It was a silent moment in a night sprinkled with a dusty multitude of Southern stars, and the distant bleating saxophone seemed indecisive and sad, like the nation and the suffocating summer, neither at peace nor at war. “Furthermore, it’s degrading to come out of the field each day and then be _forced_ to go to a night club like this, when all you want to do is go home to your wife and family. Goddam, man, I’ve _gotta_ get out!” But underneath his rebellion, Culver finally knew, Mannix--like all of them--was really resigned. Born into a generation of conformists, even Mannix (so Culver sensed) was aware that his gestures were not symbolic, but individual, therefore hopeless, maybe even absurd, and that he was trapped like all of them in a predicament which one personal insurrection could, if anything, only make worse. “You know,” he said once, “I think I was really afraid just one time last war.” The phrase “last war” had had, itself, a numb, resigned quality, in its lack of any particular inflection, like “last week end,” or “last movie I went to see.” They had been lying on the beach to which they fled each hot week end. In that setting of coast and sea and lugubrious solitude they felt nearly peaceful, in touch with a tranquil force more important, and more lasting (or so it seemed on those sunlit afternoons), than war. Mannix had been, almost for the first time since Culver had known him, rested and subdued, and the sound of his voice had been a surprise after long, sun-laden hours of sleep and silence. “That’s the goddam truth,” he said thoughtfully, “I was only afraid once. Really afraid, I mean. It was at a hotel in San Francisco. I think I really came closer to dying that night than I ever have in my life. We were drunk, you see, polluted, all of us. I think there were five of us, all of us boots just out of Dago. Kids. We were on the tenth floor of this hotel and in this room and I believe we were about as drunk as anyone could get. I remember going in to take a shower in the bathroom. It was late at night, past midnight, and after I took this shower, you see, I came out into the room buck naked. Two of those drunk guys were waiting for me. They grabbed me and pushed me toward the window. I was so loaded I couldn’t battle. Then they pushed me out the window and held me by the heels while I dangled upside-down buck naked in space, ten floors above the street.” He paused and sucked at a beer can. “Can you imagine that?” he went on slowly. “How I felt? I got stone-sober in a second. Imagine being that high upside-down in space with two drunks holding onto your heels. I was heavy, man, just like now, you see. All I can remember is those teeny-weeny lights below and the tiny little people like ants down there and those two crazy drunk guys holding onto my wet slippery ankles, laughing like hell and trying to decide whether to let go or not. I just remember the cold wind blowing on my body and that dark, man, infinite