“Look,” Fergesson called as he walked rapidly toward the entrance of his shop. “You cut it out; someday maybe you’ll be sick, and how’ll you like some goof gawking at you when you try to seek medical help?”

“Hey,” Stuart answered, turning his head, “I just saw some important guy go in there but I can’t recall who.”

“Only a neurotic watches other neurotics,” Fergesson said, and passed on into the store, to the register, which he opened and began to fill with change and bills for the day ahead.

Anyhow, Fergesson thought, wait’ll you see what I hired for a TV repairman; you’ll really have something to stare at.

“Listen, McConchie,” Fergessson said. “You know that kid with no arms and legs that comes by on that cart? That phocomelus with just those dinky flippers whose mother took that drug back in the early ‘60s? The one that always hangs around because he wants to be a TV repairman?”

Stuart, standing with his broom, said, “You hired him.”

“Yeah, yesterday while you were out selling.”

Presently McConchie said, “It’s bad for business.”

“Why? Nobody’ll see him; he’ll be downstairs in the repair department. Anyhow you have to give those people jobs; it isn’t their fault they have no arms or legs, it’s those Germans’ fault.”

Ater a pause Stuart McConchie said, “First you hire me, a Negro, and now a phoce. Well, I have to hand it to you, Fergesson; you’re trying to do right.”

Feeling anger, Fergesson said, “I not only try, I do; I’m not just daydreaming, like you. I’m a man who makes up his mind and acts.” He went to open the store safe. “His name is Hoppy. He’ll be in this morning. You ought to see him move stuff with his electronic hands; it’s a marvel of modern science.”

“I’ve seen,” Stuart said.

“And it pains you.”

Gesturing, Stuart said, “It’s—unnatural.”

Fergesson glared at him. “Listen, don’t say anything along the lines of razzing to the kid; if I catch you or any of the other salesmen or anybody who works for me—”

“Okay,” Stuart muttered.

“You’re bored,” Fergesson said, “and boredom is bad because it means you’re not exerting yourself fully; you’re slacking off, and on my time. If you worked hard, you wouldn’t have time to lean on that broom and poke fun at poor sick people going to the doctor. I forbid you to stand outside on the sidewalk ever again; if I catch you you’re fired.”

“Oh Christ, how am I supposed to come and go and go eat? How do I get into the store in the first place? Through the wall?”

“You can come and go,” Fergesson decided, “but you can’t loiter.”

Glaring after him dolefully, Stuart McConchie protested, “Aw cripes!”

Fergesson however paid no attention to his TV salesman; he began turning on displays and signs, preparing for the day ahead.

The phocomelus Hoppy Harrington generally wheeled up to Modern TV Sales & Service about eleven each morning. He generally glided into the shop, stopping his cart by the counter, and if Jim Fergesson was around he asked to be allowed to go downstairs to watch the two TV repairmen at work. However, if Fergesson was not around, Hoppy gave up and after a while wheeled off, because he knew that the salesmen would not let him go downstairs;’ they merely ribbed him, gave him the run-around. He did not mind. Or at least as far as Stuart McConchie could tell, he did not mind.

But actually, Stuart realized; he did not understand Hoppy, who had a sharp face with bright eyes and a quick, nervous manner of speech which often became jumbled into a stammer. He did not understand him psychologically. Why did Hoppy want to repair TV sets? What was so great about that? The way the phoce hung around, one would think it was the most exalted calling of all. Actually, repairwork was hard, dirty, and did not pay too well. But Hoppy was passionately determined to become a TV repairman, and now he had succeeded, because Fergesson was determined to do right by all the minority groups in the world. Fergesson was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP and the Help for the Handicapped League—the latter being, as far as Stuart could tell, nothing but a lobby group on an international scale, set up to promote soft berths for all the victims of modern medicine and science, such as the multitude from the Bluthgeld Catastrophe of 1972.

And what does that make me? Stuart asked himself as he sat upstairs in the store’s office, going over his sales book. I mean, he thought, with a phoce working here… that practically makes me a radiation freak, too, as if being colored was a sort of early form of radiation burn. He felt gloomy thinking about it.

Once upon a time, he thought, all the people on Earth were white, and then some horse’s ass set off a high-altitude bomb back say around ten thousand years ago, and some of us got seared and it was permanent; it affected our genes. So here we are today.

Another salesman, Jack Lightheiser, came and sat down at the desk across from him and lit a Corina cigar. “I hear Jim’s hired that kid on the cart,” Lightheiser said. “You know why he did it, don’t you? For publicity. The S.F. newspapers’ll write it up. Jim loves getting his name in the paper. It’s a smart move, when you get down to it. The first retail dealer in the East Bay to hire a phoce.”

Stuart grunted.

“Jim’s got an idealized image of himself,” Lightheiser said. “He isn’t just a merchant; he’s a modern Roman, he’s civic-minded. After all, he’s an educated man—he’s got a master’s degree from Stanford.”

“That doesn’t mean anything any more,” Stuart said. He himself had gotten a master’s degree from Cal, back in 1975, and look where it had got him.

“It did when he got it,” Lightheiser said. “After all, he graduated back in 1947; he was on that GI Bill they had.”

Below them, at the front door of Modern TV, a cart appeared, in the center of which, at a bank of controls, sat a slender figure. Stuart groaned and Lightheiser glanced at him.

“He’s a pest,” Stuart said.

“He won’t be when he gets started working,” Lightheiser said. “The kid is all brain, no body at all, hardly. That’s a powerful mind he’s got, and he also has ambition. Cod, he’s only seventeen years old and what he wants to do is work, get out of school and work. That’s admirable.”

The two of them watched Hoppy on his cart; Hoppy was wheeling toward the stairs which descended to the TV repair department.

“Do the guys downstairs know, yet?” Stuart asked.

“Oh sure, Jim told them last night. They’re philosophical; you know how TV repairmen are—they griped about it but it doesn’t mean anything; they gripe all the’ time anyhow.”

Hearing the salesman’s voice, Hoppy glanced sharply up. His thin, bleak face confronted them; his eyes blazed and he said stammeringly, “Hey, is Mr. Fergesson in right now?”

“Naw,” Stuart said.

“Mr. Fergesson hired me,” the phoce said.

“Yeah,” Stuart said. Neither he nor Lightheiser moved; they remained seated at the desk, gazing down at the phoce.

“Can I go downstairs?” Hoppy asked.

Lightheiser shrugged.

“I’m going out for a cup of coffee,” Stuart said, rising to his feet. “I’ll be back in ten minutes; watch the floor for me, okay?”

“Sure,” Lightheiser said, nodding as he smoked his cigar.

When Stuart reached the main floor he found the phoce still there; he had not begun the difficult descent down to the basement.

“Spirit of 1972,” Stuart said as he passed the cart.

The phoce flushed and stammered, “I was born in 1964; it had nothing to do with that blast.” As Stuart went out the door onto the sidewalk the phoce called after him anxiously, “It was that drug, that thalidomide. Everybody knows that.”

Stuart said nothing; he continued on toward the coffee shop.