As the applause died down, he rose to speak.

And he saw the Grinning Sadist coming right at him.

He saw the deranged eyes, the cruel mouth, the deliberately ugly clothing (like a very poor cowboy or a 1960s college student), and the knife in the maniac's hand.

Om mani padme hum…

And then he got the Boston Cream Pie right in the face.

It hadn't been a knife at all: he had imagined a knife when the pie plate was turned and raised as it was thrown.

Benny stood there, very conscious that he was overweight and past fifty, Boston Cream Pie dripping from his face, trying to remind himself that heart palpitations were not a symptom of heart attack, aware suddenly that the daily life of humankind was not only marvelous, as Jung had taught him, and terrible, as the murder had taught him, but totally absurd as well, as the Existentialists might have taught him.*

*Galactic Archives: Pie throwing was common in Unistat at the time of this Romance. It derived, of course, from the territorial feces-hurling rituals of other primates. See "Expressions of Violence in Wild and Domesticated Primates," Encyclopedia of Primate Psychology, Sirius Press, 2775. Domesticated primates defend ideological territories (mental constructs) as well as the physical turf. Pie throwers were expressing mammalian territorial rage in a traditional primate manner by throwing guck in the faces of those who threatened their ideological "space."

AUFGEHOBEN

2 NEW PLANETS DISCOVERED

–news headline, 1983

The only one in New York who didn't react emotionally to Benny Benedict's "One Month to Go" column was Justin Case, an embittered, fortyish man who wrote beautifully meaningless film criticism. Case had not liked the film of 1984 and never read books, which he regarded as too old-fashioned to be worthy of serious attention.