"Start praying, Kewpie Doll. If semantics can turn out an anachronism like you it can even manufacture incipient Zharkonites. Why, you can't even speak good old Terro-English."
Louis Larson looked as though he were going to cry. "We gotta do something, Karl. It only takes a few minutes after one of them announcements for them heathen Marties to start playin' human grab bag. We gotta do something!"
"What do you want to do, Kewpie Doll, live forever?" grinned Venard. "Besides, there is a way out for us. We don't have to go to the experimental wards. Have you forgotten this little memento from my long lost love?"
With infinite caution, Venard disclosed the memory-crystal, taking it with a kind of dignified stealth from beneath the rags that had once been a shirt. Dreamily he studied the small, delicate translucence of the sphere. He had managed to retain that from the pawing Marties' greedy scanners. Looking back into Venard's eyes from the shifting beauty of the sphere, the three-dimensional, almost frighteningly life-like figure of Vale who had once loved Venard, preened and sighed provocatively. The figure moved, danced in lithe grace through shifting clouds. A strange, heart-aching vision of reality and dream.
Louie Larson's beady black eyes bulged, sweat popped out of his pallid skin and trickled down through the bristles of his dirt-caked beard. "You—you're gonna use that?"
"Suicide, that's better than the experimental ward, isn't it? Kewpie Doll, sometimes you leave the experimental wards alive, but no one would ever guess you had once been human. They work on the genes, son. And they're devilishly clever." He gripped the memory-crystal. "This is a quick and easy way. There's enough of that amazing explosive developed by the Venusian Sea People in this crystal to blow everything for fifty yards around us to hell. Oh, I'll use it, Kewpie Doll."
"Sure, I'd prefer it to the wards," moaned Larson softly, "but this—this suicide, it's so final."
"There's something pretty nice about finality, Kewpie Doll. If you can really find it."
They waited. Larson picked at his beard, lips twitching. Venard looked dreamily into the cloudy depths of the memory-crystal. Next to them in a stinking cell, a man began to cry, a series of burbling choking cries of fear and hopeless hate. From somewhere far down the corridor, a woman was singing an ancient hymn.