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God’s sake, when were they going to tell him something? He was beginning to fill up with undirected anger but he wasn’t ready to think about revenge yet.
    The cop said lamely, “They’re doing everything they can.” It wasn’t clear whether he meant the detectives or the doctors.
    There was a loud groan. It could have been any one of a dozen people in the room. Paul wanted to bolt to his feet and force his way through the door; but he wouldn’t know where to turn once he got past it. And someone would throw him out.
    The rancid stink was maddening. After a while—he wasn’t reckoning time—the cop got to his feet clumsily, rattling the heavy accoutrements that hung like sinkers from his uniform belt. The thick handle of the revolver moved to Paul’s eye level.
    The cop said, “Look, I shouldn’t have stayed this long. I’ve got to get back to my partner. But if there’s anything I can do, just call the station house and ask for me, Joe Charles is my name again. I wish I could’ve been more help.”
    Paul looked up past the revolver at the cop’s hard young face. Jack reached up to shake the cop’s hand: “You’ve been damned kind.”

    They sat endlessly waiting for Authority to come and speak. Jack offered him a cigarette, forgetfully; Paul, who had never smoked, shook his head. Jack lit up the new cigarette from the glowing stub of the old one. Paul glanced up at the No Smoking sign but didn’t say anything.
    On the opposite bench a woman sat in evident pain but she kept stolidly knitting at something yellow: a man’s sock? A child’s sweater? Her face was taut and pale. Whatever her malaise she managed to clothe it in dignified resistance to fate. Paul felt like a voyeur; he looked away.
    Jack muttered, “They may have been kids you know. Just kids.”
    â€œWhat makes you say that?”
    â€œWe get them every day at Legal Aid. They’re out of their heads, that’s all. They’ll swallow ten of everything in the medicine cabinet and shoot up whatever they can lay their hands on.”
    â€œYou think these were hopped up?”
    â€œWell, that’s an obsolescent phrase, Pop, it doesn’t exactly apply any more. Maybe they were tripping on speed or maybe they were junkies overdue for a fix. Either drugs they’d taken or drugs they couldn’t get—it works both ways.”
    â€œWhat’s the point of speculating?” Paul said bleakly.
    â€œWell, it’s the only thing I can think of that might explain this. I mean there’s no rational motive for a thing like this.”
    â€œWe always have to make sense out of things, don’t we.”
    â€œSomething happens like this, you have to know why it happened, don’t you?”
    â€œWhat I’d like to know,” Paul answered viciously, “is why it couldn’t have been prevented from happening.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œChrist, I don’t know. There ought to be some way to get these animals off the streets before they can have a chance to do things like this. With all the technology we’ve developed you’d think there’d be some way to test them psychologically. Weed out the dangerous ones and treat them.”
    â€œA couple of hundred thousand addicts in the streets, Pop—who can afford to treat every one of them as long as we go on spending seventy percent of the budget beefing up weapons to overkill the rest of the world?”
    You sat in a dismal emergency waiting room and talked tired generalities. It always came around to that. But neither of them had any real heart for it and they lapsed quickly into fearful silence.

    It was the kind of place in which you did not look at things; you avoided looking. Paul’s eyes flicked from the door to his knotted hands and back again.
    Jack got up and began striding back and forth, too vinegary to sit still. One or two people glanced