all-enveloping indifference, and the white spark was extinguished, and
nothing happened--no branch trembled, no eye half-opened to glance up.
If he were to throw a pebble every one and a half minutes, and if what
the one-legged cook, nicknamed Pansy, said was true and what Madame Bardot,
head of the Assistance to the Local Population Group, reckoned, if what
driver Acey whispered to the unknown man from the Engineering Penetration
Group was untrue, and if human intuition was worth anything at all, and if
wishes came true once in a lifetime, then at the seventh stone, the bushes
behind him would part with a crash, and the director would step out onto the
soft crushed grass of the dew-gray clearing. He would be stripped to the
waist in his gray garbardines with the lilac braid, breathing heavily, sleek
and glossy, yellow-pink and shaggy, looking nowhere in particular, neither
at the forest beneath him nor at the sky above him, bending down to bury his
arms in the grass, then unbending to raise a breeze with his broad palms,
each time the mighty fold on his belly bulging out over his trousers, while
air, saturated with carbon dioxide and nicotine, would burst out of his open
mouth with a whistling gurgle.
The bushes behind parted with a crash. Pepper looked around cautiously,
but it wasn't the director, it was someone he knew, Claudius-Octavian
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