PYTHIAS PYTHIAS By FREDERIK POHL Sure, Larry Connaught saved my life—but it was how he did it that forced me to murder him! Sure, Larry Connaught saved my life—but it was how he did it that forced me to murder him! Illustrated by MEL HUNTER I am sitting on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive-drab. It isn't comfortable; but of course they expect to make me still more uncomfortable. I am They expect to take me out of this precinct jail to the District prison and eventually to the death house. Sure, there will be a trial first, but that is only a formality. Not only did they catch me with the smoking gun in my hand and Connaught bubbling to death through the hole in his throat, but I admitted it. I—knowing what I was doing, with, as they say, malice aforethought—deliberately shot to death Laurence Connaught. They execute murderers. So they mean to execute me. Especially because Laurence Connaught had saved my life. Well, there are extenuating circumstances. I do not think they would convince a jury. Connaught and I were close friends for years. We lost touch during the war. We met again in Washington, a few years after the war was over. We had, to some extent, grown apart; he had become a man with a mission. He was working very hard on something and he did not choose to discuss his work and there was nothing else in his life on which to form a basis for communication. And—well, I had my own life, too. It wasn't scientific research in my case—I flunked out of med school, while he went on. I'm not ashamed of it; it is nothing to be ashamed of. I simply was not able to cope with the messy business of carving corpses. I didn't like it, I didn't want to do it, and when I was forced to do it,
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