Scene 10

For Hektor Maille the evening meal was indisputably the high point of the day, a form of reward, which he looked forward to right from the morning, no matter in which form it might take place – but at some point it came to an end, all too soon most of the time, and then the clock was turned back to zero, in order to begin the countdown to the next feeding session.

Unfortunately, even a banquet, such as the one he had worked on with Lun that evening, ends all too soon in a form of saturation that is dictated half by the body and half by higher reason – and as such always remains a compromise, an eye-blink or rather a tummy-blink of a moment of irritating uncertainty. Maille did not know at these moments whether he was truly satiated – just as one can never know for sure if one is truly healthy. Man detects something and draws inferences from that, but are they the correct conclusions?

On this evening the peculiar feeling ended with a small drama, which, thanks to differences in evolution, was nothing: Tiger, namely Raina and Gobli's dog, a creature that never could stand Maille, decided to launch a spontaneous attack on the finger of the guest from Santa Lemusa. The power of the dog's teeth (Tiger was a Pekinese) was fortunately not strong enough to pierce the skin of the agent, hardened by the battle against global inequality.

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