My Library

We sat silently, they permitted my cigars. They watched my face as I got the implications of their power connections together with what they had said earlier. They were not joking. Even though I was sweating, I shuddered. I was afraid. I suddenly knew what the covert purpose of the aspic dinner was. Some one had asked them to feel me out -- without putting any direct questions -- well, not TOO direct anyway. Ah, yes, this is how sensitive business is done -- Lord knows that I’d seen this kind of thing in the U.N., and elsewhere. Decisions are made without putting anything into print, sometimes not even into words. What the public then sees is just the formalizing of a lifted finger, an arched eyebrow. Out of nowhere, my entire life flashed through in a split second, like when one is dying. And then the flashing pictures came to a still stop of me sitting on the subway steps and having a vision of our species potential -- that same potential that would never open up via parapsychology. Something in me -- not ME, but something in me -- said: "Well, one WOULD be chicken shit not to play the game." With that, Al stood up and said they were going to bed because the air conditioner in the bedroom worked. I didn’t take the subway home. I walked -- more or less like a zombie. I felt completely empty. Chapter 46