 What is significant about Wayne’s averse reaction to witnessing the stewbum beating?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Wayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs. The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. School over, waiting for the draft and all. Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? He listened to their purposeless noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say. Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the same old ways. A freak sideshow all the way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo. One thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in teeveeland. Anyway there was no doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion. So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone waiting for the breakout call from HQ. "Well, dear, if you say so," Mother said, with the old resigned sigh that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly. They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up. "What, son?" his old man said uneasily. He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't answer. "If you wanta walk. "But we promised the Clemons, dear," his mother said. "Hell," Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. "Oh, my dear boy," Mother cried out. He was still laughing as he whoomed the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp onto the Freeway. He strode under a sign reading Public Youth Center No. 947 and walked casually to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.
 It foreshadows that Wayne will not be able to go through with his kill
 It foreshadows that Wayne will not be able to go through with his kill  It is symbolic for the inner rage bubbling within Wayne’s teenage brain.  It references the rage he feels toward his cowardly and stupid father  It foreshadows the violence Wayne will do to Red