But then

But then, he did. He gave cut rates on cleaning, drilling and root-canal jobs for members of the Crew. Why,Contact Us? If they were all bums but still providing society with valuable art and thought, why that would be fine. If that were the case then someday, possibly in the next rising period of history, when this Decadence was past and the planets were being colonized and the world at peace, a dental historian would mention Eigenvalue in a footnote as Patron of the Arts, discreet physician to the neo-Jacobean school.
But they produced nothing but talk and at that not very good talk. A few like Slab actually did what they professed; turned out a tangible product. But again, what? Cheese danishes. Or this technique for the sake of technique - Catatonic Expressionism. Or parodies on what someone else had already done.
So much for Art. What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure.

V
McClintic, back for a weekend from Lenox, found August in Nueva York bad as he'd expected. Buzzing close to sundown through Central Park in the Triumph he saw all manner of symptoms: girls on the grass, sweating all over in thin (vulnerable) summer dresses; groups of boys prowling off on the horizon,LINK, twitchless, sure, waiting for night; cops and solid citizens, all nervous (maybe only in a business way; but the cops' business had to do with these boys and the coming of night).
He'd come back to see Ruby. Faithful, he'd sent her postcards showing different views of Tanglewood and the Berkshires once a week; cards she never answered,UK FAKE UGGS. But he'd called long-distance once or twice and she was still there close to home.
For some reason one night he'd dashed lengthwise across the state (a tiny state considering the Triumph's speed), McClintic and the bass player; nearly missed Cape Cod and driven into the sea. But sheer momentum carried them up that croissant of land and out to a settlement called French Town, a resort.
Out in front of a seafood place on the main and only drag, they found two more musicians playing mumbledy-peg with clam knives. They were on route to a party. "O yes," they cried in unison,UGG BOOTS SALE. One climbed in the Triumph's trunk, the other, who had a bottle-rum, 150 proof-and a pineapple, sat on the hood. At 80 mph over roads which are ill-lit and near-unusable by the end of the Season, this happy hood-ornament cut open the fruit with a clam knife and built rum-and-pineapple-juices in paper cups which McClintic's bass handed him over the windscreen.