Ballroom of the Skies by John D. MacDonald Page B

world became a little bit better each year. But then, following the first two world wars, the dream had somehow become reversed. Men of good will began to believe that the world was getting worse. Thought became nihilistic, or existentialistic. Praise the gods of nothingness.
    Yet somehow there had been more vitality in thinking the world was getting worse than in the tepid philosophizings of the middle sixties when it was believed that the world never gets better or worse—it remains always on an even keel of disorder, Christ played off against Dachau, with the game always ending in a draw. A bad time for functional idealism. Patrice and Miguel were the inevitable products of the culture. Let me get mine—fast.
    How much simpler to fall into their way of life. The devil take my grandchildren. Corruption is always with us. The game always ends in a draw, and all the efforts of one man cannot affect that immutable decision.
    Patrice provided the easy doorway. She had always urged him to come in with her. “There are so many things you could do, darling. I need someone to handle public relations, to deal with some of my compadres who seem to resent dealing with a woman. Some of the Indians look at me as though they thought I should be in purdah. I could pay you well, but it wouldn’t be charity or a gift or anything, because I
do
need you.”
    Not quite yet, Patrice. Not until I can recognize theinevitability of defeat. And maybe I’ll never recognize that.
    As the aircraft dipped over Philadelphia he saw that there had been another one of the power failures which seemed to become more frequent each year. Angular sections of the city were blacked out. Nobody screamed with outraged indignation anymore. With enough technicians, money and standby equipment, there would be no power failures. But Philadelphia, as all other cities, lacked all three factors. Standard correctional procedure was to appoint a committee to look into the findings of the committee which had been appointed to make a survey. The answer was always the same. We lack oil and coal and ore and copper and zinc and tin and timber and men.
    He caught a cab, had to transfer to another when the first one broke down. He felt uneasy riding through the dark streets with the money in his wallet. Philadelphia was infested with child gangs. The dissolution and decay of the school system had put them on the streets. They had the utter, unthinking ruthlessness of children in all ages. The guerrilla days had filled the land with weapons. Put an antique zip gun in the hands of an eleven-year-old child from a prono-saturated home, and you had an entity which thought only in terms of the pleasing clatter of the gun itself, with imagination so undeveloped as yet that the adults who were ripped by the slugs were not creatures capable of feeling pain, but merely exciting symbols of an alien race. They were like the children he had read about who had lived in caves in the rubble of Berlin after the Second World War.
    He got out of the cab in front of Patrice’s house, saw the lights and felt secure again. The cab drove away as he started up the walk. The faint movement of a shadow among shadows startled him. He saw it from the corner of his eye. He turned quickly, saw nothing. He waited for a few moments and then turned toward the house. The pretty Japanese maid opened the door and gave him her usual welcoming smile, glinting with gold.
    “Good evening, Mr. Lor—–”
    He had stepped into the hall. She stared at him and herface changed, grotesquely. She put one hand to her throat. She took a step backward and her eyes bulged in a glassy way as though, at last, after years of nightmare, she now faced the ultimate horror.
    “What’s wrong with you?”
    She took another step and suddenly crumpled, to lie still on the hall rug. He leaned over her. Patrice came out into the hall.
    “Dake! What on earth happened to Molly?”
    “I don’t know. She just stared at me and looked