in the back seat and still
nibbling away like a white-topped mangy old squirrel.

Of course Alice and me knew more than that. We kept making guesses as to
how the buttons worked and then backing up our guesses with hot
language. It was a little like two savages trying to decide how to play
chess by looking at the pieces. And then the old escape-to-paradise
theme took hold of us again and we studied the colored blobs on the
World screen, trying to decide which would have the fanciest
accommodations for blase ex-murderers. On the North America screen too
there was an intriguing pink patch in southern Mexico that seemed to
take in old Mexico City and Acapulco too.

"Quit talking and start pushing," Pop prodded us. "This way you're
getting nowhere fast. I can't stand hesitation, it riles my nerves."

Alice thought you ought to push ten buttons at once, using both hands,
and she was working out patterns for me to try. But I was off on a kick
about how we should darken the plane to see if any of the other buttons
glowed beside the one with the Atla-Hi violet.

"Look here, you killed a big man to get this plane," Pop broke in,
coming up behind me. "Are you going to use it for discussion groups or
are you going to fly it?"

"Quiet," I told him. I'd got a new hunch and was using the dark glasses
to scan the instrument panel.