tails.

Together they walk down the street, moving with slow insolence, their lips curled in snarls or slack with indifference, their eyes glittering with hidden hatreds. But they are not alone in the city. The college boys are coming, in their dirty jeans and beer-stained tee-shirts; so too are the lawyers, in dusty jackets and leather pants; so come the doctors and the businessmen, on stolen motorcycles; the bricklayers and gas station attendants, the beatniks and dope pushers, the bankers and lifesaving instructors, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers... they are all coming, flocking into the city for reasons not their own, wandering in twos and threes and twenties, all of them sullen and quiet, all of them shuffling beneath darkly-hued clouds of ill intent, all of them proud and deadly and virile, filling the streets by the thousands now, turning the streets into rivers of flesh....

"Hey, Johnny," says Chester, "let's cool this dump."

"Man, let's make it with the skirts," says Bartholomew.

"I don see no skirts," says Chester.

"You pig," snarls Ozzie.

The mob is monstrous now, like a pride of lion cubs, beyond count in their number, without equal in their leonine strength, above the common quick in their immortal pride, milling through the hot black veldt, swarming in the city streets. Millions of them, more than the eye can see or the mind can bear. It seems that no man sleeps, that every male in the great city must walk tonight.

"Johnny," says Chester, "I don dig no chicks on the turf."

"Eeee, colay. What a drag," whispers Bartholomew.

"You goddam logical positivist," snarls Ozzie.

An uneasy sound ripples through the mob, like the angry hiss of an injured ego, moving from street to street and swelling upward in a sudden, angry roar ... they want their women, the dance-hall girls, the young waitresses, the nowhere chicks in five dollar dresses, the Spanish girls with eyes as dark as the Spanish night. And then, as though by accident, one man looks up at the starry sky and sees her—sees her standing on a balcony far above them, twenty stories above them, up where the wind can blow her hair and billow her blue dress like an orchid of the night.

She laughs gently, without fear, gazing down at the mindless mob of rebels.

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