“What’s that for?” the corporal asked, shining the light into the metal of the scissors.

“I’ll kill myself,” Mufi said. “If you don’t go away and—leave us alone.” He stuck the closed blades of the scissors against his hair-darkened chest, near his heart.

“Then it isn’t Mrs. Mufi,” the corporal said. He returned the circle of light to the other, huddled up, sheet-covered shape. “A wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am one-time gangbang? Turning your foxy apartment into a motel room?” The corporal walked to the bed, took hold of the top sheet and blankets, then yanked them back.

In the bed beside Mr. Mufi lay a boy, slender, young, naked, with long golden hair.

“I’ll be darned,” the corporal said.

One of his men said, “I’ve got the scissors.” He tossed them onto the floor by the corporal’s right foot.

To Mr. Mufi, who sat trembling and panting, his eyes startled with terror, the corporal said, “How old is this boy?”

The boy had awakened now; he gazed fixedly up but did not stir. No expression appeared on his soft, vaguely formed face.

“Thirteen,” Mr. Mufi said croakingly, almost pleadingly. “Legal age of consent.”

To the boy the corporal said, “Can you prove it?” He felt intense revulsion now. Acute physical revulsion, making him want to barf. The bed was stained and damp with half-dried sweat and genital secretions.

“ID,” Mufi panted. “In his wallet. In his pants on the chair.”

One of the team of pols said to the corporal, “You mean if this juve’s thirteen there’s no crime involved?”

“Hell,” another pol said indignantly. “It’s obviously a crime, a perverted crime. Let’s run them both in.”

“Wait a minute. Okay?” The corporal found the boy’s pants, rummaged, found the wallet, got it out, inspected the identification. Sure enough. Thirteen years old. He shut the wallet and put it back in the pocket. “No,” he said, still half enjoying the situation, amused by Mufi’s naked shame but becoming each moment more and more revolted by the man’s cowardly horror at being disclosed. “The new revision of the Penal Code, 640.3, has it that twelve is the age of consent for a minor to engage in a sexual act either with another child of either sex or an adult also of either sex but with only one at a time.”

“But it’s goddamn sick,” one of his pols protested.

“That’s your opinion,” Mufi said, more bravely now.

“Why isn’t it a bust, a hell of a big bust?” the pols standing beside him persisted.

“They’re systematically taking all victimless crimes off the books,” the corporal said. “That’s been the process for ten years.”

“This? This is victimless?”

To Mufi, the corporal said, “What do you find about young boys that you like? Let me in on it; I’ve always wondered about scans like you.”

“‘Scans,’ “Mufi echoed, his mouth twisting with discomfort. “So that’s what I am.”

“It’s a category,” the corporal said. “Those who prey on minors for homosexual purposes. Legal but still abhorred. What do you do during the day?”

“I’m a used-quibble salesman.”

“And if they, your employers, knew you were a scan they wouldn’t want you handling their quibbles. Not after what those hairy white hands have been handling outside the workday. Right, Mr. Mufi? Even a used-quibble salesman can’t get away morally with being a scan. Even if it’s no longer on the books.”

Mufi said, “It was my mother’s fault. She dominated my father, who was a weak man.”

“How many little boys have you induced to go down on you during the last twelve months?” the corporal inquired. “I’m serious. Are these all one-night stands, is that it?”

“I love Ben,” Mufi said, staring fixedly ahead, his mouth barely moving. “Later on, when I’m better off financially and can provide, I intend to marry him.”

To the boy Ben, the corporal said, “Do you want us to take you out of here? Return you to your parents?”

“He lives here,” Mufi said, grinning a little.

“Yeah, I’ll stay here,” the boy said sullenly. He shivered. “Cripes, could you give me the covers back?” He reached irritably for the top blanket.

“Just keep the noise level down in here,” the corporal said, moving away wearily. “Christ. And they took it off the books.”

“Probably,” Mufi said, with confidence now that the pols were beginning to depart from his bedroom, “because some of those big overweight old police marshals are screwing kids themselves and don’t want to get sent up. They couldn’t stand the scandal.” His grin grew into an insinuating leer.

“I hope,” the corporal said, “that someday you do commit a statute violation of some kind, and they haul you in, and I’m on duty the day it happens. So I can book you personally.” He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his hairy, empty face.

Silently, the team of pols made their way through the living room of cigarette butts, ashes, twisted-up packs, half-filled drink glasses, to the corridor and porchway outside. The corporal yanked the door shut, shivered, stood for a moment, feeling the bleakness of his mind, its withdrawal, for a moment, from the environment around him. He then said, “Two eleven. Mrs. Ruth Gomen. Where the Taverner suspect has to be, if he’s anywhere around here at all, it being the last one.” Finally, he thought.

He knocked on the front door of 211. And stood waiting with his plastic and shot nightstick gripped at ready, terribly and completely all at once not caring shit about his job. “We’ve seen Mufi,” he said, half to himself. “Now let’s see what Mrs. Gomen is like. You think she’ll be any better? Let’s hope so. I can’t take much more of that tonight.”

“Anything would be better,” one of the pols beside him said somberly. They all nodded and shuffled about, preparing themselves for slow footsteps beyond the door.

In the living room of Ruth Rae’s lavish, lovely, newly built apartment in the Fireflash District of Las Vegas, Jason Taverner said, “I’m reasonably sure I can count on forty-eight hours on the outside and twenty-four on the inside. So I feel fairly certain that I don’t have to get out of here immediately.” And if our revolutionary new principle is correct, he thought, then this assumption will modify the situation to my advantage. I will be safe.

THE THEORY CHANGES—

“I’m glad,” Ruth said wanly, “that you’re able to remain here with me in a civilized way so we can rap a little longer. You want anything more to drink? Scotch and Coke, maybe?”

THE THEORY CHANGES THE REALITY IT DESCRIBES.

“No,” he said, and prowled about the living room, listening … to what he did not know. Perhaps the absence of sounds. No TV sets muttering, no thump of feet against the floor above their heads. Not even a pornochord somewhere, blasting out from a quad. “Are the walls fairly thick in these apartments?” he asked Ruth sharply.

“I never hear anything.”

“Does anything seem strange to you? Out of the ordinary?”

“No.” Ruth shook her head.

“You damn dumb floogle,” he said savagely. She gaped at him in injured perplexity. “I know,” he grated, “that they have me. Now. Here. In this room.”

The doorbell bonged.

“Let’s ignore it,” Ruth said rapidly, stammering and afraid. “I just want to sit and rap with you, about the mellow things in life you’ve seen and what you want to achieve that you haven’t achieved already…” Her voice died into silence as he went to the door. “It’s probably the man from upstairs. He borrows things. Weird things. Like two fifths of an onion.”

Jason opened the door. Three pols in gray uniforms filled the doorway, with weapon tubes and nightsticks aimed at him. “Mr. Taverner?” the pol with the stripes said.

“Yes.”

“You are being taken into protective custody for your own protection and welfare, effective immediately, so please come with us and do not turn back or in any way remove yourself physically from contact with us. Your possessions if any will be picked up for you later and transferred to wherever you will be at the time.”