Movement through the clear glass distracted him. Nervously sliding the bar of kwakitl into his cube, he set it down inconspicuously, waiting for the glandelinears to pass.

It was a group of four this time. Chumley recognized the first and second-high alpha-m's, and the second-high's Q, but the third was unknown to him. adjusting his auddometer, snapping it with the military precision by which his indeterminancies were annulled, he tuned in to the upper speech-caste setting and prepared to remember.

Remembering was all he had now, really, but even that was suspect. the previous life he had lived as a civil servant in the super-service arm of a federal neo-postal post-ops population division had long ago faded into the exo-screen's somnambulent landscape. Even Laika, that super powerful dog he loved more than anything, and who had died during the 'Great Swipe' when Chumley was translated across the universe by a mathematics accident, yes, even Laika was no longer anything more than the wisp of a floating memory of an emotion.

Taking out Big Ben, he wound the heavy transparent object. time changed everyday on borbscht, the quantumn fields and radioactive decay clocks on borbscht obeyed different laws than the earth-dimensional ones. only mechanical timepieces could keep him synched up with earth- and earth-response.

Heaving himself slowly to his feet, he started sauntering slowly down the street. turning the corner, he saw before him a large stone statue. CHUMLEY asked himself, wondering as he always did, why he wasn't standing somewhere else, somewhere else in the distance, where the blue hazes rose up, and the green hazes turned around, but before chumley could ask himself why it must be so, he thought to himself, the blue hazes, and the Green hazes, well, they shouldn't really be there. It seemed as if many many years had gone by, since he had left the store front by the old Moon River back in Tennessee, where the terraforms rose up out of the rivers and became a tall mystic landscapes bathed in the blue green light of the ethernet. Lately, all of the higher administrators had been calling on the terraphone. The terraphone was a miraculous invention, an invention of the glandelinear mathematicians and political higher ups, working together to achieve their bureaucratic harm harmony. But it had taken chumley many years before he was able to start the long involved process of comprehending and understanding just what was involved in the using of alien technologies.

Stopping for a moment in front of the glandelinear bank, the world wide bank of borbscht, he noticed the same small blue dog which had been following him for almost an hour now. With the pressure from the ethernet on the increase, his eyes were starting to water, and the slow pressure was building inside his head.

"Listen man," Chumley said, trying to focus his blurry vision on the Wildly Yapping small insignificant worm like dog which ran around his feet trying to knock him over, trying to take over his brain, and invade his private spaces. "You've got to to cut that out, and ", as he batted it at the small dog, "Leave my newspaper out of that."

It really isn't fair he thought to himself. The way in which the glandelinear movements had sprung up overnight, not letting the members in earth-response develop their anti glandelinear Technologies and use them in a way that would allow the script writers on earth the necessary time and space to develop all that they needed to develop before all the different people would come down from the clouds, and mountains, and also, from across the vast ocean see to where all of the hordes became inconsequential means, especially since many of the unimportant people decided it wouldn't be necessary for all the government officials, even those who wear pink and blue and orange on top of their official helmets and under their official garments, including scissors and watches and strange metallic keys dangling from their necks. They had particularly long spiney necks, which dangled from all the cliffs in the region by the Coast, where with every generation a legend had been born. It was important to the clinical systems analysis that the digital pioneer smoke auxiliary one, and auxiliary two, before he sent the one to the printer and before he went to the monitor and before he went to the computer and that was when the master decided that auxiliary two and auxiliary one and the printer, along with the monitor, should become the new glorious computer civilization, much like the mayan's and the aztecs had in ancient days and an ancient ways turned the tides of empathic history into ways that the four fathers and the four mothers had in generations before them.

It had nothing to do with the way that Sue Ellen turned all of the issues he ever thought he had straight up on their heads, throwing them out to into the street like so much garbage and so much flotsam and jetsom. "I never said that", Jamie had turned to him furiously. "If you want to say that I'm that kind of person, and that I do those kinds of things all of the time, well, Mr., you are just plain wrong. And if you think for a minute that I'm going to take care of things, well you are just plain wrong again. So when I tell you to shut the hell up, then I think it's time we both left for the good of both of us. " "Leave chumley out of this please", Jamie had said. " It has nothing to do with him it's not his fault, please don't hurt him. Sure he's a bad man, but it's not, our fault, we werent there. nobody was there, that was their fault, they hurt him, to the bone. Before we came, garibaldi was one of the most influential and high ranking members of the plutonium aristocracy. "

sighing, chumley sat down again. the ether-frags were too strong today. Looking at big ben, it was obvious that earth-response had also failed in their attempts to transmit. He would have to try again tommorrow. Signing his name, he closed on the transmission.