Table of Contents

Introduction 

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Narrow Valley

In Our Block

Land of the Great Horses

Groaning Hinges of the World

Continued On Next Rock

Among the Hairy Earthmen

Frog on the Mountain 

The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street

Great Tom Fool

Eurema's Dam

Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies

Rivers of Damascus

Tongues of the Matagorda

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Thieving Bear Planet

What's the Name of That Town?

Old Foot Forgot

The Man Who Lost His Magic

The Story of Little Briar-Rose, A Scholarly Study

Been a Long Long Time

Introduction

A proper introduction should ease you in to something new. When we published The Man Who Talled Tales, the goal was simple: to make R. A. Lafferty available to a wider audience. Today it remains the definitive collection of Lafferty's short stories, and deeply precious to the enclaves of Lafferty readers in Iceland and South Africa and Croatia and Japan and elsewhere, for many of whom it is the only Lafferty collection available.

What it is not, however, is an introduction, an easy point d'entrée into his formidable body of work. A good storyteller doesn't sit a child down by the campfire and begin with “It is necessary to recount the history of the world up to this point.” That can only come later, once the child's world has telescoped down to the storyteller's voice and the shadow-shapes the fire makes on nearby rocks.

This book is an introduction to Lafferty via his best short stories. It is not a sampler. Therefore, several of Lafferty's recurrent themes do not feature as prominently as they might. His demonic children are found only in “Among the Hairy Earthmen”, and glancingly so. His distaste for twangy faddism is certainly present, but someone who read only these stories might not fully appreciate Lafferty's enduring desire to slap a hippie. His eclectic Catholicism, though central to his conception of the world, is only apparent if you know what you're looking for.

Which is odd, as R. A. Lafferty is sometimes criticized for being a Christian writer, like C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton. (What is it with religious writers and initials?) And in truth, those who read “Sodom and Gomorrah” and “Been a Long Long Time” do come away with an impressively nuanced understanding of the Harrowing of Hell and the Keystone of Purgatory, whether they realize it or not.

Those critics, however, are never able to articulate why they consider this a valid criticism. “Continued On Next Rock” is surely just as Vedic, and “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” just as Celtic, as “Old Foot Forgot” is Catholic. Lafferty's series of stories about the Men Who Know Everything (and he, who does not) are a Greek symposium, writ ridiculous. The truth is that Lafferty was a craftsman of tales, a mythsmith, and would forge a story from any metal he could lay his hands on — though admittedly Catholicism's rich metaphysical corpus was often the closest and most familiar ore at hand. And while he certainly wrote his share of overtly Catholic stories (“And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire”, “Faith Sufficient”, etc.), he never seasoned them with fairy dust in a dishonest attempt to make them more palatable like Lewis, or was as eager as Chesterton to forgive any of the Church's perpetual paradoxes so long as they were pithily put.

The plain fact is that Lafferty's stories are bigger than any mythos or theology, no matter how baroque or absurdly haberdashed. “Thieving Bear Planet” is as dense with literary brilliance as any passage from Ulysses. If you do not shiver at the encroaching twilight of “Man Who Lost His Magic” now, don't worry. You will someday. And while “Groaning Hinges of the World” does not seem to have made much of an impression on American readers, for those of us living within new borders drawn in fresh red blood, it is a crucial chapter of the only story every one of your neighbors knows by heart.

If you are a fan, no doubt one of your favorites is not included herein. That's good. Go back and re-read it. Marvel at how it possibly could have been overlooked. You will find new aspects that make it, perhaps, the finest Lafferty story ever, and you will love that story all the more for its omission. (You're welcome.)

Lafferty said that he wrote a story until it busted. Some of the stories he published had clearly busted all over the page. Others are only half-inflated and could have easily tolerated more. The stories included here are the ones that are right on the edge, full-to-bursting and could easily explode at any moment, but if you're lucky will hold together just long enough to make themselves at home in your mind.

Though to be honest, we make no guarantees as to what happens then.

 — thebooksofsand@gmail.com

If you're looking for a proper introduction to R. A. Lafferty, check out Feast of Laughter, the annual Lafferty journal published by some of his cleverest fans. At its best, their work makes new stories fun and old stories new.

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Ceran Swicegood was a promising young Special Aspects Man. But, like all Special Aspects, he had one irritating habit. He was forever asking the question: How Did it All Begin?

They all had tough names except Ceran. Manbreaker Crag, Heave Huckle, Blast Berg, George Blood, Move Manion (when Move says “Move,” you move), Trouble Trent. They were supposed to be tough, and they had taken tough names at the naming. Only Ceran kept his own — to the disgust of his commander, Manbreaker.

“Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!” Manbreaker would thunder. “Why don't you take Storm Shannon? That's good. Or Gutboy Barrelhouse or Slash Slagle or Nevel Knife? You barely glanced at the suggested list.”

“I'll keep my own,” Ceran always said, and that is where he made his mistake. A new name will sometimes bring out a new personality. It had done so for George Blood. Though the hair on George's chest was a graft job, yet that and his new name had turned him from a boy into a man. Had Ceran assumed the heroic name of Gutboy Barrelhouse he might have been capable of rousing endeavors and man-sized angers rather than his tittering indecisions and flouncy figures.

They were down on the big asteroid Proavitus — a sphere that almost tinkled with the potential profit that might be shaken out of it. And the tough men of the Expedition knew their business. They signed big contracts on the native velvet-like bark scrolls and on their own parallel tapes. They impressed, inveigled and somewhat cowed the slight people of Proavitus. Here was a solid two-way market, enough to make them slaver. And there was a whole world of oddities that could lend themselves to the luxury trade.

“Everybody's hit it big but you,” Manbreaker crackled in kindly thunder to Ceran after three days there. “But even Special Aspects is supposed to pay its way. Our charter compels us to carry one of your sort to give a cultural twist to the thing, but it needn't be restricted to that. What we go out for every time, Ceran, is to cut a big fat hog in the rump — we make no secret of that. But if the hog's tail can be shown to have a cultural twist to it, that will solve a requirement. And if that twist in the tail can turn us a profit, then we become mighty happy about the whole thing. Have you been able to find out anything about the living dolls, for instance? They might have both a cultural aspect and a market value.”

“The living dolls seem a part of something much deeper,” Ceran said. “There's a whole complex of things to be unraveled. The key may be the statement of the Proavitoi that they do not die.”

“I think they die pretty young, Ceran. All those out and about are young, and those I have met who do not leave their houses are only middling old.”

“Then where are their cemeteries?”

“Likely they cremate the old folks when they die.”

“Where are the crematories?”

“They might just toss the ashes out or vaporize the entire remains. Probably they have no reverence for ancestors.”

“Other evidence shows their entire culture to be based on an exaggerated reverence for ancestors.”

“You find out, Ceran. You're Special Aspects Man.”

Ceran talked to Nokoma, his Proavitoi counterpart as translator. Both were expert, and they could meet each halfway in talk. Nokoma was likely feminine. There was a certain softness about both the sexes of the Proavitoi, but the men of the Expedition believed that they had them straight now.

“Do you mind if I ask some straight questions?” Ceran greeted her today.

“Sure is not. How else I learn the talk well but by talking?”

“Some of the Proavitoi say that they do not die, Nokoma. Is this true?”

“How is not be true? If they die, they not be here to say they do not die. Oh, I joke, I joke. No, we do not die. It is a foolish alien custom which we see no reason to imitate. On Proavitus, only the low creatures die.”

“None of you does?”

“Why, no. Why should one want to be an exception in this?”

“But what do you do when you get very old?”

“We do less and less then. We come to a deficiency of energy. Is it not the same with you?”

“Of course. But where do you go when you become exceedingly old?”

“Nowhere. We stay at home then. Travel is for the young and those of the active years.”

“Let's try it from the other end,” Ceran said. “Where are your father and mother, Nokoma?”

“Out and about. They aren't really old.”

“And your grandfathers and grandmothers?”

“A few of them still get out. The older ones stay home.”

“Let's try it this way. How many grandmothers do you have, Nokoma?”

“I think I have nine hundred grandmothers in my house. Oh, I know that isn't many, but we are the young branch of a family. Some of our clan have very great numbers of ancestors in their houses.”

“And all these ancestors are alive?”

“What else? Who would keep things not alive? How would such be ancestors?”

Ceran began to hop around in his excitement.

“Could I see them?” he twittered.

“It might not be wise for you to see the older of them,” Nokoma cautioned, “It could be an unsettling thing for strangers, and we guard it. A few tens of them you can see, of course.”

Then it came to Ceran that he might be onto what he had looked for all his life. He went into a panic of expectation.

“Nokoma, it would be finding the key!” he fluted. “If none of you has ever died, then your entire race would still be alive!”

“Sure. Is like you count fruit. You take none away, you still have them all.”

“But if the first of them are still alive, then they might know their origin! They would know how it began! Do they? Do you?”

“Oh, not I. I am too young for the Ritual.”

“But who knows? Doesn't someone know?”

“Oh, yes, all the old ones know how it began.”

“How old? How many generations back from you till they know?”

“Ten, no more. When I have ten generations of children, then I will also go to the Ritual.”

“The Ritual. What is it?”

“Once a year, the old people go to the very old people. They wake them up and ask them how it all began. The very old people tell them the beginning. It is a high time. Oh, how they hottle and laugh! Then the very old people go back to sleep for another year. So it is passed down to the generations. That is the Ritual.”

The Proavitoi were not humanoid. Still less were they “monkey-faces,” though that name was now set in the explorers' lingo. They were upright and robed, and swathed, and were assumed to be two-legged under their garments. Though, as Manbreaker said, “They might go on wheels, for all we know.”

They had remarkable flowing hands that might be called everywhere-digited. They could handle tools, or employ their hands as if they were the most intricate tools.

George Blood was of the opinion that the Proavitoi were always masked, and that the men of the Expedition had never seen their faces. He said that those apparent faces were ritual masks, and that no part of the Proavitoi had ever been seen by the men except for those remarkable hands, which perhaps were their real faces.

The men reacted with cruel hilarity when Ceran tried to explain to them just what a great discovery he was verging on.

“Little Ceran is still on the how-did-it-begin jag,” Manbreaker jeered. “Ceran, will you never give off asking which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“I will have that answer very soon,” Ceran sang. “I have the unique opportunity. When I find how the Proavitoi began, I may have the clue to how everything began. All of the Proavitoi are still alive, the very first generation of them.”

“It passes belief that you can be so simple-minded,” Manbreaker moaned. “They say that one has finally mellowed when he can suffer fools gracefully. By God, I hope I never come to that.”

But two days later, it was Manbreaker who sought out Ceran Swicegood on nearly the same subject. Manbreaker had been doing a little thinking and discovering of his own.

“You are Special Aspects Man, Ceran,” he said, “and you have been running off after the wrong aspect.”

“What is that?”

“It don't make a damn how it began. What is important is that it may not have to end.”

“It is the beginning that I intend to discover,” said Ceran.

“You fool, can't you understand anything? What do the Proavitoi possess so uniquely that we don't know whether they have it by science or by fool luck?”

“Ah, their chemistry, I suppose.”

“Sure. Organic chemistry has come of age here. The Proavitoi have every kind of nexus and inhibitor and stimulant. They can grow and shrink and telescope and prolong what they will. These creatures seem stupid to me; it is as if they had these things by instinct. But they have them, that is what is important. With these things, we can become the patent medicine kings of the universes, for the Proavitoi do not travel or make many outside contacts. These things can do anything or undo anything. I suspect that the Proavitoi can shrink cells, and I suspect that they can do something else.”

“No, they couldn't shrink cells. It is you who talk nonsense now, Manbreaker.”

“Never mind. Their things already make nonsense of conventional chemistry. With the pharmacopoeia that one could pick up here, a man need never die. That's the stick horse you've been riding, isn't it? But you've been riding it backward with your head to the tail. The Proavitoi say that they never die.”

“They seem pretty sure that they don't. If they did, they would be the first to know it, as Nokoma says.”

“What? Have these creatures humor?”

“Some.”

“But, Ceran, you don't understand how big this is.”

“I'm the only one who understands it so far. It means that if the Proavitoi have always been immortal, as they maintain, then the oldest of them are still alive. From them I may be able to learn how their species — and perhaps every species — began.”

Manbreaker went into his dying buffalo act then. He tore his hair and nearly pulled out his ears by the roots. He stomped and pawed and went off bull-bellowing: “It don't make a damn how it began, you fool! It might not have to end!” so loud that the hills echoed back:

“It don't make a damn — you fool.”

Ceran Swicegood went to the house of Nokoma, but not with her on her invitation. He went without her when he knew that she was away from home. It was a sneaky thing to do, but the men of the Expedition were trained in sneakery.

He would find out better without a mentor about the nine hundred grandmothers, about the rumored living dolls. He would find out what the old people did do if they didn't die, and find if they knew how they were first born. For his intrusion, he counted on the innate politeness of the Proavitoi.

The house of Nokoma, of all the people, was in the cluster on top of the large flat hill, the Acropolis of Proavitus. They were earthen houses, though finely done, and they had the appearance of growing out of and being a part of the hill itself.

Ceran went up the winding, ascending flagstone paths, and entered the house which Nokoma had once pointed out to him. He entered furtively, and encountered one of the nine hundred grandmothers — one with whom nobody need be furtive.

The grandmother was seated and small and smiling at him. They talked without real difficulty, though it was not as easy as with Nokoma, who could meet Ceran halfway in his own language. At her call, there came a grandfather who likewise smiled at Ceran. These two ancients were somewhat smaller than the Proavitoi of active years. They were kind and serene. There was an atmosphere about the scene that barely missed being an odor — not unpleasant, sleepy, reminiscent of something, almost sad.

“Are there those here older than you?” Ceran asked earnestly.

“So many, so many! Who could know how many?” said the grandmother. She called in other grandmothers and grandfathers older and smaller than herself, these no more than half the size of the active Proavitoi — small, sleepy, smiling.

Ceran knew now that the Proavitoi were not masked. The older they were, the more character and interest there was in their faces. It was only of the immature active of the Proavitoi that there could have been a doubt. No masks could show such calm and smiling old age as this. The queer textured stuff was their real faces.

So old and friendly, so weak and sleepy, there must have been a dozen generations of them there back to the oldest and smallest.

“How old are the oldest?” Ceran asked the first grandmother.

“We say that all are the same age since all are perpetual,” the grandmother told him. “It is not true that all are the same age, but it is indelicate to ask how old.”

“You do not know what a lobster is,” Ceran said to them, trembling, “but it is a creature that will boil happily, if the water on him is heated slowly. He takes no alarm, for he does not know at what point the heat is dangerous. It is that gradual here with me. I slide from one degree to another with you and my credulity is not alarmed. I am in danger of believing anything about you if it comes in small doses, and it will. I believe that you are here and as you are for no other reason than that I see and touch you. Well, I'll be boiled for a lobster, then, before I turn back from it. Are there those here even older than the ones present?”

The first grandmother motioned Ceran to follow her. They went down a ramp through the floor into the older part of the house, which must have been under ground.

Living dolls! They were here in rows on the shelves, and sitting in small chairs in their niches. Doll-sized indeed, and several hundred of them.

Many had wakened at the intrusion. Others came awake when spoken to or touched. They were incredibly ancient, but they were cognizant in their glances and recognition. They smiled and stretched sleepily, not as humans would, but as very old puppies might. Ceran spoke to them, and they understood each other surprisingly.

Lobster, lobster, said Ceran to himself, the water has passed the danger point! And it hardly feels different. If you believe your senses in this, then you will be boiled alive in your credulity.

He knew now that the living dolls were real and that they were the living ancestors of the Proavitoi.

Many of the little creatures began to fall asleep again. Their waking moments were short, but their sleeps seemed to be likewise. Several of the living mummies woke a second time while Ceran was still in the room, woke refreshed from very short sleeps and were anxious to talk again.

“You are incredible!” Ceran cried out, and all the small and smaller and still smaller creatures smiled and laughed their assent. Of course they were. All good creatures everywhere are incredible, and were there ever so many assembled in one place? But Ceran was greedy. A roomful of miracles wasn't enough.

“I have to take this back as far as it will go!” he cried avidly. “Where are the even older ones?”

“There are older ones and yet older and again older,” said the first grandmother, “and thrice-over older ones, but perhaps it would be wise not to seek to be too wise. You have seen enough. The old people are sleepy. Let us go up again.”

Go up again, out of this? Ceran would not. He saw passages and descending ramps, down into the heart of the great hill itself. There were whole worlds of rooms about him and under his feet. Ceran went on and down, and who was to stop him? Not dolls and creatures much smaller than dolls.

Manbreaker had once called himself an old pirate who reveled in the stream of his riches. But Ceran was the Young Alchemist who was about to find the Stone itself.

He walked down the ramps through centuries and millennia. The atmosphere he had noticed on the upper levels was a clear odor now — sleepy, half-remembered, smiling, sad and quite strong. That is the way Time smells.

“Are there those here even older than you?” Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held in the palm of his hand.

“So old and so small that I could hold in my hand,” said the grandmother in what Ceran knew from Nokoma to be the older uncompounded form of the Proavitus language.

Smaller and older the creatures had been getting as Ceran went through the rooms. He was boiled lobster now for sure. He had to believe it all: he saw and felt it. The wren-sized grandmother talked and laughed and nodded that there were those far older than herself, and in doing so she nodded herself back to sleep. Ceran returned her to her niche in the hive-like wall where there were thousands of others, miniaturized generations.

Of course he was not in the house of Nokoma now. He was in the heart of the hill that underlay all the houses of Proavitus, and these were the ancestors of everybody on the asteroid.

“Are there those here even older than you?” Ceran asked a small grandmother whom he held on the tip of his finger.

“Older and smaller,” she said, “but you come near the end.”

She was asleep, and he put her back in her place. The older they were, the more they slept.

He was down to solid rock under the roots of the hill. He was into the passages that were cut out of that solid rock, but they could not be many or deep. He had a sudden fear that the creatures would become so small that he could not see them or talk to them, and so he would miss the secret of the beginning.

But had not Nokoma said that all the old people knew the secret? Of course. But he wanted to hear it from the oldest of them. He would have it now, one way or the other.

“Who is the oldest? Is this the end of it? Is this the beginning? Wake up! Wake up!” he called when he was sure he was in the lowest and oldest room.

“Is it Ritual?” asked some who woke up. Smaller than mice they were, no bigger than bees, maybe older than both. “It is a special Ritual,” Ceran told them. “Relate to me how it was in the beginning.”

What was that sound — too slight, too scattered to be a noise? It was like a billion microbes laughing. It was the hilarity of little things waking up to a high time.

“Who is the oldest of all?” Ceran demanded, for their laughter bothered him. “Who is the oldest and first?”

“I am the oldest, the ultimate grandmother,” one said gaily. “All the others are my children. Are you also of my children?”

“Of course,” said Ceran, and the small laughter of unbelief flittered out from the whole multitude of them.

“Then you must be the ultimate child, for you are like no other. If you be, then it is as funny at the end as it was in the beginning.”

“How was it in the beginning?” Ceran bleated. “You are the first. Do you know how you came to be?”

“Oh, yes, yes,” laughed the ultimate grandmother, and the hilarity of the small things became a real noise now.

“How did it begin?” demanded Ceran, and he was hopping and skipping about in his excitement.

“Oh, it was so funny a joke the way things began that you would not believe it,” chittered the grandmother. “A joke, a joke!”

“Tell me the joke, then. If a joke generated your species, then tell me that cosmic joke.”

“Tell yourself,” tinkled the grandmother. “You are a part of the joke if you are of my children. Oh, it is too funny to believe. How good to wake up and laugh and go to sleep again.”

Blazing green frustration! To be so close and to be balked by a giggling bee!

“Don't go to sleep again! Tell me at once how it began!” Ceran shrilled, and he had the ultimate grandmother between thumb and finger.

“This is not Ritual,” the grandmother protested. “Ritual is that you guess what it was for three days, and we laugh and say ‘No, no, no, it was something nine times as wild as that. Guess some more.’ ”

“I will not guess for three days! Tell me at once or I will crush you,” Ceran threatened in a quivering voice.

“I look at you, you look at me, I wonder if you will do it,” the ultimate grandmother said calmly.

Any of the tough men of the Expedition would have done it — would have crushed her, and then another and another and another of the creatures till the secret was told. If Ceran had taken on a tough personality and a tough name he'd have done it. If he'd been Gutboy Barrelhouse he'd have done it without a qualm. But Ceran Swicegood couldn't do it.

“Tell me,” he pleaded in agony. “All my life I've tried to find out how it began, how anything began. And you know!”

“We know. Oh, it was so funny how it began. So joke! So fool, so clown, so grotesque thing! Nobody could guess, nobody could believe.”

“Tell me! Tell me!” Ceran was ashen and hysterical.

“No, no, you are no child of mine,” chortled the ultimate grandmother. “Is too joke a joke to tell a stranger. We could not insult a stranger to tell so funny, so unbelieve. Strangers can die. Shall I have it on conscience that a stranger died laughing?”

“Tell me! Insult me! Let me die laughing!” But Ceran nearly died crying from the frustration that ate him up as a million bee-sized things laughed and hooted and giggled:

“Oh, it was so funny the way it began!”

And they laughed. And laughed. And went on laughing… until Ceran Swicegood wept and laughed together, and crept away, and returned to the ship still laughing. On his next voyage he changed his name to Blaze Bolt and ruled for ninety-seven days as king of a sweet sea island in M-81, but that is another and much more unpleasant story.

Narrow Valley

In the year 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White-Eyes did.

“Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can't kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres. And I sure am not hear before about this pay taxes on land.”

Clarence Big-Saddle selected a nice green valley for his allotment. It was one of the half-dozen plots he had always regarded as his own. He sodded around the summer lodge that he had there and made it an all-season home. But he sure didn't intend to pay taxes on it.

So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:

“That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!” he orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if an intruder come.”

He didn't have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn't have any elder leaves. He used a handful of jack-oak leaves. And he forgot the word. How you going to work it if you forget the word?

“Petahauerat!” he howled out with the confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

“That's the same long of a word,” he said in a low aside to himself. But he was doubtful. “What am I, a White Man, a burr-tailed jack, a new kind of nut to think it will work?” he asked. “I have to laugh at me. Oh well, we see.”

He threw the rest of the bark and the leaves on the fire, and he hollered the wrong word out again.

And he was answered by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning.

“Skidi!” Clarence Big-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn't think it would.”

Clarence Big-Saddle lived on his land for many years, and he paid no taxes. Intruders were unable to come down to his place. The land was sold for taxes three times, but nobody ever came down to claim it. Finally, it was carried as open land on the books. Homesteaders filed on it several times, but none of them fulfilled the qualification of living on the land.

Half a century went by. Clarence Big-Saddle called his son.

“I've had it, boy,” he said. “I think I'll just go in the house and die.”

“Okay, Dad,” the son Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I'm going in to town to shoot a few games of pool with the boys. I'll bury you when I get back this evening.”

So the son Clarence Little-Saddle inherited. He also lived on the land for many years without paying taxes.

There was a disturbance in the courthouse one day. The place seemed to be invaded in force, but actually there were but one man, one woman, and five children. “I'm Robert Rampart,” said the man, “and we want the Land Office.”

“I'm Robert Rampart Junior,” said a nine-year-old gangler, “and we want it pretty blamed quick.”

“I don't think we have anything like that,” the girl at the desk said. “Isn't that something they had a long time ago?”

“Ignorance is no excuse for inefficiency, my dear,” said Mary Mabel Rampart, an eight-year-old who could easily pass for eight and a half. “After I make my report, I wonder who will be sitting at your desk tomorrow.”

“You people are either in the wrong state or the wrong century,” the girl said.

“The Homestead Act still obtains,” Robert Rampart insisted. “There is one tract of land carried as open in this county. I want to file on it.”

Cecilia Rampart answered the knowing wink of a beefy man at the distant desk. “Hi,” she breathed as she slinked over. “I'm Cecilia Rampart, but my stage name is Cecilia San Juan. Do you think that seven is too young to play ingénue roles?”

“Not for you,” the man said. “Tell your folks to come over here.”

“Do you know where the Land Office is?” Cecilia asked.

“Sure. It's the fourth left-hand drawer of my desk. The smallest office we got in the whole courthouse. We don't use it much any more.”

The Ramparts gathered around. The beefy man started to make out the papers.

“This is the land description,” Robert Rampart began. “Why, you've got it down already. How did you know?”

“I've been around here a long time,” the man answered.

They did the paperwork, and Robert Rampart filed on the land.

“You won't be able to come onto the land itself though,” the man said.

“Why won't I?” Rampart demanded. “Isn't the description accurate?”

“Oh, I suppose so. But nobody's ever been able get to the land. It's become a sort of joke.”

“Well, I intend to get to the bottom of that joke,” Rampart insisted. “I will occupy the land, or I will find out why not.”

“I'm not sure about that,” the beefy man said. “The last man to file on the land, about a dozen years ago, wasn't able to occupy the land. And he wasn't able to say why he couldn't. It's kind of interesting, the look on their faces after they try it for a day or two, and then give it up.”

The Ramparts left the courthouse, loaded into their camper, and drove out to find their land. They stopped it at the house of a cattle and wheat farmer named Charley Dublin. Dublin met them with a grin which indicated he had been tipped off.

“Come along if you want to, folks,” Dublin said. “The easiest way is on foot across my short pasture here. Your land's directly west of mine.”

They walked the short distance to the border.

“My name is Tom Rampart, Mr. Dublin.” Six-year-old Tom made conversation as they walked. “But my name is really Ramires, and not Tom. I am the issue of an indiscretion of my mother in Mexico several years ago.”

“The boy is a kidder, Mr. Dublin,” said the mother Nina Rampart, defending herself. “I have never been in Mexico, but sometimes I have the urge to disappear there forever.”

“Ah yes, Mrs. Rampart. And what is the name of the youngest boy here?” Charley Dublin asked.

“Fatty,” said Fatty Rampart.

“But surely that is not your given name?”

“Audifax,” said five-year-old Fatty.

“Ah well, Audifax, Fatty, are you a kidder too?”

“He's getting better at it, Mr. Dublin,” Mary Mabel said. “He was a twin till last week. His twin was named Skinny. Mama left Skinny unguarded while she was out tippling, and there were wild dogs in the neighborhood. When Mama got back, do you know what was left of Skinny? Two neck bones and an ankle bone. That was all.”

“Poor Skinny,” Dublin said. “Well, Rampart, this is the fence and the end of my land. Yours is just beyond.”

“Is that ditch on my land?” Rampart asked.

“That ditch is your land.”

“I'll have it filled in. It's a dangerous deep cut even if it is narrow. And the other fence looks like a good one, and I sure have a pretty plot of land beyond it.”

“No, Rampart, the land beyond the second fence belongs to Holister Hyde,” Charley Dublin said. “That second fence is the end of your land.”

“Now, just wait a minute, Dublin! There's something wrong here. My land is one hundred and sixty acres, which would be a half mile on a side. Where's my half-mile width?”

“Between the two fences.”

“That's not eight feet.”

“Doesn't look like it, does it, Rampart? Tell you what — there's plenty of throwing-sized rocks around. Try to throw one across it.”

“I'm not interested in any such boys' games,” Rampart exploded. “I want my land.”

But the Rampart children were interested in such games. They got with it with those throwing rocks. They winged them out over the little gully. The stones acted funny. They hung in the air, as it were, and diminished in size. And they were small as pebbles when they dropped down, down into the gully. None of them could throw a stone across that ditch, and they were throwing kids.

“You and your neighbor have conspired to fence open land for your own use,” Rampart charged.

“No such thing, Rampart,” Dublin said cheerfully. “My land checks perfectly. So does Hyde's. So does yours, if we knew how to check it. It's like one of those trick topological drawings. It really is half a mile from here to there, but the eye gets lost somewhere. It's your land. Crawl through the fence and figure it out.”

Rampart crawled through the fence, and drew himself up to jump the gully. Then he hesitated. He got a glimpse of just how deep that gully was. Still, it wasn't five feet across.

There was a heavy fence post on the ground, designed for use as a corner post. Rampart up-ended it with some effort. Then he shoved it to fall and bridge the gully. But it fell short, and it shouldn't have. An eight-foot post should bridge a five-foot gully.

The post fell into the gully, and rolled and rolled and rolled. It spun as though it were rolling outward, but it made no progress except vertically. The post came to rest on a ledge of the gully, so close that Rampart could almost reach out and touch it, but it now appeared no bigger than a match stick.

“There is something wrong with that fence post, or with the world, or with my eyes,” Robert Rampart said. “I wish I felt dizzy so I could blame it on that.”

“There's a little game that I sometimes play with my neighbor Hyde when we're both out,” Dublin said. “I've a heavy rifle and I train it on the middle of his forehead as he stands on the other side of the ditch apparently eight feet away. I fire it off then (I'm a good shot) and I hear it whine across. It'd kill him dead if things were as they seem. But Hyde's in no danger. The shot always bangs into that little scuff of rocks and boulders about thirty feet below him. I can see it kick up the rock dust there, and the sound of it rattling into those little boulders comes back to me in about two and a half seconds.”

A bull-bat (poor people call it the night-hawk) raveled around in the air and zoomed out over the narrow ditch, but it did not reach the other side. The bird dropped below ground level and could be seen against the background of the other side of the ditch. It grew smaller and hazier as though at a distance of three or four hundred yards. The white bars on its wings could no longer be discerned; then the bird itself could hardly be discerned; but it was far short of the other side of the five-foot ditch.

A man identified by Charley Dublin as the neighbor Hollister Hyde had appeared on the other side of the little ditch. Hyde grinned and waved. He shouted something, but could not be heard.

“Hyde and I both read mouths,” Dublin said, “so we can talk across the ditch easy enough. Which kid wants to play chicken? Hyde will barrel a good-sized rock right at your head, and if you duck or flinch you're chicken.”

“Me! Me!” Audifax Rampart challenged. And Hyde, a big man with big hands, did barrel a fearsome jagged rock right at the head of the boy. It would have killed him if things had been as they appeared. But the rock diminished to nothing and disappeared into the ditch. Here was a phenomenon: things seemed real-sized on either side of the ditch, but they diminished coming out over the ditch either way.

“Everybody game for it?” Robert Rampart Junior asked.

“We won't get down there by standing here,” Mary Mabel said.

“Nothing wenchered, nothing gained,” said Cecilia. “I got that from an ad for a sex comedy.”

Then the five Rampart kids ran down into the gully. Ran down is right. It was almost as if they ran down the vertical face of a cliff. They couldn't do that. The gully was no wider than the stride of the biggest kids. But the gully diminished those children, it ate them alive. They were doll-sized. They were acorn-sized. They were running for minute after minute across a ditch that was only five feet across. They were going, deeper in it, and getting smaller. Robert Rampart was roaring his alarm, and his wife Nina was screaming. Then she stopped. “What am I carrying on so loud about?” she asked herself. “It looks like fun. I'll do it too.”

She plunged into the gully, diminished in size as the children had done, and ran at a pace to carry her a hundred yards away across a gully only five feet wide.

That Robert Rampart stirred things up for a while then. He got the sheriff there, and the highway patrolmen. A ditch had stolen his wife and five children, he said, and maybe had killed them. And if anybody laughs, there may be another killing. He got the colonel of the State National Guard there, and a command post set up. He got a couple of airplane pilots. Robert Rampart had one quality: when he hollered, people came.

He got the newsmen out from T-Town, and the eminent scientists, Dr. Velikof Vonk, Arpad Arkabaranan, and Willy McGilly. That bunch turns up every time you get on a good one. They just happen to be in that part of the country where something interesting is going on.

They attacked the thing from all four sides and the top, and by inner and outer theory. If a thing measures half a mile on each side, and the sides are straight, there just has to be something in the middle of it. They took pictures from the air, and they turned out perfect. They proved that Robert Rampart had the prettiest hundred and sixty acres in the country, the larger part of it being a lush green valley, and all of it being half a mile on a side, and situated just where it should be. They took ground-level photos then, and it showed a beautiful half-mile stretch of land between the boundaries of Charley Dublin and Hollister Hyde. But a man isn't a camera. None of them could see that beautiful spread with the eyes in their heads. Where was it?

Down in the valley itself everything was normal. It really was half a mile wide and no more than eighty feet deep with a very gentle slope. It was warm and sweet, and beautiful with grass and grain.

Nina and the kids loved it, and they rushed to see what squatter had built that little house on their land. A house, or a shack. It had never known paint, but paint would have spoiled it. It was built of split timbers dressed near smooth with ax and draw knife, chinked with white clay, and sodded up to about half its height. And there was an interloper standing by the little lodge.

“Here, here what are you doing on our land?” Robert Rampart Junior demanded of the man. “Now you just shamble off again wherever you came from. I'll bet you're a thief too, and those cattle are stolen.”

“Only the black-and-white calf,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “I couldn't resist him, but the rest are mine. I guess I'll just stay around and see that you folks get settled all right.”

“Is there any wild Indians around here?” Fatty Rampart asked.

“No, not really. I go on a bender about every three months and get a little bit wild, and there's a couple Osage boys from Gray Horse that get noisy sometimes, but that's about all,” Clarence Little-Saddle said.

“You certainly don't intend to palm yourself off on us as an Indian,” Mary Mabel challenged. “You'll find us a little too knowledgeable for that.”

“Little girl, you might as well tell this cow there's no room for her to be a cow since you're so knowledgeable. She thinks she's a short-horn cow named Sweet Virginia; I think I'm a Pawnee Indian named Clarence. Break it to us real gentle if we're not.”

“If you're an Indian where's your war bonnet? There's not a feather on you anywhere.”

“How you be sure? There's a story that we got feathers instead of hair on —  Aw, I can't tell a joke like that to a little girl! How come you're not wearing the Iron Crown of Lombardy if you're a white girl? How you expect me to believe you're a little white girl and your folks came from Europe a couple hundred years ago if you don't wear it? There are six hundred tribes, and only one of them, the Oglala Sioux, had the war bonnet, and only the big leaders, never more than two or three of them alive at one time, wore it.”

“Your analogy is a little strained,” Mary Mabel said. “Those Indians we saw in Florida and the ones at Atlantic City had war bonnets, and they couldn't very well have been the kind of Sioux you said. And just last night on the TV in the motel, those Massachusetts Indians put a war bonnet on the President and called him the Great White Father. You mean to tell me that they were all phonies? Hey, who's laughing at who here?”

“If you're an Indian where's your bow and arrow?” Tom Rampart interrupted. “I bet you can't even shoot one.”

“You're sure right there,” Clarence admitted. “I never shot one of those things but once in my life. They used to have an archery range in Boulder Park over in T-Town, and you could rent the things and shoot at targets tied to hay bales. Hey, I barked my whole forearm and nearly broke my thumb when the bow-string thwacked home. I couldn't shoot that thing at all. I don't see how anybody ever could shoot one of them.”

“Okay, kids,” Nina Rampart called to her brood. “Let's start pitching this junk out of the shack so we can move in. Is there any way we can drive our camper down here, Clarence?”

“Sure, there's a pretty good dirt road, and it's a lot wider than it looks from the top. I got a bunch of green bills in an old night charley in the shack. Let me get them, and then I'll clear out for a while. The shack hasn't been cleaned out for seven years, since the last time this happened. I'll show you the road to the top, and you can bring your car down it.”

“Hey, you old Indian, you lied!” Cecilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. “You do have a war bonnet. Can I have it?”

“I didn't mean to lie, I forgot about that thing,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it.”

All the children were assigned tasks carrying the junk out of the shack and setting fire to it. Nina Rampart and Clarence Little-Saddle ambled up to the rim of the valley by the vehicle road that was wider than it looked from the top.

“Nina, you're back! I thought you were gone forever,” Robert Rampart jittered at seeing her again. “What — where are the children?”

“Why, I left them down in the valley, Robert. That is, ah, down in that little ditch right there. Now you've got me worried again. I'm going to drive the camper down there and unload it. You'd better go on down and lend a hand too, Robert, and quit talking to all these funny-looking men here.”

And Nina went back to Dublin's place for the camper.

“It would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for that intrepid woman to drive a car down into that narrow ditch,” the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk said.

“You know how that camel does it?” Clarence Little-Saddle offered, appearing of a sudden from nowhere. “He just closes one of his own eyes and flops back his ears and plunges right through. A camel is mighty narrow when he closes one eye and flops back his ears. Besides, they use a big-eyed needle in the act.”

“Where'd this crazy man come from?” Robert Rampart demanded, jumping three feet in the air. “Things are coming out of the ground now. I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife! Whoops, here she comes driving it. Nina, you can't drive a loaded camper into a little ditch like that! You'll be killed or collapsed!”

Nina Rampart drove the loaded camper into the little ditch at a pretty good rate of speed. The best of belief is that she just closed one eye and plunged right through. The car diminished and dropped, and it was smaller than a toy car. But it raised a pretty good cloud of dust as it bumped for several hundred yards across a ditch that was only five feet wide.

“Rampart, it's akin to the phenomenon known as looming, only in reverse,” the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan explained as he attempted to throw a rock across the narrow ditch. The rock rose very high in the air, seemed to hang at its apex while it diminished to the size of a grain of sand, and then fell into the ditch not six inches of the way across. There isn't anybody going to throw across a half-mile valley even if it looks five feet. “Look at a rising moon sometimes, Rampart. It appears very large, as though covering a great sector of the horizon, but it only covers one-half of a degree. It is hard to believe that you could set seven hundred and twenty of such large moons side by side around the horizon, or that it would take one hundred and eighty of the big things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead. It is also hard to believe that your valley is twelve hundred times as wide as it appears, but it has been surveyed, and it is.”

“I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife,” Robert chanted dully. “Damn, I let her get away again.”

“I tell you, Rampy,” Clarence Little-Saddle squared on him, “a man that lets his wife get away twice doesn't deserve to keep her. I give you till nightfall; then you forfeit. I've taken a liking to the brood. One of us is going to be down there tonight.”

After a while a bunch of them were off in that little tavern on the road between Cleveland and Osage. It was only half a mile away. If the valley had run in the other direction, it would have been only six feet away.

“It is a psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome,” said the eminent scientist Dr. Velikof Vonk. “It is maintained subconsciously by the concatenation of at least two minds, the stronger of them belonging to a man dead for many years. It has apparently existed for a little less than a hundred years, and in another hundred years it will be considerably weakened. We know from our checking out folk tales of Europe as well as Cambodia that these ensorcelled areas seldom survive for more than two hundred and fifty years. The person who first set such a thing in being will usually lose interest in it, and in all worldly things, within a hundred years of his own death. This is a simple thanato-psychic limitation. As a short-term device, the thing has been used several times as a military tactic.

“This psychic nexus, as long as it maintains itself, causes group illusion, but it is really a simple thing. It doesn't fool birds or rabbits or cattle, or cameras, only humans. There is nothing meteorological about it. It is strictly psychological. I'm glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to it or it would have worried me.”

“It is the continental fault coinciding with a noospheric fault,” said the eminent scientist Arpad Arkabaranan. “The valley really is half a mile wide, and at the same time it really is only five feet wide. If we measured correctly, we would get these dual measurements. Of course it is meteorological! Everything including dreams is meteorological. It is the animals and cameras which are fooled, as lacking a true dimension; it is only humans who see the true duality. The phenomenon should be common along the whole continental fault where the earth gains or loses half a mile that has to go somewhere. Likely it extends through the whole sweep of the Cross Timbers. Many of those trees appear twice, and many do not appear at all. A man in the proper state of mind could farm that land or raise cattle on it, but it doesn't really exist. There is a clear parallel in the Luftspiegelungthal sector in the Black Forest of Germany which exists, or does not exist, according to the circumstances and to the attitude of the beholder. Then we have the case of Mad Mountain in Morgan County, Tennessee, which isn't there all the time; and also the Little Lobo Mirage south of Presidio, Texas, from which twenty thousand barrels of water were pumped in one two-and-a-half-year period before the mirage reverted to mirage status. I'm glad I was able to give a scientific explanation to this or it would have worried me.”

“I just don't understand how he worked it,” said the eminent scientist Willy McGilly. “Cedar bark, jack-oak leaves, and the world ‘Petahauerat.’ The thing's impossible! When I was a boy and we wanted to make a hide-out, we used bark from the skunk-spruce tree, the leaves of a box-elder, and the word was ‘Boadicea.’ All three elements are wrong here. I cannot find a scientific explanation for it, and it does worry me.”

They went back to Narrow Valley. Robert Rampart was still chanting dully: “I want my land. I want my children. I want my wife.”

Nina Rampart came chugging up out of the narrow ditch in the camper and emerged through that little gate a few yards down the fence row.

“Supper's ready and we're tired of waiting for you, Robert,” she said. “A fine homesteader you are! Afraid to come onto your own land! Come along now; I'm tired of waiting for you.”

“I want my land! I want my children! I want my wife!” Robert Rampart still chanted. “Oh, there you are, Nina. You stay here this time. I want my land! I want my children! I want an answer to this terrible thing.”

“It is time we decided who wears the pants in this family,” Nina said stoutly. She picked up her husband, slung him over her shoulder, carried him to the camper and dumped him in, slammed (as it seemed) a dozen doors at once, and drove furiously down into the Narrow Valley, which already seemed wider.

Why, that place was getting normaler and normaler by the minute! Pretty soon it looked almost as wide as it was supposed to be. The psychic nexus in the form of an elongated dome had collapsed. The continental fault that coincided with the noospheric fault had faced facts and decided to conform. The Ramparts were in effective possession of their homestead, and Narrow Valley was as normal as any place anywhere.

“I have lost my land,” Clarence Little-Saddle moaned. “It was the land of my father Clarence Big-Saddle, and I meant it to be the land of my son Clarence Bare-Back. It looked so narrow that people did not notice how wide it was, and people did not try to enter it. Now I have lost it.”

Clarence Little-Saddle and the eminent scientist Willy McGilly were standing on the edge of Narrow Valley, which now appeared its true half-mile extent. The moon was just rising, so big that it filled a third of the sky. Who would have imagined that it would take a hundred and eighty of such monstrous things to reach from the horizon to a point overhead, and yet you could sight it with sighters and figure it so.

“I had a little bear-cat by the tail and I let go,” Clarence groaned. “I had a fine valley for free, and I have lost it. I am like that hard-luck guy in the funny-paper or Job in the Bible. Destitution is my lot.”

Willy McGilly looked around furtively. They were alone on the edge of the half-mile-wide valley.

“Let's give it a booster shot,” Willy McGilly said.

Hey, those two got with it! They started a snapping fire and began to throw the stuff onto it. Bark from the dog-elm tree — how do you know it won't work?

It was working! Already the other side of the valley seemed a hundred yards closer, and there were alarmed noises coming up from the people in the valley.

Leaves from a black locust tree — and the valley narrowed still more! There was, moreover, terrified screaming of both children and big people from the depths of Narrow Valley, and the happy voice of Mary Mabel Rampart chanting “Earthquake! Earthquake!”

“That my valley be always wide and flourish and such stuff, and green with money and grass!” Clarence Little-Saddle orated in Pawnee chant style, “but that it be narrow if intruders come, smash them like bugs!”

People, that valley wasn't over a hundred feet wide now, and the screaming of the people in the bottom of the valley had been joined by the hysterical coughing of the camper car starting up.

Willy and Clarence threw everything that was left on the fire. But the word? The word? Who remembers the word?

“Corsicanatexas!” Clarence Little-Saddle howled out with confidence he hoped would fool the fates.

He was answered not only by a dazzling sheet of summer lightning, but also by thunder and raindrops.

“Chahiksi!” Clarence Little-Saddle swore. “It worked. I didn't think it would. It will be all right now. I can use the rain.”

The valley was again a ditch only five feet wide.

The camper car struggled out of Narrow Valley through the little gate. It was smashed flat as a sheet of paper, and the screaming kids and people in it had only one dimension.

“It's closing in! It's closing in!” Robert Rampart roared, and he was no thicker than if he had been made out of cardboard.

“We're smashed like bugs,” the Rampart boys intoned. “We're thin like paper.

“Mort, ruine, écrasement!” spoke-acted Cecilia Rampart like the great tragedienne she was.

“Help! Help!” Nina Rampart croaked, but she winked at Willy and Clarence as they rolled by. “This homesteading jag always did leave me a little flat.”

“Don't throw those paper dolls away. They might be the Ramparts,” Mary Mabel called.

The camper car coughed again and bumped along on level ground. This couldn't last forever. The car was widening out as it bumped along.

“Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”

“Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don't think we overdid it, Willy. That car must be eighteen inches wide already, and they all ought to be normal by the time they reach the main road. The next time I do it, I think I'll throw wood-grain plastic on the fire to see who's kidding who.”

In Our Block

There were a lot of funny people in that block.

“You ever walk down that street?” Art Slick asked Jim Boomer, who had just come onto him there.

“Not since I was a boy. After the overall factory burned down, there was a faith healer had his tent pitched there one summer. The street's just one block long and it dead-ends on the railroad embankment. Nothing but a bunch of shanties and weed-filled lots. The shanties looked different today, though, and there seem to be more of them. I thought they pulled them all down a few months ago.”

“Jim, I've been watching that first little building for two hours. There was a tractor-truck there this morning with a forty-foot trailer, and it loaded out of that little shanty. Cartons about eight inches by eight inches by three feet came down that chute. They weighed about thirty-five pounds each from the way the men handled them. Jim, they filled that trailer up with them, and then pulled it off.”

“What's wrong with that, Art?”

“Jim, I said they filled that trailer up. From the drag on it it had about a sixty-thousand-pound load when it pulled out. They loaded a carton every three and a half seconds for two hours; that's two thousand cartons.”

“Sure, lots of trailers run over the load limit nowadays; they don't enforce it very well.”

“Jim, that shack's no more than a cracker box seven feet on a side. Half of it is taken up by a door, and inside a man in a chair behind a small table. You couldn't get anything else in that half. The other half is taken up by whatever that chute comes out of. You could pack six of those little shacks on that trailer.”

“Let's measure it,” Jim Boomer said. “Maybe it's bigger than it looks.” The shack had a sign on it: Make Sell Ship Anything Cut Price. Jim Boomer measured the building with an old steel tape. The shack was a seven-foot cube, and there were no hidden places. It was set up on a few piers of broken bricks, and you could see under it.

“Sell you a new fifty-foot steel tape for a dollar,” said the man in the chair in the little shack. “Throw that old one away.” The man pulled a steel tape out of a drawer of his table-desk, though Art Slick was sure it had been a plain flat-top table with no place for a drawer.

“Fully retractable, rhodium-plated, Dort glide, Ramsey swivel, and it forms its own carrying case. One dollar,” the man said.

Jim Boomer paid him a dollar for it. “How many of them you got?”

“I can have a hundred thousand ready to load out in ten minutes,” the man said. “Eighty-eight cents each in hundred thousand lots.”

“Was that a trailer-load of steel tapes you shipped out this morning?” Art asked the man.

“No, that must have been something else. This is the first steel tape I ever made. Just got the idea when I saw you measuring my shack with that old beat-up one.”

Art Slick and Jim Boomer went to the rundown building next door. It was smaller, about a six-foot cube, and the sign said Public Stenographer. The clatter of a typewriter was coming from it, but the noise stopped when they opened the door.

A dark pretty girl was sitting in a chair before a small table. There was nothing else in the room, and no typewriter.

“I thought I heard a typewriter in here,” Art said.

“Oh that is me.” The girl smiled. “Sometimes I amuse myself make typewriter noises like a public stenographer is supposed to.”

“What would you do if someone came in to have some typing done?”

“What are you think? I do it of course.”

“Could you type a letter for me?”

“Sure is can, man friend, two bits a page, good work, carbon copy, envelope and stamp.”

“Ah, let's see how you do it. I will dictate to you while you type.”

“You dictate first. Then I write. No sense mix up two things at one time.

Art dictated a long and involved letter that he had been meaning to write for several days. He felt like a fool droning it to the girl as she filed her nails. “Why is public stenographer always sit filing her nails?” she asked as Art droned. “But I try to do it right, file them down, grow them out again, then file them down some more. Been doing it all morning. It seems silly.”

“Ah — that is all,” Art said when he had finished dictating.

“Not P. S. Love and Kisses?” the girl asked.

“Hardly. It's a business letter to a person I barely know.”

“I always say P. S. Love and Kisses to persons I barely know,” the girl said. “Your letter will make three pages, six bits. Please you both step outside about ten seconds and I write it. Can't do it when you watch.” She pushed them out and closed the door.

Then there was silence.

“What are you doing in there, girl?” Art called.

“Want I sell you a memory course too? You forget already? I type a letter,” the girl called.

“But I don't hear a typewriter going.”

“What is? You want verisimilitude too? I should charge extra.” There was a giggle, and then the sound of very rapid typing for about five seconds.

The girl opened the door and handed Art the three page letter. It was typed perfectly, of course.

“There is something a little odd about this,” Art said.

“Oh? The ungrammar of the letter is your own, sir. Should I have correct?”

“No. It is something else. Tell me the truth, girl: how does the man next door ship out trailer-loads of material from a building ten times too small to hold the stuff?”

“He cuts prices.”

“Well, what are you people? The man next door resembles you.”

“My brother-uncle. We tell everybody we are Innominee Indians.”

“There is no such tribe,” Jim Boomer said flatly.

“Is there not? Then we will have to tell people we are something else. You got to admit it sounds like Indian. What's the best Indian to be?”

“Shawnee,” said Jim Boomer.

“Okay then we be Shawnee Indians. See how easy it is.”

“We're already taken,” Boomer said. “I'm a Shawnee and I know every Shawnee in town.”

“Hi cousin!” the girl cried, and winked. “That's from a joke I learn, only the begin was different. See how foxy I turn all your questions.”

“I have two bits coming out of my dollar,” Art said.

“I know,” the girl said. “I forgot for a minute what design is on the back of the two-bitser piece, so I stall while I remember it. Yes, the funny bird standing on the bundle of firewood. One moment till I finish it. Here.” She handed the quarter to Art Slick. “And you tell everybody there's a smoothie public stenographer here who types letters good.”

“Without a typewriter,” said Art Slick. “Let's go, Jim.”

“P. S. Love and Kisses,” the girl called after them.

The Cool Man Club was next door, a small and shabby beer bar. The bar girl could have been a sister of the public stenographer.

“We'd like a couple of Buds, but you don't seem to have a stock of anything,” Art said.

“Who needs stock?” the girl asked. “Here is beers.” Art would have believed that she brought them out of her sleeves, but she had no sleeves. The beers were cold and good.

“Girl, do you know how the fellow on the corner can ship a whole trailer-load of material out of a space that wouldn't hold a tenth of it?” Art asked the girl.

“Sure. He makes it and loads it out at the same time. That way it doesn't take up space, like if he made it before time.”

“But he has to make it out of something,” Jim Boomer cut in.

“No, no,” the girl said. “I study your language. I know words. Out of something is to assemble, not to make. He makes.”

“This is funny.” Slick gaped. “Budweiser is misspelled on this bottle, the i before the e.”

“Oh, I goof,” the bar girl said. “I couldn't remember which way it goes so I make it one way on one bottle and the other way on the other. Yesterday a man ordered a bottle of Progress beer, and I spelled it Progers on the bottle. Sometimes I get things wrong. Here, I fix yours.”

She ran her hand over the label, and then it was spelled correctly.

“But that thing is engraved and then reproduced,” Slick protested.

“Oh, sure, all fancy stuff like that,” the girl said. “I got to be more careful. One time I forget and make Jax-taste beer in a Schlitz bottle and the man didn't like it. I had to swish swish change the taste while I pretended to give him a different bottle. One time I forgot and produced a green-bottle beer in a brown bottle, ‘It is the light in here, it just makes it look brown,’ I told the man. Hell, we don't even have a light in here. I go swish fast and make the bottle green. It's hard to keep from making mistake when you're stupid.”

“No, you don't have a light or a window in here, and it's light,” Slick said. “You don't have refrigeration. There are no power lines to any of the shanties in this block. How do you keep the beer cold?”

“Yes, is the beer not nice and cold? Notice how tricky I evade your question. Will you good men have two more beers?”

“Yes, we will. And I'm interested in seeing where you get them,” Slick said.

“Oh look, is snakes behind you!” the girl cried. “Oh how you startle and jump!” she laughed. “It's all joke. Do you think I will have snakes in my nice bar?”

But she had produced two more beers, and the place was as bare as before.

“How long have you tumble-bugs been in this block?” Boomer asked.

“Who keep track?” the girl said. “People come and go.”

“You're not from around here,” Slick said. “You're not from anywhere I know. Where do you come from? Jupiter?”

“Who wants Jupiter?” the girl seemed indignant. “Do business with a bunch of insects there, is all! Freeze your tail too.”

“You wouldn't be a kidder, would you, girl?” Slick asked.

“I sure do try hard. I learn a lot of jokes but I tell them all wrong yet. I get better, though. I try to be the witty bar girl so people will come back.”

“What's in the shanty next door toward the tracks?”

“My cousin-sister,” said the girl. “She set up shop just today. She grow any color hair on bald-headed men. I tell her she's crazy. No business. If they wanted hair they wouldn't be bald-headed in the first place.”

“Well, can she grow hair on bald-headed men?” Slick asked.

“Oh sure. Can't you?”

There were three or four more shanty shops in the block. It didn't seem that there had been that many when the men went into the Cool Man Club.

“I don't remember seeing this shack a few minutes ago,” Boomer said to the man standing in front of the last shanty on the line.

“Oh, I just made it,” the man said.

Weathered boards, rusty nails… and he had just made it.

“Why didn't you — ah — make a decent building while you were at it?” Slick asked.

“This is more inconspicuous,” the man said. “Who notices when an old building appears suddenly? We're new here and want to feel our way in before we attract attention. Now I'm trying to figure out what to make. Do you think there is a market for a luxury automobile to sell for a hundred dollars? I suspect I would have to respect the local religious feeling when I make them though.”

“What is that?” Slick asked.

“Ancestor worship. The old gas tank and fuel system still carried as vestiges after natural power is available. Oh well, I'll put them in. I'll have one done in about three minutes if you want to wait.”

“No. I've already got a car,” Slick said. “Let's go, Jim.”

That was the last shanty in the block, so they turned back.

“I was just wondering what was down in this block where nobody ever goes,” Slick said. “There's a lot of odd corners in our town if you look them out.”

“There are some queer guys in the shanties that were here before this bunch,” Boomer said. “Some of them used to come up to the Red Rooster to drink. One of them could gobble like a turkey. One of them could roll one eye in one direction and the other eye the other way. They shoveled hulls at the cottonseed oil float before it burned down.”

They went by the public stenographer shack again.

“No kidding, honey, how do you type without a typewriter?” Slick asked.

“Typewriter is too slow,” the girl said.

“I asked how, not why,” Slick said.

“I know. Is it not nifty the way I turn away a phrase? I think I will have a big oak tree growing in front of my shop tomorrow for shade. Either of you nice men have an acorn in your pocket?”

“Ah — no. How do you really do the typing, girl?”

“You promise you won't tell anybody.”

“I promise.”

“I make the marks with my tongue,” the girl said.

They started slowly on up the block.

“Hey, how do you make the carbon copies?” Jim Boomer called back.

“With my other tongue,” the girl said.

There was another forty-foot trailer loading out of the first shanty in the block. It was bundles of half-inch plumbers pipe coming out of the chute — in twenty-foot lengths. Twenty-foot rigid pipe out of a seven-foot shed.

“I wonder how he can sell trailer-loads of such stuff out of a little shack like that,” Slick puzzled, still not satisfied.

“Like the girl says, he cuts prices,” Boomer said. “Let's go over to the Red Rooster and see if there's anything going on. There always were a lot of funny people in that block.”

Land of the Great Horses

“They came and took our country away from us,” the people had always said. But nobody understood them.

Two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, were rolling in a terrain buggy over the Thar Desert. It was bleak, red country, more rock than sand. It looked as though the top had been stripped off it and the naked underland left uncovered.

They heard thunder and it puzzled them. They looked at each other, the blond Rockwell and the dark Smith. It never thundered in the whole country between New Delhi and Bahawalpur. What would this rainless north India desert have to thunder with?

“Let's ride the ridges here,” Rockwell told Smith, and he sent the vehicle into a climb. “It never rains here, but once before I was caught in a draw in a country where it never rained. I nearly drowned.”

It thundered again, heavy and rolling, as though to tell them that they were hearing right.

“This draw is named Kuti Tavdavi — Little River,” Smith said darkly. “I wonder why.”

Then he jerked back as though startled at himself.

“Rockwell, why did I say that? I never saw this draw before. How did a name like that pop into my mind? But it's the low draw that would be a little river if it ever rained in this country. This land can't have significant rain. There's no high place to tip whatever moisture goes over.”

“I wonder about that every time I come,” said Rockwell, and raised his hand toward the shimmering heights — the Land of the Great Horses, the famous mirage. “If it were really there it would tip the moisture. It would make a lush savanna of all this.”

They were mineral explorers doing ground minutiae on promising portions of an aerial survey. The trouble with the Thar was that it had everything — lead, zinc, antimony, copper, tin, bauxite — in barely submarginal amounts. Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay.

Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage, and they had never seen that before. It had clouded and lowered. It was thundering in rolling waves, and there was no mirage of sound.

“There is either a very large and very busy bird up there or this is rain,” Rockwell said.

And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily. It was pleasant as they chukkered along in the vehicle through the afternoon. Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.

Smith broke into a happy song in one of the northwest India tongues, a tune with a ribald swing to it, though Rockwell didn't understand the words. It was full of double rhymes and vowel-packed words such as a child might make up.

“How the devil do you know the tongues so well?” Rockwell asked. “I find them difficult, and I have a good linguistic background.”

“I didn't have to learn them,” Smith said, “I just had to remember them. They all cluster around the boro jib itself.”

“Around the what? How many of the languages do you know?”

“All of them. The Seven Sisters, they're called: Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi, Hindi.”

“Your Seven Sisters only number six,” Rockwell jibed.

“There's a saying that the seventh sister ran off with a horse trader,” Smith said. “But that seventh lass is still encountered here and there around the world.”

Often they stopped to survey on foot. The very color of the new rivulets was significant to the mineral men, and this was the first time they had ever seen water flow in that country. They continued on fitfully and slowly, and ate up a few muddy miles.

Rockwell gasped once and nearly fell off the vehicle. He had seen a total stranger riding beside him, and it shook him.

Then he saw that it was Smith as he had always been, and he was dumbfounded by the illusion. And, soon, by something else.

“Something is very wrong here,” Rockwell said.

“Something is very right here,” Smith answered him, and then broke into another song in an Indian tongue.

“We're lost,” Rockwell worried out loud. “We can't see any distance for the rain, but there shouldn't be rising ground here. It isn't mapped.”

“Of course it is,” Smith sang. “It's the Jalo Char.”

“The what? Where did you get a name like that? The map's a blank here, and the country should be.”

“Then the map is defective. Man, it's the sweetest valley in the world! It will lead us all the way up. How could the map forget it? How could we all forget it for so long?”

“Smith! What's wrong? You're pie-eyed.”

“Everything's right, I tell you. I was reborn just a minute ago. It's a coming home.”

“Smith! We're riding through green grass.”

“I love it. I could crop it like a horse.”

“That cliff, Smith! It shouldn't be that close! It's part of the mir — ”

“Why, sir, that is Lolo Trusul.”

“But it's not real! It's not on any topography map!”

“Map, sir? I'm a poor kalo man who wouldn't know about things like that.”

“Smith! You're a qualified cartographer!”

“Does seem that I followed a trade with a name like that. But the cliff is real enough. I climbed it in my boyhood — in my other boyhood. And that yonder, sir, is Drapengoro Rez — the Grassy Mountain. And the high plateau ahead of us which we begin to climb is Diz Boro Grai — the Land of the Great Horses.”

Rockwell stopped the terrain buggy and leaped off. Smith followed him in a happy daze.

“Smith, you're wide-eyed crazy!” Rockwell gasped. “And what am I? We're terribly lost somehow. Smith, look at the log chart and the bearings recorder!”

“Log chart, sir? I'm a poor kalo man who wouldn't know — ”

“Damn you, Smith, you made these instruments. If they're correct we're seven hundred feet too high and have been climbing for ten miles into a highland that's supposed to be part of a mirage. These cliffs can't be here. We can't be here. Smith!”

But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.

“Smith, where are you trotting off to? Can't you hear me?”

“You call to me, sir?” asked Smith. “And by such a name?”

“Are the two of us as crazy as the country?” Rockwell moaned. “I've worked with you for three years. Isn't your name Smith?”

“Why, yes, sir, I guess it might be englished as Horse-Smith or Black-Smith. But my name is Pettalangro and I'm going home.”

And the man who had been Smith started on foot up to the Land of the Great Horses.

“Smith, I'm getting on the buggy and I'm going back,” Rockwell shouted. “I'm scared liverless of this country that changes. When a mirage turns solid it's time to quit. Come along now! We'll be back in Bikaner by tomorrow morning. There's a doctor there, and a whiskey bar. We need one of them.”

“Thank you, sir, but I must go up to my home,” Smith sang out. “It was kind of you to give me a ride along the way.”

“I'm leaving you, Smith. One crazy man is better than two.”

“Ashava, Sarishan,” Smith called a parting.

“Smith, unriddle me one last thing,” Rockwell called, trying to find a piece of sanity to hold to. “What is the name of the seventh sister?”

“Deep Romany,” Smith sang, and he was gone up into the high plateau that had always been a mirage.

In an upper room on Olive Street in St. Louis, Missouri, a half-and-half couple were talking half-and-half.

“The rez has riser'd,” the man said. “I can sung it like brishindo. Let's jal.”

“All right,” the wife said, “if you're awa.”

“Hell, I bet I can riker plenty bano on the beda we got here. I'll have kakko come kinna it aro.”

“With a little bachi we can be jal'd by areat,” said the wife.

“Nashiva, woman, nashiva!”

“All right,” the wife said, and she began to pack their suitcases.

In Camargo in the Chihuahua State of Mexico, a shade-tree mechanic sold his business for a hundred pesos and told his wife to pack up — they were leaving.

“To leave now when business is so good?” she asked.

“I only got one car to fix and I can't fix that,” the man said.

“But if you keep it long enough, he will pay you to put it together again even if it isn't fixed. That's what he did last time. And you've a horse to shoe.”

“I'm afraid of that horse. It has come back, though. Let's go.”

“Are you sure we will be able to find it?”

“Of course I'm not sure. We will go in our wagon and our sick horse will pull it.”

“Why will we go in the wagon, when we have a car, of sorts?”

“I don't know why. But we will go in the wagon, and we will nail the old giant horseshoe up on the lintel board.”

A carny in Nebraska lifted his head and smelled the air.

“It's come back,” he said. “I always knew we'd know. Any other Romanies here?”

“I got a little rart in me,” said one of his fellows. “This narvelengero dives is only a two-bit carnival anyhow. We'll tell the boss to shove it up his chev and we'll be gone.”

In Tulsa, a used-car dealer named Gypsy Red announced the hottest sale on the row:

“Everything for nothing! I'm leaving. Pick up the papers and drive them off. Nine new heaps and thirty good ones. All free.”

“You think we're crazy?” the people asked. “There's a catch.”

Red put the papers for all the cars on the ground and put a brick on top of them. He got in the worst car on the lot and drove it off forever.

“All free,” he sang out as he drove off. “Pick up the papers and drive the cars away.”

They're still there. You think people are crazy to fall for something like that that probably has a catch to it?

In Galveston a barmaid named Margaret was asking merchant seamen how best to get passage to Karachi.

“Why Karachi?” one of them asked her.

“I thought it would be the nearest big port,” she said. “It's come back, you know.”

“I kind of felt this morning it had come back,” he said. “I'm a chal myself. Sure, we'll find something going that way.”

In thousands of places fawney-men and dukkerin-women, kakki-baskros and hegedusies, clowns and commission men, Counts of Condom and Dukes of Little Egypt parvel'd in their chips and got ready to roll.

Men and families made sudden decisions in every country. Athinganoi gathered in the hills above Salonika in Greece and were joined by brothers from Serbia and Albania and the Rhodope Hills of Bulgaria. Zingari of north Italy gathered around Pavia and began to roll toward Genoa to take ship. Boêmios of Portugal came down to Porto and Lisbon. Gitanos of Andalusia and all southern Spain came to Sanlúcar and Málaga. Zigeuner from Thuringia and Hanover thronged to Hamburg to find ocean passage. Gioboga and their mixed-blood Shelta cousins from every cnoc and coill of Ireland found boats at Dublin and Limerick and Bantry.

From deeper Europe, Tsigani began to travel overland eastward. The people were going from two hundred ports of every continent and over a thousand highroads — many of them long forgotten.

Balauros, Kalo, Manusch, Melelo, Tsigani, Moro, Romani, Flamenco, Sinto, Cicara, the many-named people was traveling in its thousands. The Romani Rai was moving.

Two million Gypsies of the world were going home.

At the institute, Gregory Smirnov was talking to his friends and associates.

“You remember the thesis I presented several years ago,” he said, “that, a little over a thousand years ago, Outer Visitors came down to Earth and took a sliver of our Earth away with them. All of you found the proposition comical, but I arrived at my conclusion by isostatic and eustatic analysis carried out minutely. There is no doubt that it happened.”

“One of our slivers is missing,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You guessed the sliver taken at about ten thousand square miles in area and no more than a mile thick at its greatest. You said you thought they wanted to run this sliver from our Earth through their laboratories as a sample. Do you have something new on our missing sliver?”

“I'm closing the inquiry,” Gregory said. “They've brought it back.”

It was simple really, jekvasteskero, Gypsy-simple. It is the gadjo, the non-Gypsies of the world, who give complicated answers to simple things.

“They came and took our country away from us,” the Gypsies had always said, and that is what had happened.

The Outer Visitors had run a slip under it, rocked it gently to rid it of nervous fauna, and then taken it away for study. For a marker, they left an immaterial simulacrum of that high country as we ourselves sometimes set name or picture tags to show where an object will be set later. This simulacrum was often seen by humans as a mirage.

The Outer Visitors also set simulacra in the minds of the superior fauna that fled from the moving land. This would be a homing instinct, inhibiting permanent settlement anywhere until the time should come for the resettlement; entwined with this instinct were certain premonitions, fortune-showings, and understandings.

Now the Visitors brought the slice of land back, and its old fauna homed in on it.

“What will the — ah — patronizing smile on my part — Outer Visitors do now, Gregory?” Aloysius Shiplap asked back at the Institute.

“Why, take another sliver of our Earth to study, I suppose, Aloysius,” Gregory Smirnov said.

Low-intensity earthquakes rocked the Los Angeles area for three days. The entire area was evacuated of people. Then there was a great whistle blast from the sky as if to say, “All ashore that's going ashore.”

Then the surface to some little depth and all its superstructure was taken away. It was gone. And then it was quickly forgotten.

From the Twenty-second Century Comprehensive Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, page 389:

ANGELENOS: (See also Automobile Gypsies and Prune Pickers.) A mixed ethnic group of unknown origin, much given to wandering in automobiles. It is predicted that they will be the last users of this vehicle, and several archaic chrome-burdened models are still produced for their market. These people are not beggars; many of them are of superior intelligence. They often set up in business, usually as real estate dealers, gamblers, confidence men, managers of mail-order diploma mills, and promoters of one sort or other. They seldom remain long in one location.

Their pastimes are curious. They drive for hours and days on old and seldom-used cloverleafs and freeways. It has been said that a majority of the Angelenos are narcotics users, but Harold Freelove (who lived for some months as an Angeleno) has proved this false. What they inhale at their frolics (smog-crocks) is a black smoke of carbon and petroleum waste laced with monoxide. Its purpose is not clear.

The religion of the Angelenos is a mixture of old cults with a very strong eschatological element. The Paradise Motif is represented by reference to a mystic “Sunset Boulevard.” The language of the Angelenos is a colorful and racy argot. Their account of their origin is vague:

“They came and took our dizz away from us,” they say.

Groaning Hinges Of The World

Eginhard wrote that the Hinges of the World are, the one of them in the Carnic Alps north of the Isarko and quite near High Glockner, and the other one in the Wangeroog in the Frisian islands off the Weser mouth and under the water of this shelf; and that these hinges are made of iron. It is the Germanies, the whole great country between these hinges that turns over, he wrote, after either a long generation or a short generation.

The only indication of the turning over is a groaning of the World Hinges too brief to terrify. That which rises out of the Earth has the same appearance in mountains and rivers and towns and people as the land that it replaces. The land and the people do not know that they have turned over, but their neighbors may come to know it. A man looking at the new, after the land had turned over, would not see it different from the old: and yet it would be different. But the places and the persons would have the same names and appearances as those they replaced.

Strabo, however, eight hundred years earlier, wrote that the Hinges of the World are in high Armenia, the one of them on the Albanian extension into the Caspian Sea, the other at Mount Ararat itself (known from the earliest time as the hinge of the world). Strabo wrote that it is the whole Caucasus Mountains that turn over, with all the people and goats: and the hinges on which the region turns are bronze.

But Elpidius claimed that the Hinges of the World are, the one of them at Aneto in Andorra (anciano Gozne del Mundo), and the other at Hendaye on the Biscay coast. He stated that it is the Pyrenees that turn over, that their turning is always for a very long generation, and that the Basques who obtain in that region are people from under the earth and are much more Basque-like than those they replace. He wrote that the Hinges of the World are here of rock-crystal.

All three of the writers give the name Revolution to this turning over of a region, but lesser authorities have later given that name to less literal turnings. There is something very consistent about the reports of these three men, and there are aspects of their accounts almost too strange not to be true.

But they all lie. How would any of these regions turn over on hinges? And if they have the same appearance in land and people after they have turned over, who would know that they had turned? It would seem that if a man have the same name and appearance after he has turned over, then he is still the same man. As to the deep groaning of the World Hinges which all three authorities state is heard at the time of turnover, why, one hears groanings all the time.

The only region of the world that does in fact turn over is far around the world from all of these. It is in the western Moluccas. One hinge is just north of Berebere on Morotai Island and the other is at Ganedidalem on Jilolo or Halmahera Island. These are the true Hinges of the World and they are made of hard kapok-wood well oiled.

All the peoples of this region were peaceful with themselves and their neighbors almost all the time. The people under the world were no more than people in stories to them. There was fire under the islands, of course, and volcanoes on them; and the people under the earth were said to be themselves brands of fire. Well, let them stay under the world then. Let the hinges not turn again!

But one day a fisherman from Obi Island was out in his boat right on the edge of the region that was said to have turned over in the old times. He had pulled in only a few fish in his nets and he had about decided to sail to Jilolo and steal enough fish from the timid people there to fill his boat.

Then he heard a short, deep groaning. He felt a shock, and a shock-wave. But who pays attention to things like that around the volcano islands? He was uneasy, of course, but a man is supposed to be uneasy several times a day.

He pulled in his net. Then he felt a further shock. This net had been torn in one place and he had tied it together. He had tied it, as he always did, with a pendek knot. But now he saw that it was tied with a panjang knot which he had never tied in his life. He noticed also that the fish in his net were of a little bit darker color than usual. He wouldn't have noticed this if he hadn't noticed the knot first. In great fear he set his short sail, and he also drove his oar as hard as he could to take the boat toward his own Obi Island.

The only region where the panjang knot is commonly tied is the region under the world. This region had turned up in the age of the fisherman's ancestors, to the death and destruction of many of them, and now it may have turned up once more. A part of the fisherman's net must have been in the region that turned over, he was that close to the fringe of it. The fisherman knew that the upheaval people would have the same names and appearances as people he knew; he knew also that the whole business might be a high storm.

Fast canoes out of Jilolo overtook the fisherman before he was home. He was frightened at first, but when they came closer to overhaul him, he saw that the men in them were friends of his, Jilolo people, the most gentle people in the world. You could push the Jilolos, you could steal their fish, you could steal their fruits, you could even steal their boats, and they would only smile sadly. The fisherman forgot all about the turnover when the gentle Jilolos overtook him.

“Hello, Jilolo men, give me fish, give me fruits,” the fisherman said, “or I will run down your canoes and push you into the water. Give me fish. My boat is not near full of fish.”

“Hello, our friend,” the Jilolo men said to the fisherman. Then they came on board his boat and cut off his head. They were men of the same names and appearances as those he had known, and yet they were different.

The Jilolos tied the fisherman's head onto the prow of the foremost and biggest canoe. “Guide us into the best landing of Obi Island,” they told the head. So the head guided them in, telling them whether to veer a little to the east or the west, telling them about the cross-wave and the shoal, telling them how to go right to the landing. (The shy Jilolos had formerly used a poorer landing when they came to Obi Island.)

“Shout a greeting,” the men told the head when they were very near the land. “They will know your voice on shore. Tell them to bring out all their spears and fish-spears, and the Dutch gun, and stack them all by the landing. Tell them we are their good friends come to play a game with them.” So the head shouted it all out.

The Obi men came out and stacked all their spears and the fish-spears and the Dutch gun by the landing, chuckling over whatever new game it should be. Weapons had not been used for anything but games for many years.

The Jilolo men came onto shore. They took the spears and the Dutch gun. One of them understood the gun. He shot it three times and killed three of the Obi men with it. Other Jilolo men killed other Obi men with spears and with clubs they brought with them.

“This is the game we play with you,” the Jilolos said. They caught twenty of the Obi girls and young women and took them with them. They gave instructions as to what tribute must be brought to them weekly by the Obis. They killed two more Obi men to make sure that their message was understood. Then they went away in their canoes.

And it was all confusion that they left behind them.

One of the Obi men, however, in spite of the killing and confusion, had untied the fisherman's head from the prow of the biggest canoe. Now some of the frightened Obi men took the head with them into the long hut and questioned it as to what this should mean.

“The region has turned over on its hinges,” the fisherman's head said, “just as it sometimes turned over and over again in the days of our distant grandfathers. I was out in my boat fishing. I heard the short, deep groaning; I felt the shock, and the shockwave. But who pays attention to things like these around the volcano islands? Then I pulled in my net with the few fish in it.

“This net had been torn in one place, and I had tied it together with a pendek knot. Now I saw that it was tied with a panjang knot, which I never tied in my life, but which the people under the earth tie. I noticed also that the fish in my net were a little darker color than is common. This means that I was on the edge of the region and the region has turned over.

“Oh my family and my people, it is all misery and death for us now! The Jilolo men will have the same names and appearances as those they have displaced, but you see already that they are not the same. No more will we be able to push the Jilolos down and take their fish and fruits and boats. We will not be able to push them into the water or have fun with them. They have taken the bodies of some of our men with them; they have taken some of our girls and young women with them; and they will be having fun with both tonight. We used to make jokes with each other about the stories that we used to eat each other. It has come back to us now. That whole part of the world has turned over on its hinges. We die in our woe.”

The fisherman's head was in great pain. One of the men gave it a stick to bite on. And in a little while it died.

And there followed one of the most horrifying ages ever in those lilac waters. The turned-up Jilolos were the demons, the old slavers come back. They were like the tearing, meat-eating birds swooping in. They were like bloody dragons. They came one day and took an Obi man away from his brother. The next day they came again and said, “Your brother wants to talk to you.”

They had a drumhead covered with the brother's skin. They beat on it till it sounded like the brother's voice booming. That is what they meant that his brother wanted to talk to him.

These Jilolos gnawed roast meat from men's ribs as they strode about for mockery. They burned down the huts and the long huts of the Obi. They did the same thing to the people of Batjan and Misool and Mangole and Sanana. All the leading men of those places were hiding in the hills.

The Jilolos said that they would kill nine men for every leading man who was hiding. Many of the leading men, hearing of this, came out of their hiding and let themselves be killed to save the lives of many more. Soon there were only a few leading men left.

The Jilolos cut out the eyes and tongues and gonads of people and left the people blind and mutilated and dying. They roasted some of the people alive. People are best that way, they said. “How is it that in the old days we ate only fish and pig and fruit?” the Jilolos asked. “How have we missed this fine thing so long?”

The Jilolos set fires in the coconut groves and spice bushes and kapok forests of the five islands. Fires rose over these islands day and night, brighter even than the volcano fires of Jilolo itself. Anyone who tried to put out the fire would be burned up in the fire, they said.

They tied sacks over the heads of men before they killed them. This was to trap their souls and kill them too. They were merciless. They violated and killed little children. They skinned some people before they killed them. They killed so many people that they took only their eyes and hearts to eat. Carrion birds gobbled down from the high air, and sharks jostled into the waters drawn by more blood than had been known for many ages.

So it went for a year and a day. Whole islands moaned and bled with the abomination of it, and the oceans were black with reeking blood.

There was one old Dutchman who still lived on Obi Island. After the Dutch days, he had gone home to Dutchland. He had missed the really busy seas and ports with the tang of trade to them, and the ordered rich land in all its bright neatness. He had been homesick for many years, so he went home.

But he found that the home seas were cluttered with belching ships that fouled the air (he had forgotten that part); he found the land was overcrowded with Dutchmen all busy and benign (he had forgotten that part too); and the roads and lanes were full of bicycles and motor cars. He found that it was cold and gusty and demanding, and the bright neat colors were not nearly so bright as those of the islands. He discovered that neatness and the appearance of respectability were required of him, and he had long since turned into a loose old rounder. He became homesick for the second time, and he returned to the islands and Obi Island. He had found that he could not Dutch it over the Dutch themselves, but he could still Dutch it over the Obis.

Now the Jilolos demanded that the Obis give up their Dutchman to them, or they would kill one hundred Obis. They wanted to have fun with the Dutchman and then kill him in an unusual way. They wanted to see if Dutch flesh was really prime stuff. So the Obis came sadly to their duty.

“We will have to give you up,” they told the Dutchman when they had come to his house in the hills. “We like you, but we don't like you as well as one hundred of ourselves. Come along now. There is no way out of it.”

“This Dutchman, about to be given up, will think of a way out of it,” the Dutchman said. “A thing that is done can be undone. Can there be found twelve leading men left alive here, and twelve in the peninsula north of Berebere?”

“There are barely that many of us. We are they,” the men said. “We believe that there are barely that many leading men left north of Berebere.”

“Inform yourselves, and inform them,” the Dutchman said. “Each party will go out in twelve fishing boats that have windlass winches for the nets. It will take the power of all the windlasses together to turn the things, and even then it may not work. And both parties will have to do it at exactly the same time.”

“How will we know it is the same time, with the distance between the two groups?” the men asked.

“I don't know,” the Dutchman said.

But one of the men there had affinity with two large birds of the kind called radjawall, who were larger than others of their species and special in several ways. They preyed over the ocean as well as over the land (they were, in fact, sea-eagles), they talked more canny than parrots, and they were more intelligent than the derek-derek, the crane. The man went out of the Dutchman's house and whistled loudly. The two big birds appeared as two dots in the sky, they came on very rapidly, and then they were there with the men.

“Oh yes, I've heard of you two fellows,” the Dutchman said to the birds. “If one of you were flying high over Ganedidalem and the other over Berebere, could you still see each other at that distance?”

“Yes, if we were high enough, we could still see each other,” one of the birds said.

“And would you be too high to see our ready-signal from the shores then?”

“No, we could see that too,” the other bird said. “Tell us what you want us to do.”

The Dutchman carefully told them about the affair. Then he said, “The one of you fly now to Berebere and find the men there. Tell them how it is. Tell them that we start now and will be at our place in the early morning. Let them be at their place then too. And caution them to be clear of the Hinges when they do it, on the outside of them, or they may find themselves turned over when it happens. In the morning you two birds will give the signal to each other and to us so we can do it together.”

The one bird flew off to Berebere. The twelve leading men, each one taking three lesser men with him, cast off in twelve fishing boats. They set sail on the evening wind; and with the wind and the oars going all night, they were off Ganedidalem in the early morning.

They found the great Hinge in an inlet, just where legend had always said it should be. They took the twelve windlass winches off the twelve fishing boats, and the Dutchman rigged them to the kapok-wood axle of the World Hinge. There would be no trouble about the same thing up at Berebere. The men at Berebere are handier and more mechanical than the men of Obi.

Then four men stood at each windlass to throw their weight to the thing. The Dutchman gave the ready signal to the bird in the sky. Then they waited.

One minute later, the bird flared his great wings and began to dive straight down for signal. Long leagues to the north, off Berebere, the other bird did the same thing.

“Heave!” cried the Dutchman. “All heave! For our lives, it is now or it is nevermore with us!” And all heaved at the windlass winches, turning the cranks while the ropes sounded and moaned.

Then began the groaning of the World Hinges, more horrible than could be believed! The Earth shook, and the Island smoked and bawled. This was unnatural, it was a violation. Always before, the hinges had turned from natural forces in the earth that had come to their term and time.

Groaning yet more horrible! The ropes cried like infants from the strain on them, the cranks whined with the sound of hard wood about to shatter. The Hinge groaned a final terrible time. There was the shock! And the shock-wave.

Then they were done with it, or they were undone forever.

“Let us go back to Obi Island and wait,” the Dutchman said. “I believe that it turned over when the Hinge groaned last and loudest. If the raiding stops, then we have done it. If it has not stopped, then we are dead forever.”

“Let us go to Jilolo Island and not wait,” the Obi men said. “We will have bloody death there, or we will have us a lot of fun.”

The Obis with the Dutchman rowed and sailed for Jilolo all day, and came there in the evening. They found Jilolo men. They pushed them down, they stole their fish and fruits and boats, they pushed them in the water and laughed at them. This was the fun they hadn't had for a long time.

These were Jilolos of the same names and appearances as the horrible killers of the last time, but they were different. You could push them down and take advantage of them; you didn't have to be afraid of them. For they were also the men of the same names and appearances of the time before last, and they only smiled sadly when they were robbed and pushed down.

The Obi men called the girls and young women who had been stolen from them, and took them in the boats with them and went home. So peace returned, and it was all as it had been before with them.

Only not quite.

These girls and young women, robbed from the Obi and now taken back by them, had been on Jilolo when it turned back. It was in reverse with them. With the turning back, they became their own counterparts from under the world, the meanest, most troublesome women ever found anywhere, yet of the same names and appearances as the girls and young women before. They raised hell from one end of Obi to the other when they got home, and they kept it up all their lives.

So it was a troubled peace that came to Obi. Even so, many said it was better than to be killed by the Jilolo. Others said it was about the same thing.

That is the only place, there in the western Moluccas, where the World Hinges do really turn and a whole region may experience this revolution. The other places are almost surely fable.

A man just back from high Armenia says he examined the hinges there and they are bronze turned green with great age. They apparently have not turned since the drying of the flood. And if Armenia would turn over, who would know it? You can turn an Armenian upside-down and hardly tell it. Those fellows look about the same on both ends.

As to the Germanies, those hinges in the Carnic Alps and in the Wangeroog are of badly rusted iron. Nobody can tell when they turned last, but should they turn now (the shape they are in) it would make a groaning heard around the world. Besides, if this country had turned in modern centuries, there would have to be some indication of it; some stark frightful thing would have happened there comparable to the revolution of the Jilolos. The people and places, keeping the same names and appearances, would have become immeasurably different in not too subtle ways, would have become violent and appalling. Is there any report of such a thing happening in our own days or those of our fathers?

And in the Pyrenees, is there any indication that they have turned, lately or ever? Rock-crystal does not rust, but it does acquire a patina of unuse. Yet one has said of the Canigou, which I take to apply to all the Pyrenees and all the people in them, that it is unchanging forever, but that it is created anew every morning. The Hinges at Aneto and Hendaye either do not turn at all, or they turn every night.

Continued On Next Rock

Up in the Big Little country there is an up-thrust, a chimney rock that is half fallen against a newer hill. It is formed of what is sometimes called Dawson sandstone and is interlaced with tough shale. It was formed during the glacial and recent ages in the bottom lands of Crow Creek and Green River when these streams (at least five times) were mighty rivers.

The chimney rock is only a little older than mankind, only a little younger than grass. Its formation had been up-thrust and then eroded away again, all but such harder parts as itself and other chimneys and blocks.

A party of five persons came to this place where the chimney rock had fallen against a still newer hill. The people of the party did not care about the deep limestone below: they were not geologists. They did care about the newer hill (it was man-made) and they did care a little about the rock chimney; they were archaeologists.

Here was time heaped up, bulging out in casing and accumulation, and not in line sequence. And here also was striated and banded time, grown tall, and then shattered and broken.

The five party members came to the site early in the afternoon, bringing the working trailer down a dry creek bed. They unloaded many things and made a camp there. It wasn't really necessary to make a camp on the ground. There was a good motel two miles away on the highway; there was a road along the ridge above. They could have lived in comfort and made the trip to the site in five minutes every morning. Terrence Burdock, however, believed that one could not get the feel of a digging unless he lived on the ground with it day and night.

The five persons were Terrence Burdock, his wife Ethyl, Robert Derby, and Howard Steinleser: four beautiful and balanced people. And Magdalen Mobley who was neither beautiful nor balanced. But she was electric; she was special. They crouched around in the formations a little after they had made camp and while there was still light. All of them had seen the formations before and had guessed that there was promise in them.

“That peculiar fluting in the broken chimney is almost like a core sample,” Terrence said, “and it differs from the rest of it. It's like a lightning bolt through the whole length. It's already exposed for us. I believe we will remove the chimney entirely. It covers the perfect access for the slash in the mound, and it is the mound in which we are really interested. But we'll study the chimney first. It is so available for study.”

“Oh, I can tell you everything that's in the chimney,” Magdalen said crossly. “I can tell you everything that's in the mound too.”

“I wonder why we take the trouble to dig if you already know what we will find,” Ethyl sounded archly.

“I wonder too,” Magdalen grumbled. “But we will need the evidence and the artifacts to show. You can't get appropriations without evidence and artifacts. Robert, go kill that deer in the brush about forty yards northeast of the chimney. We may as well have deer meat if we're living primitive.”

“This isn't deer season,” Robert Derby objected. “And there isn't any deer there. Or, if there is, it's down in the draw where you couldn't see it. And if there's one there, it's probably a doe.”

“No, Robert, it is a two-year-old buck and a very big one. Of course it's in the draw where I can't see it. Forty yards northeast of the chimney would have to be in the draw. If I could see it, the rest of you could see it too. Now go kill it! Are you a man or a mus microtus? Howard, cut poles and set up a tripod to string and dress the deer on.”

“You had better try the thing, Robert,” Ethyl Burdock said, “or we'll have no peace this evening.”

Robert Derby took a carbine and went northeastward of the chimney, descending into the draw forty yards away. There was the high ping of the carbine shot. And, after some moments, Robert returned with a curious grin.

“You didn't miss him, Robert, you killed him,” Magdalen called loudly. “You got him with a good shot through the throat and up into the brain when he tossed his head high like they do. Why didn't you bring him? Go back and get him!”

“Get him? I couldn't even lift the thing. Terrence and Howard, come with me and we'll lash it to a pole and get it here somehow.”

“Oh, Robert, you're out of your beautiful mind,” Magdalen chided. “It only weighs a hundred and ninety pounds. Oh, I'll get it.”

Magdalen Mobley went and got the big buck. She brought it back, carrying it listless across her shoulders and getting herself bloodied, stopping sometimes to examine rocks and kick them with her foot, coming on easily with her load. It looked as if it might weigh two hundred and fifty pounds; but if Magdalen said it weighed a hundred and ninety, that is what it weighed.

Howard Steinleser had cut poles and made a tripod. He knew better than not to. They strung the buck up, skinned it off, ripped up its belly, drew it, and worked it over in an almost professional manner.

“Cook it, Ethyl,” Magdalen said.

Later, as they sat on the ground around the fire and it had turned dark, Ethyl brought the buck's brains to Magdalen, messy and not half-cooked, believing that she was playing an evil trick. And Magdalen ate them avidly. They were her due. She had discovered the buck.

If you wonder how Magdalen knew what invisible things were where, so did the other members of the party always wonder.

“It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology,” Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. “The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and under-surface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It also has its up-thrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.”

“And it has its glaciations,” Ethyl Burdock said, and perhaps she was looking at her husband in the dark.

“The mind has its hard sandstone, sometimes transmuted to quartz, or half-transmuted into flint, from the drifting and floating sand of daily events. It has its shale from the old mud of daily ineptitudes and inertias. It has limestone out of its more vivid experiences, for lime is the remnant of what was once animate: and this limestone may be true marble if it is the deposit of rich enough emotion, or even travertine if it has bubbled sufficiently through agonized and evocative rivers of the under-mind. The mind has its sulphur and its gemstones — ” Terrence bubbled on sufficiently, and Magdalen cut him off.

“Say simply that we have rocks in our heads,” she said. “But they're random rocks, I tell you, and the same ones keep coming back. It isn't the same with us as it is with the earth. The world gets new rocks all the time. But it's the same people who keep turning up, and the same minds. Damn, one of the samest of them just turned up again! I wish he'd leave me alone. The answer is still no.”

Very often Magdalen said things that made no sense. Ethyl Burdock assured herself that neither her husband, nor Robert, nor Howard, had slipped over to Magdalen in the dark. Ethyl was jealous of the chunky and surly girl.

“I am hoping that this will be as rich as Spiro Mound,” Howard Steinleser hoped. “It could be, you know. I'm told that there was never a less prepossessing site than that, or a trickier one. I wish we had someone who had dug at Spiro.”

“Oh, he dug at Spiro,” Magdalen said with contempt.

“He? Who?” Terrence Burdock asked. “No one of us was at Spiro. Magdalen, you weren't even born yet when that mound was opened. What could you know about it?”

“Yeah, I remember him at Spiro,” Magdalen said, “ — always turning up his own things and pointing them out.”

“Were you at Spiro?” Terrence suddenly asked a piece of darkness. For some time, they had all been vaguely aware that there were six, not five, persons around the fire.

“Yeah, I was at Spiro,” the man said. “I dig there. I dig at a lot of the digs. I dig real well, and I always know when we come to something that will be important. You give me a job.”

“Who are you?” Terrence asked him. The man was pretty visible now. The flame of the fire seemed to leap towards him as if he compelled it.

“Oh, I'm just a rich old poor man who keeps following and hoping and asking. There is one who is worth it all forever, so I solicit that one forever. And sometimes I am other things. Two hours ago I was the deer in the draw. It is an odd thing to munch one's own flesh.” And the man was munching a joint of the deer, unasked.

“Him and his damn cheap poetry!” Magdalen cried angrily.

“What's your name!” Terrence asked him.

“Manypenny. Anteros Manypenny is my name forever.”

“What are you?”

“Oh, just Indian. Shawnee, Choc, Creek, Anadarko, Caddo and pre-Caddo. Lots of things.”

“How could anyone be pre-Caddo?”

“Like me. I am.”

“Is Anteros a Creek name?”

“No. Greek. Man, I am a going Jessie, I am one digging man! I show you tomorrow.”

Man, he was one digging man! He showed them tomorrow. With a short-handled rose hoe he began the gash in the bottom of the mound, working too swiftly to be believed.

“He will smash anything that is there. He will not know what he comes to,” Ethyl Burdock complained.

“Woman, I will not smash whatever is there,” Anteros said. “You can hide a wren's egg in one cubic meter of sand. I will move all the sand in one minute. I will uncover the egg, wherever it is. And I will not crack the egg. I sense these things. I come now to a small pot of the proto-Plano period. It is broken, of course, but I do not break it. It is in six pieces and they will fit together perfectly. I tell you this beforehand. Now I reveal it.”

And Anteros revealed it. There was something wrong about it even before he uncovered it. But it was surely a find, and perhaps it was of the proto-Plano period. The six shards came out. They were roughly cleaned and set. It was apparent that they would fit wonderfully.

“Why, it is perfect!” Ethyl exclaimed.

“It is too perfect,” Howard Steinleser protested. “It was a turned pot, and who had turned pots in America without the potter's wheel? But the glyphs pressed into it do correspond to proto-Plano glyphs. It is fishy.” Steinleser was in a twitchy humor today and his face was livid.

“Yes, it is the ripple and the spinosity, the fish-glyph,” Anteros pointed out. “And the sun-sign is riding upon it. It is fish-god.”

“It's fishy in another way,” Steinleser insisted. “Nobody finds a thing like that in the first sixty seconds of a dig. And there could not be such a pot. I wouldn't believe it was proto-Plano unless points were found in the exact site with it.”

“Oh, here,” Anteros said. “One can smell the very shape of the flint points already. Two large points, one small one. Surely you get the whiff of them already? Four more hoe cuts and I come to them.”

Four more hoe cuts, and Anteros did come to them. He uncovered two large points and one small one, spearheads and arrowhead. Lanceolate they were, with ribbon flaking. They were late Folsom, or they were proto-Plano; they were what you will.

“This cannot be,” Steinleser groaned. “They're the missing chips, the transition pieces. They fill the missing places too well. I won't believe it. I'd hardly believe it if mastodon bones were found on the same level here.”

“In a moment,” said Anteros, beginning to use the hoe again. “Hey, those old beasts did smell funny! An elephant isn't in it with them. And a lot of it still clings to their bones. Will a sixth thoracic bone do? I'm pretty sure that's what it is. I don't know where the rest of the animal is. Probably somebody gnawed the thoracic here. Nine hoe cuts, and then very careful.”

Nine hoe cuts; and then Anteros, using a mason's trowel, unearthed the old gnawed bone very carefully. Yes, Howard said almost angrily, it was a sixth thoracic of a mastodon. Robert Derby said it was a fifth or sixth; it is not easy to tell.

“Leave the digging for a while, Anteros,” Steinleser said. “I want to record and photograph and take a few measurements here.”

Terrence Burdock and Magdalen Mobley were working at the bottom of the chimney rock, at the bottom of the fluting that ran the whole height of it like a core sample.

“Get Anteros over here and see what he can uncover in sixty seconds,” Terrence offered.

“Oh, him! He'll just uncover some of his own things.”

“What do you mean, his own things? Nobody could have made an intrusion here. It's hard sandstone.”

“And harder flint here,” Magdalen said. “I might have known it. Pass the damned thing up. I know just about what it says, anyhow.”

“What it says? What do you mean? But it is marked! And it's large and dressed rough. Who'd carve in flint?”

“Somebody real stubborn, just like flint,” Magdalen said. “All right then, let's have it out. Anteros! Get this out in one piece. And do it without shattering it or tumbling the whole thing down on us. He can do it, you know, Terrence. He can do things like that.”

“What do you know about his doings, Magdalen? You never saw or heard about the poor man till last night.”

“Oh well, I know that it'll turn out to be the same damned stuff.”

Anteros did get it out without shattering it or bringing down the chimney column. A cleft with a digging bar, three sticks of the stuff and a cap, and he touched the leads to the battery when he was almost on top of the charge. The blast, it sounded as if the whole sky were falling down in them, and some of those sky-blocks were quite large stones. The ancients wondered why fallen pieces of the sky should always be dark rockstuff and never sky-blue clear stuff. The answer is that it is only pieces of the night sky that ever fall, even though they may sometimes be most of the daytime in falling, such is the distance. And the blast that Anteros set off did bring down rocky chunks of the night sky even though it was broad daylight. They brought down darker rocks than any of which the chimney was composed.

Still, it was a small blast. The chimney tottered but did not collapse. It settled back uneasily on its base. And the flint block was out in the clear.

“A thousand spearheads and arrowheads could be shattered and chipped out of that hunk,” Terrence marveled. “That flint block would have been a primitive fortune for a primitive man.”

“I had several such fortunes,” Anteros said dully, “and this one I preserved and dedicated.”

They had all gathered around it.

“Oh the poor man!” Ethyl suddenly exclaimed, but she was not looking at any of the men. She was looking at the stone.

“I wish he'd get off that kick,” Magdalen sputtered angrily. “I don't care how rich he is. I can pick up better stuff than him in the alleys.”

“What are the women chirping about?” Terrence asked. “But those do look like true glyphs. Almost like Aztec, are they not, Steinleser?”

“Nahuat-Tanoan, cousins-german to the Aztec, or should I say cousins-yaqui?”

“Call it anything, but can you read it?”

“Probably. Give me eight or ten hours on it and I should come up with a contingent reading of many of the glyphs. We can hardly expect a rational rendering of the message, however. All Nahuat-Tanoan translations so far have been gibberish.”

“And remember, Terrence, that Steinleser is a slow reader,” Magdalen said spitefully. “And he isn't very good at interpreting other signs either.”

Steinleser was sullen and silent. How had his face come to bear those deep livid claw-marks today?

They moved a lot of rock and rubble that morning, took quite a few pictures, wrote up bulky notes. There were constant finds as the divided party worked up the shag-slash in the mound and the core-flute of the chimney. There were no more really startling discoveries; no more turned pots of the proto-Plano period; how could there be? There were no more predicted and perfect points of the late Folsom, but there were broken and unpredictable points. No other mastodon thoracic was found, but bones were uncovered of bison latifrons, of dire wolf, of coyote, of man. There were some anomalies in the relationship of the things discovered, but it was not as fishy as it had been in the early morning, not as fishy as when Anteros had announced and then dug out the shards of the pot, the three points, the mastodon bone. The things now were as authentic as they were expected, and yet their very profusion had still the smell of a small fish.

And that Anteros was one digging man. He moved the sand, he moved the stone, he missed nothing. And at noon he disappeared.

An hour later he reappeared in a glossy station wagon, coming out of a thicketed ravine where no one would have expected a way. He had been to town. He brought a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, relishes and pastries, a couple of cases of cold beer, and some V.O.

“I thought you were a poor man, Anteros,” Terrence chided.

“I told you that I was a rich old poor man. I have nine thousand acres of grassland, I have three thousand head of cattle, I have alfalfa land and clover land and corn land and hay-grazer land — ”

“Oh, knock it off!” Magdalen snapped.

“I have other things,” Anteros finished sullenly.

They ate, they rested, they worked the afternoon. Magdalen worked as swiftly and solidly as did Anteros. She was young, she was stocky, she was light-burned-dark. She was not at all beautiful (Ethyl was). She could have any man there any time she wanted to (Ethyl couldn't). She was Magdalen, the often unpleasant, the mostly casual, the suddenly intense one. She was the tension of the party, the string of the bow.

“Anteros!” she called sharply just at sundown.

“The turtle?” he asked. “The turtle that is under the ledge out of the current where the backwater curls in reverse? But he is fit and happy and he has never harmed anything except for food or fun. I know you do not want me to get that turtle.”

“I do! There's eighteen pounds of him. He's fat. He'll be good. Only eighty yards, where the bank crumbles down to Green River, under the lower ledge that's shale that looks like slate, two feet deep — ”

“I know where he is. I will go get the fat turtle.” Anteros said. “I myself am the fat turtle. I am the Green River.” He went to get it.

“Oh that damned poetry of his!” Magdalen spat when he was gone.

Anteros brought back the fat turtle. He looked as if he'd weigh twenty-five pounds; but if Magdalen said he weighed eighteen pounds, then it was eighteen.

“Start cooking, Ethyl,” Magdalen said. Magdalen was a mere undergraduate girl permitted on the digging by sheer good fortune. The others of the party were all archaeologists of the moment. Magdalen had no right to give orders to anyone, except her born right.

“I don't know how to cook a turtle,” Ethyl complained.

“Anteros will show you how.”

“The late evening smell of newly exposed excavation!” Terrence Burdock burbled as they lounged around the campfire a little later, full of turtle and V. O. and feeling rakishly wise. “The exposed age can be guessed by the very timbre of the smell, I believe.”

“Timbre of the smell! What is your nose wired up to?” from Magdalen.

And, indeed, there was something time-evocative about the smell of the diggings; cool, at the same time musty and musky, ripe with old stratified water and compressed death. Stratified time.

“It helps if you already know what the exposed age is,” said Howard Steinleser. “Here there is an anomaly. The chimney sometimes acts as if it were younger than the mound. The chimney cannot be young enough to include written rock, but it is.”

“Archaeology is made up entirely of anomalies,” said Terrence, “rearranged to make them fit in a flukey pattern. There'd be no system to it otherwise.”

“Every science is made up entirely of anomalies rearranged to fit,” said Robert Derby. “Have you unriddled the glyph-stone, Howard?”

“Yes, pretty well, better than I expected. Charles August can verify it, of course, when we get it back to the University. It is a non-royal, non-tribal, non-warfare, non-hunt declaration. It does not come under any of the usual radical signs, any of the categories. It can only be categorized as uncategorized or personal. The translation will be rough.”

“Rocky is the word,” said Magdalen.

“On with it, Howard,” Ethyl cried.

“ ‘You are the freedom of wild pigs in the sour-grass, and the nobility of badgers. You are the brightness of serpents and the soaring of vultures. You are passion of mesquite bustles on fire with lightning. You are serenity of toads.’ ”

“You've got to admit he's got a different line,” said Ethyl. “Your own love notes were less acrid, Terrence.”

“What kind of thing is it, Steinleser?” Terrence questioned. “It must have a category.”

“I believe Ethyl is right. It's a love poem. ‘You are the water in rock cisterns and the secret spiders in that water. You are the dead coyote lying half in the stream, and you are the old entrapped dreams of the coyote's brains oozing liquid through the broken eye socket. You are the happy ravening flies about that broken socket.’ ”

“Oh, hold it, Steinleser,” Robert Derby cried. “You can't have gotten all that from scratches on flint. What is ‘entrapped dreams’ in Nahuat-Tanoan glyph-writing?”

“The solid-person sign next to the hollow-person sign, both enclosed in the night sign — that has always been interpreted as the dream glyph. And here the dream glyph is enclosed in the glyph of the dead-fall trap. Yes, I believe it means entrapped dreams. To continue: ‘You are the corn-worm in the dark heart of the corn, the naked small bird in the nest. You are the pustules on the sick rabbit, devouring life and flesh and turning it into your own serum. You are stars compressed into charcoal. But you cannot give, you cannot take. Once again you will be broken at the foot of the cliff, and the word will remain unsaid in your swollen and purple tongue.’ ”

“A love poem, perhaps, but with a difference,” said Robert Derby.

“I never was able to go his stuff, and I tried, I really tried,” Magdalen moaned.

“Here is the change of person-subject shown by the canted-eye glyph linked with the self-glyph,” Steinleser explained. “It is now a first-person talk. ‘I own ten-thousand back-loads of corn. I own gold and beans and nine buffalo horns full of watermelon seeds. I own the loin cloth that the sun wore on his fourth journey across the sky. Only three loin cloths in the world are older and more valued than this. I cry out to you in a big voice like the hammering of herons’ (that sound-verb-particle is badly translated, the hammer being not a modern pounding hammer but a rock angling, chipping hammer) ‘and the belching of buffaloes. My love is sinewy as entwined snakes, it is steadfast as the sloth, it is like a feathered arrow shot into your abdomen — such is my love. Why is my love unrequited?’ ”

“I challenge you, Steinleser,” Terrence Burdock cut in. “What is the glyph for ‘unrequited’?”

“The glyph of the extended hand — with all the fingers bent backwards. It goes on ‘I roar to you. Do not throw yourself down. You believe you are on the hanging sky bridge, but you are on the terminal cliff. I grovel before you. I am no more than dog-droppings.’ ”

“You'll notice he said that and not me,” Magdalen burst out. There was always a fundamental incoherence about Magdalen.

“Ah — continue, Steinleser,” said Terrence. “The girl is daft, or she dreams out loud.”

“That is all of the inscriptions, Terrence, except for a final glyph which I don't understand. Glyph writing takes a lot of room. That's all the stone would hold.”

“What is the glyph that you don't understand, Howard?”

“It's the spear-thrower glyph entwined with the time glyph. It sometimes means ‘flung forward or beyond.’ But what does it mean here?”

“It means ‘continued,’ dummy. ‘Continued,’ ” Magdalen said. “Do not fear. There'll be more stories.”

“I think it's beautiful,” said Ethyl Burdock, “ — in its own context, of course.”

“Then why don't you take him on, Ethyl, in his own context, of course?” Magdalen asked. “Myself, I don't care how many back-loads of corn he owns. I've had it.”

“Take whom on, dear?” Ethyl asked. “Howard Steinleser can interpret the stones, but who can interpret our Magdalen?”

“Oh, I can read her like a rock,” Terrence Burdock smiled. But he couldn't.

But it had fastened on them. It was all about them and through them: the brightness of serpents and the serenity of toads, the secret spiders in the water, the entrapped dreams oozing through the broken eye socket, the pustules of the sick rabbit, the belching of the buffalo, and the arrow shot into the abdomen. And around it all was the night smell of flint and turned earth and chuckling streams, the mustiness, and the special muskiness which bears the name Nobility of Badgers.

They talked archeology and myth talk. Then it was steep night, and the morning of the third day.

Oh, the sample digging went well. This was already a richer mound than Spiro, though the gash in it was but a small promise of things to come. And the curious twin of the mound, the broken chimney, confirmed and confounded and contradicted. There was time going wrong in the chimney, or at least in the curious fluted core of it; the rest of it was normal enough, and sterile enough.

Anteros worked that day with a soft sullenness, and Magdalen brooded with a sort of lightning about her.

“Beads, glass beads!” Terrence Burdock exploded angrily. “All right! Who is the hoaxer in our midst? I will not tolerate this at all.” Terrence had been angry of face all day. He was clawed deeply, as Steinleser had been the day before, and he was sour on the world.

“There have been glass-bead caches before, Terrence, hundreds of them,” Robert Derby said softly.

“There have been hoaxers before, hundreds of them,” Terrence howled. “These have ‘Hong Kong Contemporary’ written all over them, damn cheap glass beads sold by the pound. They have no business in a stratum of around the year seven hundred. All right, who is guilty?”

“I don't believe that any one of us is guilty, Terrence,” Ethyl put in mildly. “They are found four feet in from the slant surface of the mound. Why, we've cut through three hundred years of vegetable loam to get to them, and certainly the surface was eroded beyond that.”

“We are scientists,” said Steinleser. “We find these. Others have found such. Let us consider the improbabilities of it.”

It was noon, so they ate and rested and considered the improbabilities. Anteros had brought them a great joint of white pork, and they made sandwiches and drank beer and ate pickles.

“You know,” said Robert Derby, “that beyond the rank impossibility of glass beads found so many times where they could not be found, there is a real mystery about all early Indian beads, whether of bone, stone, or antler. There are millions and millions of these fine beads with pierced holes finer than any piercer every found. There are residues, there are centers of every other Indian industry, and there is evolution of every other tool. Why have there been these millions of pierced beads, and never one piercer? There was no technique to make so fine a piercer. How were they done?”

Magdalen giggled. “Bead-spitter,” she said.

“Bead-spitter! You're out of your fuzzy mind,” Terrence erupted. “That's the silliest and least sophisticated of all Indian legends.”

“But it is the legend,” said Robert Derby, “the legend of more than thirty separate tribes. The Carib Indians of Cuba said that they got their beads from Bead-spitters. The Indians of Panama told Balboa the same thing. The Indians of the pueblos told the same story to Coronado. Every Indian community had an Indian who was its Bead-spitter. There are Creek and Alabama and Kaosati stories of Bead-spitter; see Swanton's collections. And his stories were taken down within living memory.

“More than that, when European trade-beads were first introduced, there is one account of an Indian receiving some and saying ‘I will take some to Bead-spitter. If he sees them, he can spit them too.’ And that Bead-spitter did then spit them by the bushel. There was never any other Indian account of the origin of their beads. All were spit by a Bead-spitter.”

“Really, this is very unreal,” Ethyl said. Really it was.

“Hog hokey! A Bead-spitter of around the year seven hundred could not spit future beads, he could not spit cheap Hong Kong glass beads of the present time!” Terrence was very angry.

“Pardon me, yes sir, he could,” said Anteros. “A Bead-spitter can spit future beads, if he faces north when he spits. That has always been known.”

Terrence was angry, he fumed and poisoned the day for them, and the claw marks on his face stood out livid purple. He was angrier yet when he said that the curious dark capping rock on top of the chimney was dangerous, that it would fall and kill someone; and Anteros said that there was no such capping rock on the chimney, that Terrence's eyes were deceiving him, that Terrence should go sit in the shade and rest.

And Terrence became excessively angry when he discovered that Magdalen was trying to hide something that she had discovered in the fluted core of the chimney. It was a large and heavy shale-stone, too heavy even for Magdalen's puzzling strength. She had dragged it out of the chimney flute, tumbled it down to the bottom, and was trying to cover it with rocks and scarp.

“Robert, mark the extraction point!” Terrence called loudly. “It's quite plain yet. Magdalen, stop that! Whatever it is, it must be examined now.”

“Oh, it's just more of the damned same thing! I wish he'd let me alone. With his kind of money he can get plenty of girls. Besides, it's private, Terrence. You don't have any business reading it.”

“You are hysterical, Magdalen, and you may have to leave the digging site.”

“I wish I could leave. I can't. I wish I could love. I can't. Why isn't it enough that I die?”

“Howard, spend the afternoon on this,” Terrence ordered. “It has writing of a sort on it. If it's what I think it is, it scares me. It's too recent to be in any eroded chimney rock formation, Howard, and it comes from far below the top. Read it.”

“A few hours on it and I may come up with something. I never saw anything like it either. What did you think it was, Terrence?”

“What do you think I think it is? It's much later than the other, and that one was impossible. I'll not be the one to confess myself crazy first.”

Howard Steinleser went to work on the incised stone; and two hours before sundown they brought him another one, a gray soap-stone block from higher up. Whatever this was covered with, it was not at all the same thing that covered the shale-stone.

And elsewhere things went well, too well. The old fishiness was back on it. No series of finds could be so perfect, no petrification could be so well ordered.

“Robert,” Magdalen called down to Robert Derby just at sunset, “in the high meadow above the shore, about four hundreds yards down, just past the old fence line — ”

“ — there is a badger hole, Magdalen. Now you have me doing it, seeing invisible things at a distance. And if I take a carbine and stroll down there quietly, the badger will stick his head out just as I get there (I being strongly downwind of him), and I'll blam him between the eyes. He'll be a big one, fifty pounds.”

“Thirty. Bring him, Robert. You're showing a little understanding at last.”

“But, Magdalen, badger is rampant meat. It's seldom eaten.”

“May not the condemned girl have what she wishes for her last meal? Go get it, Robert.”

Robert went. The voice of the little carbine was barely heard at that distance. Soon, Robert brought back the dead badger.

“Cook it, Ethyl,” Magdalen ordered.

“Yes, I know. And if I don't know how, Anteros will show me.” But Anteros was gone. Robert found him on a sundown knoll with his shoulders hunched. The old man was sobbing silently and his face seemed to be made out of dull pumice stone. But he came back to aid Ethyl in preparing the badger.

“If the first of today's stones scared you, the second should have lifted the hair right off your head, Terrence,” Howard Steinleser said.

“It does, it does. All the stones are too recent to be in a chimney formation, but this last one is an insult. It isn't two hundred years old, but there's a thousand years of strata above it. What time is deposited here?”

They had eaten rampant badger meat and drunk inferior whiskey (which Anteros, who had given it to them, didn't know was inferior), and the muskiness was both inside them and around them. The campfire sometimes spit angrily with small explosions, and its glare reached high when it did so. By one such leaping glare, Terrence Burdock saw that the curious dark capping rock was once more on top of the chimney. He thought he had seen it there in the daytime; but it had not been there after he had sat in the shade and rested, and it had absolutely not been there when he climbed the chimney itself to be sure.

“Let's have the second chapter and then the third, Howard,” Ethyl said. “It's neater that way.”

“Yes. Well, the second chapter (the first and lowest and apparently the earliest rock we came on today) is written in a language that no one ever saw written before; and yet it's no great trouble to read it. Even Terrence guessed what it was and it scared him. It is Anadarko-Caddo hand-talk graven in stone. It is what is called the Sign Language of the Plains Indians copied down in formalized pictographs. And it has to be very recent, within the last three hundred years. Hand-talk was fragmentary at the first coming of the Spanish, and well developed at the first coming of the French. It was an explosive development, as such things go, worked out within a hundred years. This rock has to be younger than its situs, but it was absolutely found in place.”

“Read it, Howard, read it,” Robert Derby called. Robert was feeling fine and the rest of them were gloomy tonight.

“ ‘I own three hundred ponies,’ ” Steinleser read the rock out of his memory. “ ‘I own two day's ride north and east and south, and one day's ride west. I give you all. I blast out with a big voice like fire in tall trees, like the explosion of crowning pine trees. I cry like closing-in wolves, like the high voice of the lion, like the hoarse scream of torn calves. Do you not destroy yourself again! You are the dew on crazy-weed in the morning. You are the swift crooked wings of the nighthawk, the dainty feet of the skunk, you are the juice of the sour squash. Why can you not take or give? I am the hump-backed bull of the high plains, I am the river itself and the stagnant pools left by the river, I am the raw earth and the rocks. Come to me, but do not come so violently as to destroy yourself.’

“Ah, that was the text of the first rock of the day, the Anadarko-Caddo hand-talk graven in stone. And final pictographs which I don't understand: a shot-arrow sign, and a boulder beyond.”

“ ‘Continued on next rock’ of course,” said Robert Derby. “Well, why wasn't hand-talk ever written down? The signs are simple and easily stylized and they were understood by many different tribes. It would have been natural to write it.”

“Alphabetical writing was in the region before hand-talk was well-developed,” Terrence Burdock said. “In fact, it was the coming of the Spanish that gave the impetus to hand-talk. It was really developed for communication between Spanish and Indian, not between Indian and Indian. And yet, I believe, hand-talk was written down once; it was the beginning of the Chinese pictographs. And there also it had its beginning as communication between differing peoples. Depend on it, if all mankind had always been of a single language, there would never have been any written language developed at all. Writing always began as a bridge, and there had to be some chasm for it to bridge.”

“We have one to bridge here,” said Steinleser. “That whole chimney is full of rotten smoke. The highest part of it should be older than the lowest part of the mound, since the mound was built on a base eroded away from the chimney formation. But in many ways they seem to be contemporary. We must all be under a spell here. We've worked two days on this, parts of three days, and the total impossibility of the situation hasn't struck us yet.

“The old Nahuatlan glyphs for Time are the Chimney glyphs. Present time is a lower part of a chimney and fire burning at the base. Past time is black smoke from a chimney, and future time is white smoke from a chimney. There was a signature glyph running through our yesterday's stone which I didn't and don't understand. It seemed to indicate something coming down out of the chimney rather than going up it.”

“It really doesn't look much like a chimney,” Magdalen said.

“And a maiden doesn't look much like dew on crazy-weed in the morning, Magdalen,” Robert Derby said, “but we recognize these identities.”

They talked awhile about the impossibility of the whole business.

“There are scales on our eyes,” Steinleser said. “The fluted core of the chimney is wrong. I'm not even sure the rest of the chimney is right.”

“No, it isn't,” said Robert Derby. “We can identify most of the strata of the chimney with known periods of the river and stream. I was above and below today. There is one stretch where the sandstone was not eroded at all, where it stands three hundred yards back from the shifted river and is overlaid with a hundred years of loam and sod. There are other sections where the stone is cut away variously. We can tell when most of the chimney was laid down, we can find its correspondences up to a few hundred years ago. But when were the top ten feet of it laid down? There were no correspondences anywhere to that. The centuries represented by the strata of the top of the chimney, people, those centuries haven't happened yet.”

“And when was the dark capping rock on top of it all formed — ?” Terrence began. “Ah, I'm out of my mind. It isn't there. I'm demented.”

“No more than the rest of us,” said Steinleser. “I saw it too, I thought, today. And then I didn't see it again.”

“The rock-writing, it's like an old novel that I only half remember,” said Ethyl.

“Oh, that's what it is, yes,” Magdalen murmured.

“But I don't remember what happened to the girl in it.”

“I remember what happened to her, Ethyl,” Magdalen said.

“Give us the third chapter, Howard,” Ethyl asked. “I want to see how it comes out.”

“First you should all have whiskey for those colds,” Anteros suggested humbly.

“But none of us have colds,” Ethyl objected.

“You take your own medicinal advice, Ethyl, and I'll take mine,” Terrence said. “I will have whiskey. My cold is not rheum but fear-chill.”

They all had whiskey. They talked a while, and some of them dozed.

“It's late, Howard,” Ethyl said after a while. “Let's have the next chapter. Is it the last chapter? Then we'll sleep. We have honest digging to do tomorrow.”

“Our third stone, our second stone of the day just past, is another and even later form of writing, and it has never been seen in stone before. It is Kiowa picture writing. The Kiowas did their out-turning spiral writing on buffalo skins dressed almost as fine as vellum. In its more sophisticated form (and this is a copy of that) it is quite late. The Kiowa picture writing probably did not arrive at its excellence until influenced by white artists.”

“How late, Steinleser?” Robert Derby asked.

“Not more than a hundred and fifty years old. But I have never seen it copied in stone before. It simply isn't stone-styled. There's a lot of things around here lately that I haven't seen before.

“Well then, to the text, or should I say the pictography? ‘You fear the earth, you fear rough ground and rocks, you fear moister earth and rotting flesh, you fear the flesh itself, all flesh is rotting flesh. If you love not rotting flesh, you love not at all. You believe the bridge hanging in the sky, the bridge hung by tendrils and woody vines that diminish as they go up and up till they are no thicker than hairs. There is no sky-bridge, you cannot go up on it. Did you believe that the roots of love grow upside down? They come out of deep earth that is old flesh and brains and hearts and entrails, that is old buffalo bowels and snakes' pizzles, that is black blood and rot and moaning underground. This is old and worn-out and bloody Time, and the roots of love grow out of its gore.’ ”

“You seem to give remarkably detailed translations of the simple spiral pictures, Steinleser, but I begin to get in the mood of it,” Terrence said.

“Ah, perhaps I cheat a little,” said Steinleser.

“You lie a lot,” Magdalen challenged.

“No I do not. There is some basis for every phrase I've used. It goes on: ‘I own twenty-two trade rifles. I own ponies. I own Mexico silver, eight-bit pieces. I am rich in all ways. I give all to you. I cry out with big voice like a bear full of mad-weed, like a bullfrog in love, like a stallion rearing against a puma. It is the earth that calls you. I am the earth, woolier than wolves and rougher than rocks. I am the bog earth that sucks you in. You cannot give, you cannot like, you cannot love, you think there is something else, you think there is a sky-bridge you may loiter on without crashing down. I am bristled-boar earth, there is no other. You will come to me in the morning. You will come to me easy and with grace. Or you will come to me reluctant and you be shattered in every bone and member of you. You be broken by our encounter. You be shattered as by a lightning bolt striking up from the earth. I am the red calf which is in the writings. I am the rotting red earth. Live in the morning or die in the morning, but remember that love in death is better than no love at all.’ ”

“Oh brother! Nobody gets that stuff from such kid pictures, Steinleser,” Robert Derby moaned.

“Ah well, that's the end of the spiral picture. And a Kiowa spiral pictograph ends with either an in-sweep or an out-sweep line. This ends with an out-sweep, which means — ”

“ ‘Continued on next rock,’ that's what it means,” Terrence cried roughly.

“You won't find the next rocks,” Magdalen said. “They're hidden, and most of the time they're not there yet, but they will go on and on. But for all that, you'll read it in the rocks tomorrow morning. I want it to be over with. Oh, I don't know what I want!”

“I believe I know what you want tonight, Magdalen,” Robert Derby said.

But he didn't.

The talk trailed off, the fire burned down, they went to their sleeping sacks.

Then it was long jagged night, and the morning of the fourth day. But wait! In Nahuat-Tanoan legend, the world ends on the fourth morning. All the lives we lived or thought we lived had been but dreams of third night. The loin cloth that the sun wore on the fourth day's journey was not so valuable as one has made out. It was worn for no more than an hour or so.

And, in fact, there was something terminal about fourth morning. Anteros had disappeared. Magdalen had disappeared. The chimney rock looked greatly diminished in its bulk (something had gone out of it) and much crazier in its broken height. The sun had come up a garish gray-orange color through fog. The signature-glyph of the first stone dominated the ambient. It was as if something were coming down from the chimney, a horrifying smoke; but it was only noisome morning fog.

No it wasn't. There was something else coming down from the chimney, or from the hidden sky: pebbles, stones, indescribable bits of foul oozings, the less fastidious pieces of sky; a light, nightmare rain had begun to fall there; the chimney was apparently beginning to crumble.

“It's the damnedest thing I ever heard about,” Robert Derby growled. “Do you think that Magdalen really went off with Anteros?” Derby was bitter and fumatory this morning and his face was badly clawed.

“Who is Magdalen? Who is Anteros?” Ethyl Burdock asked.

Terrence Burdock was hooting from high on the mound. “All come up,” he called. “Here is a find that will make it all worthwhile. We'll have to photo and sketch and measure and record and witness. It's the finest basalt head I've ever seen, man-sized, and I suspect that there's a man-sized body attached to it. We'll soon clean it and clear it. Gah! What a weird fellow he was!”

But Howard Steinleser was studying a brightly colored something that he held in his two hands.

“What is it, Howard? What are you doing?” Derby demanded.

“Ah, I believe this is the next stone in the sequence. The writing is alphabetical but deformed — there is an element missing. I believe it is in modern English, and I will solve the deformity and see it true in a minute. The text of it seems to be — ”

Rocks and stones were coming down from the chimney, and fog, amnesic and wit-stealing fog.

“Steinleser, are you all right?” Robert Derby asked with compassion. “That isn't a stone that you hold in your hand.”

“It isn't a stone? I thought it was. What is it then?”

“It is the fruit of the Osage orange tree, an American moraceous. It isn't a stone, Howard.” And the thing was a tough, woody, wrinkled mock-orange, as big as a small melon.

“You have to admit that the wrinkles look a little bit like writing, Robert.”

“Yes, they look a little like writing, Howard. Let us go up where Terrence is bawling for us. You've read too many stones. And it isn't safe here.”

“Why go up, Howard? The other thing is coming down.”

It was the bristled-boar earth reaching up with a rumble. It was a lightning bolt struck upward out of the earth, and it got its prey. There was explosion and roar. The dark capping rock was jerked from the top of the chimney and slammed with terrible force to the earth, shattering with a great shock. And something else that had been on that capping rock. And the whole chimney collapsed about them.

She was broken by the encounter. She was shattered in every bone and member of her. And she was dead.

“Who — who is she?” Howard Steinleser stuttered.

“Oh God! Magdalen, of course!” Robert Derby cried.

“I remember her a little bit. Didn't understand her. She put out like an evoking moth but she wouldn't be had. Near clawed the face off me the other night when I misunderstood the signals. She believed there was a sky-bridge. It's in a lot of the mythologies. But there isn't one, you know. Oh well.”

“The girl is dead! Damnation! What are you doing grubbing in those stones?”

“Maybe she isn't dead in them yet, Robert. I'm going to read what's here before something happens to them. This capping rock that fell and broke, it's impossible, of course. It's a stratum that hasn't been laid down yet. I always did want to read the future and I may never get another chance.”

“You fool! The girl's dead! Does nobody care? Terrence, stop bellowing about your find. Come down. The girl's dead.”

“Come up, Robert and Howard,” Terrence insisted. “Leave that broken stuff down there. It's worthless. But nobody ever saw anything like this.”

“Do come up, men,” Ethyl sang. “Oh, it's a wonderful piece! I never saw anything like it in my life.”

“Ethyl, is the whole morning mad?” Robert Derby demanded as he came up to her. “She's dead. Don't you really remember her? Don't you remember Magdalen?”

“I'm not sure. Is she the girl down there? Isn't she the same girl who's been hanging around here a couple of days? She shouldn't have been playing on that high rock. I'm sorry she's dead. But just look what we're uncovering here!”

“Terrence. Don't you remember Magdalen?”

“The girl down there? She's a little bit like the girl that clawed the hell out of me the other night. Next time someone goes to town they might mention to the sheriff that there's a dead girl here. Robert, did you ever see a face like this one? And it digs away to reveal the shoulders. I believe there's a whole man-sized figure here. Wonderful, wonderful!”

“Terrence, you're off your head. Well, do you remember Anteros?”

“Certainly, the twin of Eros, but nobody ever made much of the symbol of unsuccessful love. Thunder! That's the name for him! It fits him perfectly. We'll call him Anteros.”

Well, it was Anteros, life-like in basalt stone. His face was contorted. He was sobbing soundlessly and frozenly and his shoulders were hunched with emotion. The carving was fascinating in its miserable passion, his stony love unrequited. Perhaps he was more impressive now than he would be when he was cleaned. He was earth, he was earth itself. Whatever period the carving belonged to, it was outstanding in its power.

“The live Anteros, Terrence. Don't you remember our digging man, Anteros Manypenny?”

“Sure. He didn't show up for work this morning, did he? Tell him he's fired.”

“Magdalen is dead! She was one of us! Dammit, she was the main one of us!” Robert Derby cried. Terrence and Ethyl Burdock were earless to his outburst. They were busy uncovering the rest of the carving.

And down below, Howard Steinleser was studying dark broken rocks before they would disappear, studying a stratum that hadn't been laid down yet, reading a foggy future.

Among The Hairy Earthmen

There is one period of our World History that has aspects so different from anything that went before and after that we can only gaze back on those several hundred years and ask:

“Was that ourselves who behaved so?”

Well, no, as a matter of fact, it wasn't. It was beings of another sort who visited us briefly and who acted so gloriously and abominably.

This is the way it was:

The Children had a Long Afternoon free. They could go to any of a dozen wonderful places, but they were already in one.

Seven of them — full to the craw of wonderful places — decided to go to Eretz.

“Children are attracted to the oddest and most shambling things,” said the Mothers. “Why should they want to go to Eretz?”

“Let them go,” said the Fathers. “Let them see — before they be gone — one of the few simple peoples left. We ourselves have become a contrived and compromised people. Let the Children be children for half a day.”

Eretz was the Planet of the Offense, and therefore it was to be (perhaps it recently had been) the Planet of the Restitution also. But in no other way was it distinguished. The Children had received the tradition of Eretz as children receive all traditions — like lightning.

Hobble, Michael Goodgrind, Ralpha, Lonnie, Laurie, Bea and Joan they called themselves as they came down on Eretz — for these were their idea of Eretzi names. But they could have as many names as they wished in their games.

An anomalous intrusion of great heat and force! The rocks ran like water where they came down, and there was formed a scarp-pebble enclave.

It was all shanty country and shanty towns on Eretz — clumsy hills, badly done plains and piedmonts, ragged fields, uncleansed rivers, whole weedpatches of provinces — not at all like Home. And the Towns! Firenze, Praha, Venezia, Londra, Colonia, Gant, Roma — why, they were nothing but towns made out of stone and wood! And these were the greatest of the towns of Eretz, not the meanest.

The Children exploded into action. Like children of the less transcendent races running wild on an ocean beach for an afternoon, they ran wild over continents. They scattered. And they took whatever forms first came into their minds.

Hobble — dark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan.

Michael Goodgrind — a broken-nosed bull of a man. How they all howled when he invented that first form!

Ralpha — like young Mercury.

And Lonnie — a tall giant with a golden beard.

Laurie was fire, Bea was light, Joan was moon-darkness.

But in these, or in any other forms they took, you'd always know that they were cousins or brethren.

Lonnie went pure Gothic. He had come onto it at the tail end of the thing and he fell in love with it.

“I am the Emperor!” he told the people like giant thunder. He pushed the Emperor Wenceslas off the throne and became Emperor.

“I am the true son of Charles, and you had thought me dead,” he told the people. “I am Sigismund.” Sigismund was really dead, but Lonnie became Sigismund and reigned, taking the wife and all the castles of Wenceslas. He grabbed off gangling old forts and mountain-rooks and raised howling Eretzi armies to make war. He made new castles. He loved the tall sweeping things and raised them to a new height. Have you never wondered that the last of those castles — in the late afternoon of the Gothic — were the tallest and oddest?

One day the deposed Wenceslas came back, and he was possessed of a new power.

“Now we will see who is the real Emperor!” the new Wenceslas cried like a rising storm.

They crashed their two forces and broke down each other's bridges and towns and stole the high ladies from each other's strongholds. They wrestled like boys. But they wrestled with a continent.

Lonnie (who was Sigismund) learned that the Wenceslas he battled was Michael Goodgrind wearing a contrived Emperor body. So they fought harder.

There came a new man out of an old royal line.

“I am Jobst,” the new man cried. “I will show you two princelings who is the real Emperor!”

He fought the two of them with overwhelming verve. He raised fast-striking Eretzi armies, and used tricks that only a young Mercury would know. He was Ralpha, entering the game as the third Emperor. But the two combined against him and broke him at Constance.

They smashed Germany and France and Italy like a clutch of eggs. Never had there been such spirited conflict. The Eretzi were amazed by it all, but they were swept into it; it was the Eretzi who made up the armies.

Even today the Eretzi or Earthers haven't the details of it right in their histories. When the King of Aragon, for an example, mixed into it, they treated him as a separate person. They did not know that Michael Goodgrind was often the King of Aragon, just as Lonnie was often the Duke of Flanders. But, played for itself, the Emperor game would be quite a limited one. Too limited for the children.

The girls played their own roles. Laurie claimed to be thirteen different queens. She was consort of all three Emperors in every one of their guises, and she also dabbled with the Eretzi. She was the wanton of the group.

Bea liked the Grande Dame part and the Lady Bountiful bit. She was very good on Great Renunciations. In her different characters, she beat paths from thrones to nunneries and back again; and she is now known as five different saints. Every time you turn to the Common of the Mass of Holy Women who are Neither Virgins nor Martyrs, you are likely to meet her.

And Joan was the dreamer who may have enjoyed the Afternoon more than any of them.

Laurie made up a melodrama — Lucrezia Borgia and the Poison Ring. There is an advantage in doing these little melodramas on Eretz. You can have as many characters as you wish — they come free. You can have them as extravagantly as you desire — who is there to object to it? Lucrezia was very well done, as children's burlesques go, and the bodies were strewn from Napoli to Vienne. The Eretzi play with great eagerness any convincing part offered them, and they go to their deaths quite willingly if the part calls for it.

Lonnie made one up called The Pawnbroker and the Pope. It was in the grand manner, all about the Medici family, and had some very funny episodes in the fourth act. Lonnie, who was vain of his acting ability, played Medici parts in five succeeding generations. The drama left more corpses than did the Lucrezia piece, but the killings weren't so sudden or showy; the girls had a better touch at the bloody stuff.

Ralpha did a Think Piece called One, Two, Three — Infinity. In its presentation he put all the rest of the Children to roast grandly in Hell; he filled up Purgatory with Eretzi-type people — the dullards; and for the Paradise he did a burlesque of Home. The Eretzi use a cropped version of Ralpha's piece and call it the Divine Comedy, leaving out a lot of fun.

Bea did a poetic one named the Witches' Bonfire. All the Children spent many a happy evening with that one, and they burnt twenty thousand witches. There was something satisfying about those Eretzi autumnal twilights with the scarlet sky and the frosty fields and the kine lowing in the meadows and the evening smell of witches burning. Bea's was really a pastoral piece.

All the Children ranged far except Hobble. Hobble (who was Vulcan) played with his sick toys. He played at Ateliers and Smithies, at Furnaces and Carousels. And often the other Children came and watched his work, and joined in for a while.

They played with the glass from the furnaces. They made gold-toned goblets, iridescent glass poems, figured spheres, goblin pitchers, glass music boxes, gargoyle heads, dragon chargers, princess salieras, figurines of lovers. So many things to make of glass! To make, and to smash when made!

But some of the things they exchanged as gifts instead of smashing them — glass birds and horses, fortune-telling globes that showed changing people and scenes within, tuned chiming balls that rang like bells, glass cats that sparked when stroked, wolves and bears, witches that flew.

The Eretzi found some of these things that the Children discarded. They studied them and imitated them.

And again, in the interludes of their other games, the Children came back to Hobble's shops where he sometimes worked with looms. They made costumes of wool and linen and silk. They made trains and cloaks and mantles, all the things for their grand masquerades. They fabricated tapestries and rugs and wove in all sorts of scenes: vistas of Home and of Eretz, people and peacocks, fish and cranes, dingles and dromedaries, larks and lovers. They set their creations in the strange ragged scenery of Eretz and in the rich contrived gardens of Home. A spark went from the Children to their weaving so that none could tell where they left off and their creations began.

Then they left poor Hobble and went on to their more vital games.

There were seven of them (six, not counting the backward Hobble), but they seemed a thousand. They built themselves castles in Spain and Gardes in Languedoc. The girls played always at Intrigue, for the high pleasure of it, and to give a cause for the wars. And the wars were the things that the boys seldom tired of. It is fun to play at armies with live warriors; and the Eretzi were live… in a sense.

The Eretzi had had wars and armies and sieges long before this, but they had been aimless things. Oh, this was one field where the Eretzi needed the Children. Consider the battles that the Children engineered that afternoon:

Gallipoli — how they managed the ships in that one! The Fathers could not have maneuvered more intricately in their four-dimension chess at Home.

Adrianople, Kunovitza, Dibra, Varna, Hexamilion! It's fun just to call out the bloody names of battles.

Constantinople! That was the one where they first used the big cannon. But who cast the big cannon for the Turks there? In their histories the Eretzi say that it was a man named Orban or Urban, and that he was Dacian, or he was Hungarian, or he was Danish. How many places did you tell them that you came from, Michael Goodgrind?

Belgrad, Trebizond, Morat, Blackheath, Napoli, Dornach!

Cupua and Taranto — Ralpha's armies beat Michael's at both of those.

Carignola — Lonnie foxed both Michael and Ralpha there, and nearly foxed himself. (You didn't intend it all that way, Lonnie. It was seven-cornered luck and you know it!)

Garigliano where the sea was red with blood and the ships were like broken twigs on the water!

Brescia! Ravenna! Who would have believed that such things could be done with a device known as Spanish infantry?

Villalar, Milan, Pavia! Best of all, the sack of Rome! There were a dozen different games blended into that one. The Eretzi discovered new emotions in themselves there — a deeper depravity and a higher heroism.

Siege of Florence! That one called out the Children's every trick. A wonderfully well-played game!

Turin, San Quentin, Moncontour, Mookerhide!

Lepanto! The great sea-siege where the castled ships broke asunder and the tall Turk Ochiali Pasha perished with all his fleet and was drowned forever. But it wasn't so forever as you might suppose, for he was Michael Goodgrind who had more bodies than one. The fish still remember Lepanto. Never had there been such feastings.

Alcazar-Quivir! That was the last of the excellent ones — the end of the litany. The Children left off the game. They remembered (but conveniently, and after they had worn out the fun of it) that they were forbidden to play Warfare with live soldiers. The Eretzi, left to themselves again, once more conducted their battles as dull and uninspired affairs.

You can put it to a test, now, tonight. Study the conflicts of the earlier times, of this high period, and of the time that followed. You will see the difference. For a short two or three centuries you will find really well-contrived battles. And before and after there is only ineptitude.

Often the Children played at Jealousies and raised up all the black passions in themselves. They played at Immoralities, for there is an abiding evil in all children.

Masking and water-carnivals and balls, and forever the emotional intrigue!

Ralpha walked down a valley, playing a lute and wearing the body of someone else. He luted the birds out of the trees and worked a charm on the whole countryside.

An old crone followed him and called, “Love me when I'm old.”

“Sempremái, tuttavía,” sang Ralpha in Eretzi or Earthian. “For Ever, For Always.”

A small girl followed and called, “Love me when I'm young.”

“Forever, for always,” sang Ralpha.

The weirdest witch in the world followed him and called, “Love me when I'm ugly.”

“For always, forever,” sang Ralpha, and pulled her down on the grass. He knew that all the creatures had been Laurie playing Bodies.

But a peculiar thing happened: the prelude became more important than the play. Ralpha fell in love with his own song, and forgot Laurie who had inspired it. He made all manner of music and poem — aubade, madrigal, chanson; and he topped it off with one hundred sonnets. He made them in Eretzi words, Italian words, Languedoc words, and they were excellent. And the Eretzi still copy them.

Ralpha discovered there that poetry and song are Passion Deferred. But Laurie would rather have deferred the song. She was long gone away and taking up with others before Ralpha had finished singing his love for her, but he never noticed that she had left him. After Hobble, Ralpha was the most peculiar of them all.

In the meanwhile, Michael Goodgrind invented another game of Bodies. He made them of marble — an Eretzi limestone that cuts easily without faulting. And he painted them on canvas. He made the People of Home, and the Eretzi. He said that he would make angels.

“But you cannot make angels,” said Joan.

“We know that,” said Michael, “but do the Eretzi know that I cannot? I will make angels for the Eretzi.”

He made them grotesque, like chicken men, like bird men, with an impossible duplication of humeral function. And the Children laughed at the carven jokes.

But Michael had sudden inspiration. He touched his creations up and added an element of nobility. So an icon was born.

All the Children did it then, and they carried it into other mediums. They made the Eretzi, and they made themselves. You can still see their deep features on some of those statues, that family look that was on them no matter what faces they wore or copied.

Bronze is fun! Bronze horses are the best. Big bronze doors can be an orgy of delight, or bronze bells whose shape is their tone.

The Children went to larger things. They played at Realms and Constitutions, and Banks and Ships and Provinces. Then they came down to smaller things again and played at Books, for Hobble had just invented the printing thing.

Of them all, Hobble had the least imagination. He didn't range wide like the others. He didn't outrage the Eretzi. He spent all his time with his sick toys as though he were a child of much younger years.

The only new body he acquired was another one just like his own. Even this he didn't acquire as did the other Children theirs. He made it laboriously in his shop, and Hobble and the Hobble Creature worked together thereafter, and you could not tell them apart. One was as dull and laboring as the other.

The Eretzi had no effect whatsoever on the Children, but the Children had great effect on the Eretzi. The Children had the faculty of making whatever little things they needed or wanted, and the Eretzi began to copy them. In this manner the Eretzi came onto many tools, processes, devices and arts that they had never known before. Out of ten thousand, there were these:

The Astrolabe, Equatorium, Quadrant, Lathes and Traversing Tools, Ball-Bearings, Gudgeons, Gig Mills, Barometers, Range-Finders, Cantilever Construction, Machine Saws, Screw Jacks, Hammer Forges and Drop Forges, Printing, Steel that was more than puddled Iron, Logarithms, Hydraulic Rams, Screw Dies, Spanner Wrenches, Flux Solder, Telescopes, Microscopes, Mortising Machines, Wire-Drawing, Stanches (Navigation Locks), Gear Trains, Paper-Making, Magnetic Compass and Wind-Rhumb, Portulan Charts and Projection Maps, Pinnule-Sights, Spirit-Levels, Fine Micrometers, Porcelain, Firelock Guns, Music Notation and Music Printing, Complex Pulleys and Snatch-Blocks, the Seed-Drill, Playing Cards (the Children's masquerade faces may still be seen on them), Tobacco, the Violin, Whiskey, the Mechanical Clock.

They were forbidden, of course, to display any second-aspect powers or machines, as these would disrupt things. But they disrupted accidentally in building, in tooling, in armies and navies, in harbors and canals, in towns and bridges, in ways of thinking and recording. They started a thing that couldn't be reversed. It was only the One Afternoon they were here, only two or three Eretzi Centuries, but they set a trend. They overwhelmed by the very number of their new devices, and it could never be simple on Eretz again.

There were many thousands of Eretz days and nights in that Long Afternoon. The Children had begun to tire of it, and the hour was growing late. For the last time they wandered off, this time all Seven of them together.

In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.

“Let's tumble the hairy Eretzi,” shouted Ralpha. “Let him not stand in the way of Kings!” For Ralpha was King of Bulgaria that day.

But they did not tumble the Pilgrim. That man knew how to handle his staff, and he laid the bunch of them low. It was nothing to him that they were the high people of the World who ordered Nations. He flogged them flat.

“Bleak Children!” that Pilgrim cried out as he beat them into the ground. “Unfledged little oafs! Is it so that you waste your Afternoon on Earth? I'll give you what your Fathers forgot.”

Seven-colored thunder, how he could use that staff! He smashed the gaudy bodies of the Children and broke many of their damnable bones. Did he know that it didn't matter? Did he understand that the bodies they wore were only for an antic?

“Lay off, old Father!” begged Michael Goodgrind, bleeding and half beaten into the earth. “Stay your bloody bludgeon. You do not know who we are.”

“I know you,” maintained the Pilgrim mountainously. “You are ignorant Children who have abused the Afternoon given you on Earth. You have marred and ruined and warped everything you have touched.”

“No, no,” Ralpha protested — as he set in new bones for his old damaged ones — “You do not understand. We have advanced you a thousand of your years in one of our afternoons. Consider the Centuries we have saved you! It's as though we had increased your life by that thousand years.”

“We have all the time there is,” said the Pilgrim solidly. “We were well and seriously along our road, and it was not so crooked as the one you have brought us over. You have broken our sequence with your meddling. You've set us back more ways than you've advanced us. You've shattered our Unity.”

“Pigs have unity!” Joan shouted. “We've brought you diversity. Think deep. Consider all the machines we have showed you, the building and the technique. I can name you a thousand things we've given you. You will never be the same again.”

“True. We will never be the same,” said the Pilgrim. “You may not be an unmixed curse. I'm a plain man and I don't know. Surety is one of the things you've lost us. But you befouled us. You played the game of Immoralities and taught it to us Earthlings.”

“You had it already,” Laurie insisted. “We only brought elegance instead of piggishness to its practice.” Immoralities was Laurie's own game, and she didn't like to hear it slighted.

“You have killed many thousands of us in your battles,” said the Pilgrim. “You're a bitter fruit — sweet at the first taste only.”

“You would yourselves have killed the same numbers in battles, and the battles wouldn't have been so good,” said Michael. “Do you not realize that we are the higher race? We have roots of great antiquity.”

“We have roots older than antiquity,” averred the Pilgrim. “You are wicked Children without compassion.”

“Compassion? For the Eretzi?” shouted Lonnie in disbelief.

“Do you have compassion for mice?” demanded Ralpha.

“Yes. I have compassion for mice,” the Pilgrim said softly.

“I make a guess,” Ralpha shot in shrewdly after they had all repaired their damaged bodies. “You travel as a Pilgrim, and Pilgrims sometimes come from very far away. You are not Eretzi. You are one of the Fathers from Home going in the guise of an Eretzi Pilgrim. You have this routine so that sometimes one of you comes to this world — and to every world — to see how it goes. You may have come to investigate an event said to have happened on Eretz a day ago.”

Ralpha did not mean an Eretzi day ago, but a day ago at Home. The High Road they were on was in Coele-Syria, not far from where the Event was thought to have happened, and Ralpha pursued his point:

“You are no Eretzi, or you would not dare to confront us, knowing what we are.”

“You guess wrong in this and in everything,” said the Pilgrim. “I am of this Earth, earthy. And I will not be intimidated by a gangle of children of whatever species! You're a weaker flesh than ourselves. You hide in other bodies, and you get Earthlings to do your slaughter. And you cannot stand up to my staff!

“Go home, you witless weanlings!” and he raised his terrible staff again.

“Our time is nearly up. We will be gone soon,” said Joan softly.

The last game they played? They played Saints — for the Evil they had done in playing Bodies wrongly, and in playing Warfare with live soldiers. But they repented of the things only after they had enjoyed them for the Long Afternoon. They played Saints in hairshirt and ashes, and revived that affair among the Eretzi.

And finally they all assembled and took off from the high hill between Prato and Firenze in Italy. The rocks flowed like water where they left, and now there would be a double scarp formation.

They were gone, and that was the end of them here.

There is a theory, however, that one of the Hobbles remained and is with us yet. Hobble and his creature could not be told apart and could not finally tell themselves apart. They flipped an Eretzi coin, Emperors or Shields, to see which one would go and which one would stay. One went and one stayed. One is still here.

But, after all, Hobble was only concerned with the sick toys, the mechanical things, the material inventions. Would it have been better if Ralpha or Joan stayed with us? They'd have burned us crisp by now! They were damnable and irresponsible children.

This short Historical Monograph was not assembled for a distraction or an amusement. We consider the evidence that Children have spent their short vacations here more than once and in both hemispheres. We set out the theses in ordered parallels and we discover that we have begun to tremble unaccountably.

When last came such visitors here? What thing has beset us during the last long Eretzi lifetime?

We consider a new period — and it impinges on the Present — with aspects so different from anything that went before that we can only gasp aghast and gasp in sick wonder:

“Is it ourselves who behave so?

“Is it beings of another sort, or have we become those beings?

“Are we ourselves? Are these our deeds?”

There are great deep faces looking over our shoulder, there are cold voices of ancient Children jeering “Compassion? For Earthlings?” there is frozen vasty laughter that does not belong to our species.

Frog On The Mountain

He woke to mountains, as the poet says. Really, there is nothing like it. The oceans and the lowlands were made long ago, according to legend. But the mountains are made new every morning.

It took some doing. His name was Garamask, and he had done it.

“I hate space,” Garamask had said when he decided on it, and the crewmen had been surprised.

“Why do you, Mr. Garamask?” the Captain had asked him. “You've logged more time in space than I have. You've been to many more regions. And you've made more money in the space business than anyone I know. I never saw a man so eager for voyages or for new worlds as you. You're so expansive a person that I thought you were in love with the expanse of space.”

“I love movement and travel,” Garamask said. “I love worlds! But in space, the feel of movement and the sense of travel is quickly lost. And space is not expansive. It is shriveling.

“I have, let us say, a passion for a certain unkempt and mountainous world, but space comes near to destroying that passion in me; for I have seen that world appear on the scope like a microbe, and I will watch it disappear like a microbe again. I have studied epic and towering things under the microscope. And when I put away the microscope, I know that the towering things are really too small to see. From the aspect of space, all the towering and wild worlds that I love are things too small to see or to believe in. I love a big world, and I hate space for spoiling that bigness.”

“Paravata isn't so big a world, Mr. Garamask,” the Captain told him.

“It is! It's big! It's huge!” Garamask insisted. “And I'll not have it spoiled. It is the largest possible world on the man-scale, and I will not let that scale suffer by comparison. It's a world as large as a man can get around on with ease, without becoming less than a man. It's half again Earth's gravity, so it calls out our strength. It has an atmosphere that keeps one on an oxygen binge, so it gives the strength something to draw on. It has mountains that rise ten thousand meters, the highest mountains anywhere that a man can climb in his proper body and without apparatus.

“And I won't have it spoiled for me! I'm rich enough that you can't regard me as a nuisance. I've given my instructions. So, follow them as regards me.”

“Mr. Garamask, weren't you ever young?” the Captain asked him.

“I am young yet, Captain. I am physically the fittest man on this ship. And this is a very young and aspiring idea that I am effecting now.”

“Ah, were you never something else, Mr. Garamask, not quite so young, and much more awkward?”

“I don't know what you mean, Captain, but I suspect that I never was. Follow my instructions.”

The instructions of Garamask were that he be sent into a sustaining sleep, and that he be landed and lodged on Paravata of the Mountains while he slept. He did not know when Paravata was picked up microbe-sized nor when it grew a hundred million times to the size of a pea. He did not see the planet grow to twice the size of Earth. He missed the landing.

He was taken from the ship at Paravata Landing and transported a hundred kilometers to the mountain lodge. He was installed there as befitted a man of means. He slept a determined number of hours, as he had planned it, and he woke in the very early morning. He woke to mountains.

He went out into the keen air of Paravata or Paravath, finding himself in the middle of the small town of Mountain-Foot. He had a warrant for arrest and death in his wallet; and he had a singing curiosity about this world whose vital civilization had suddenly been frozen in motion, whose people, the Rogha (the elites, the excellent ones), had disappeared or very nearly disappeared and whose place had been taken by the oafish Oganta, and this almost within living memory. He was on a hunting trip in depth: he would hunt on the three stage mountain to kill Sinek the cat-lion, Riksino the bear, Shasos the eagle-condor, and Bater-Jeno the crag-ape or the frog-man (depending on the translation). This was said to be the most challenging hunt in the galaxy. And most likely he would die on the triple mountain, for no human hunter had ever bagged all four of the creatures and survived the thing; though Oganta hunters were said to have done the trick.

On the second level, Garamask was hunting for the answer to the riddle: what had happened to the Rogha elites? Could those few who were left not be strengthened in their hold? Could their civilization not be unfrozen? Might it not be discovered what queer hold the oafish Oganta had over this Rogha remnant? How had the excellent ones fallen (willingly, it was said) to their inferiors?

On the third level, Garamask was hunting for a murderer, the Oganta, Rogha, Animal, or Man who had killed Allyn. Allyn had been a close friend, but Garamask had not realized how close until after the event. It had been given out that Allyn, on the same hunt, had been killed by the Bater-Jeno, the crag-ape or the frog-man. Allyn, however, had newly appeared to Garamask in a rhapsody-dream and said that this was not so. He had been killed, said Allyn, by his guide and hunting companion, who had been an Oganta named Ocras, but who might not now be in Oganta form.

“I believe that we have been close,” Allyn had said, “though we never spoke of our closeness. Avenge me, Garamask, and take the lid off the mystery of Paravath. I was so very close to uncovering the mystery myself.”

“What had you found, Allyn?” Garamask had asked; but appearances in dreams often seem hard of hearing; they speak but they do not listen.

“Uncover it, Garamask,” Allyn had repeated, “and avenge me. I was so close to it. He ate into the base of my skull and so killed me. He ate my very brains as I died.”

“But what did you find when you came so close, Allyn?” Garamask had asked once more. “Tell me what you had going, so I will know what to look for.”

“I was so close to it when I died,” Allyn said.

Apparitions are as stone-deaf. They speak their message but they do not hear. You may have noticed this yourself.

Garamask was not a great believer in dreams, but he had desired this hunt for a long time; he had, in fact, intended to accompany Allyn on his hunt, but had been prevented by affairs. And he had known at the time of the dream, had not known till he had gone carefully over the report, that Allyn had indeed been killed by having his skull eaten into. Now Garamask tested it a little.

“My guide, will he be Ocras?” he asked the gangling Oganta who was manager of the hunting lodge.

“Ocras? No, he is no longer a guide. He has been translated out of this life.”

“But there was a guide named Ocras?”

“There was one time a guide named Ocras, who is no more. Your guide will be Chavo.”

But there had been a guide named Ocras, and Garamask hadn't known the name except in the rhapsody-dream. Then Garamask saw one of the Rogha survivors walking proudly in the early keen air. He went to him at once, meeting him on a rocky slope.

“I have an intense interest in you and all your kind,” Garamask began. “You yourself are the face of the mystery. You are imposing in a way that I could never be; I can see why you are called the elite, the excellent ones. You are so startlingly in contrast to the Oganta here that everyone for worlds around is puzzled over it. You are kings. They are oafs. Why do they take you over?”

“I suppose it is the day of the oafs, pilgrim-man,” the Rogha said easily. “I am Treorai, and you are the man Garamask who made preparations to wake to mountains. You have taken up the challenge of the three-stage mountain. It's a high aspiration to kill the four creatures there. One who has done it will experience a deep change.”

“As Allyn did?”

“I knew him when he was here. He did not kill the four creatures. He was killed by the fourth.”

“He has told me, outside the lines as it were, that he was killed by something other.”

“Allyn would not lie, even outside the lines. You have misunderstood him. Did he say that he completed the hunt and killed the fourth creature?”

“He said that he had killed Sinek the lion, Riksino the bear, Shasos the eagle; but, no, he did not say that he had killed the Bater-Jeno. He said, however, that he was murdered by something else.”

“No, Garamask, he was killed by the fourth prey. A creature is often fuzzy in his mind about his own manner of dying. He was a wonderful fellow, though, for a man.”

“Treorai, why has your civilization come to a grotesque halt? Why have you Rogha, in your manifest superiority, all but died out? Why have the rough rampant Oganta taken over? A dozen of them couldn't take one of you. You have the presence that would dumbfound any attack. I can feel it like magnetism. Is it a genetic thing that has happened?”

“A genetic thing, a ghostly thing, a sundering thing really, Garamask. But it isn't finished, and there is no apathy here. What we Rogha have lost, we will regain, by any means whatsoever. This eclipse will pass from us.”

“Why don't you simply annihilate the Oganta, Treorai?”

“You are an educated man, Garamask, but your speaking of the Paravath language is imperfect. I simply do not understand your question. I have some World-English, if that would help.”

“Treorai, why do you Rogha not simply annihilate the Oganta?” Garamask asked the excellent Rogha in World-English.

“No, Garamask, I have not so much of the idiom as I thought,” said Treorai. “Your question is simply incomprehensible in whatever language it is put. Ah, your guide has peeped out to see if you are ready. Grab him quickly, or he will go in and be back to sleep again. The Oganta are not morning types. And the sun should not find you still at Mountain-Foot. It should find you at least two hundred meters aloft. See that ledge there! It is a wonderful place to catch first sun.”

“I see that it will be,” said Garamask. “And it will take some inspired climbing to get there in time. If I live I will see you again, excellent one.”

“High hunting, Garamask! A very strong hunter with a very good guide may kill the first three creatures. To kill the fourth, the hunter must transcend himself.”

Garamask started up the Mountain Domba (the first mountain of the three-mountain complex) with Chavo his booming Oganta guide. The Oganta are rangy and solid creatures, and strength and endurance is their birth-right. Say what you will about the loud oafs, they are strong climbers! And Garamask was a very strong man who had climbed on heavier-than-World worlds before.

And, ah, there is sometimes an advantage in knowing the Paravath language imperfectly. Garamask could tune Chavo out. It took all his attention to follow the language, and his attention was mercifully on many other things as they went up. And yet Chavo laughed and boomed incessantly, like boulders clashing together.

A queer and unfinished looking creature was this Chavo, were all the Oganta. (Climbing, climbing hard and high, they'd catch first sun on the fine ledge yet.) A queer creature! “The male European moor frog (Rana arvalis) is covered with a light blue bloom like a plum,” the anthropologist-naturalist Wendt had written two hundred years ago, but Wendt had never heard of the world of Paravata, nor of a blue-blooming moor frog two meters tall. (Climbing hard and high, there was another shade of blue bloom in the morning light, and the keen air was like World brandy.) “Those naked goblins with human hands and infant bodies,” old Wendt had written again, but Wendt never envisioned an infant body that would weigh two hundred kilograms here, and two-thirds that much on Earth. Chavo the Oganta was a lot of oaf!

It was all moss-covered rocks, and tiger grass growing between them. It was nowhere difficult to get foot-or-handhold, but it was steep and it was heavy. They came to the fine ledge and took it just at first sun. They rested there.

“You do not like me, Papa Garamask,” Chavo was booming. “But I will make you like me. We Oganta like to be liked. We will go to any lengths to be liked.”

“You go too far for it, I believe,” said Garamask. “When will we meet the Sinek?”

“We will meet sineks and sineks from here on up, but they will bound away from us and will not stand. Then we will meet Sinek himself, and he will stand.”

“You talk as though there were only one of the species who would be dangerous. And yet, surely, a dozen of these very dangerous sineks have been killed.”

“There is only one at a time, Papa Garamask. Whether it is always the same one that is translated back to live on the mountain, or whether one inherits from another, we do not know. But always there are many sineks, and there is Sinek himself. It is time to arm before we go up higher.”

Chavo broke the stuff out of his pack. No shot-weapon might be used on the mountain hunt; even bow and spear-thrower and sling were ruled out. The animals had them not, so the hunters might not have them. It made for a harder hunt. The hunting and killing must be by direct confrontation and intimate encounter. Garamask clipped the claw-gauntlets over the backs of his hands, binding them by wrist and palm straps. He had been proud of his crushing grip, of his massive hands and forearms; but could he with these deliver lion blows on the lion himself? He bound on the elbow and knee and toe and heel daggers, needle-pointed, double-bladed, curiously curved. He bound on the crotch and throat armor. He slipped the casing fangs over his own dog teeth. He bound on the cap with the skull saber. Chavo similarly equipped himself. Well, the animals of Paravath had such claws and fangs (not all of them having the same ones), so the hunters could have such also.

“It will be much harder to climb in this,” Garamask grumbled.

“It will be, Papa Garamask,” Chavo said, “and the climb itself becomes much harder. Some hunters take the spikes and claws off and hook them ready in their belts, and they are surprised by Sinek or Riksino or Shasos, and die for it. Some climb, clawed and daggered, and slip and fall to their deaths.”

“Which is best, guide?”

“Whichever way you would rather die, Papa Garamask, so select it. That will be best for you.”

“I do not intend to die on the mountain.”

“Shall we turn back now, Papa Garamask? You make twelve World-men who have come to hunt. All die on the mountain. None goes all the way through the full hunt.”

“One man, Allyn, went all the way, Chavo. And then he was murdered. I have climbed with him and hunted with him, and I'm as good a man. I intend to go all the way, and I do not intend to be murdered.”

They climbed strongly, Garamask silent, Chavo booming and croaking with incessant talk that Garamask tuned out. The Oganta climbed, clawed and daggered and fanged and armored. That was the best way then. Garamask did likewise. He didn't envy the Oganta his youth and towering strength. Garamask had his own strength and he enjoyed testing it. But he envied the Oganta, a little, his fangs. Garamask had no such giant canine teeth to support the giant saber-fangs. He had no such bull-bowed neck, nor skull-massif, nor buttressed and ridged upper jaw to support such sabers. But he had donned a pretty good set of fangs himself and he believed he would know how to use them.

From one jagged turning, Garamask caught a dizzy view of Daingean City far away. The excellent Rogha had been builders at least equal to men. Now their cities were almost emptied of them, and the oafish Oganta lived in them like animals denning. Then the jagged turning became even more jagged, and Garamask could not afford another glance at the city.

They ate aran-moss and cobble-moss, and pods of tiger grass. They chewed green coill-nuts for water. They climbed high and hard. Then Garamask caught the whiff and the spoor of the spook animals, and he knew it out of the cellar of his mind.

“Ah, this is the world you live on,” he breathed, “and you are not imaginary at all. Animal who is no animal, I know what you are.” Garamask slavered when he called out because of the great fangs capped to his dog teeth. “The old Greeks called you the all-animal, and pictured you as made out of parts of many. And men said you were the Asian lion, or leopard, or tiger, or rock-lion, or American puma. And all the time you were yourself, the legend animal.”

“Who do you talk to, Papa Garamask?” Chavo asked in some alarm. “Do you talk to the grandfather of Sinek?”

“To the great-great-grandfather of Sinek, oaf. In the rain forests, they told poor men that your name was jaguar, but the poor men knew better. In the old South of the Conglomerate States on World, they told that your name was puma or cougar, but the poor cracker-men always knew your real species. Spook animal, I come after you!”

“Papa Garamask, throw but a rock into the thicket and it will slink off. It is only one of the sineks, it is not Sinek himself. He seldom hunts so low or so early. And do not talk to the grandfather of Sinek, or he will come in your dreams and eat through your live throat and kill you.”

“Damn you, oaf, it is Sinek himself! He hunts low and early today. Grandfather of all the animals, I fight you now! Panther!”

And Garamask charged upward, across a slide of moss-covered rocks, into a tall thicket of tiger-grass and coill-bush, to fight panther, the animal who exists only in legend and misnomer. On Paravath he used the name Sinek.

It was a long black male. This was no sinek who would bound away, who would not stand. This was Sinek himself, and now Garamask understood why there could be only one of him at a time. The spook, the spirit filled this animal completely, with nothing left over for any other.

Garamask drew first blood, clawing the black panther half blind, getting his elbow dagger inside the panther's mouth, trying always to stay inside the animal's forepaws. Panther got one side of Garamask's head, above the throat armor, inside his mouth, failed to hold, slid bloodily along it, popped it out, and took an ear off neatly. The animal would weigh a hundred and fifty kilograms here, a hundred on Earth, just about Garamask's own weight. Panther, Sinek, knocked Garamask loose, and he slid on the loose rocks and moss, very nearly off the mountain to his death. Then they were in confrontation.

Sinek was upground of Garamask on the edge of the firm rock; and Garamask was on the loose-rock fringe that slipped and cascaded and was now flowing over the edge like water. Chavo, the Oganta oaf, was chewing a blade of tiger-grass and laughing.

It was with amazement that Garamask saw intelligence, almost total intelligence, in the eyes of Sinek the panther. This was a person and a personage, whatever the species. The intelligent look was almost friendly to Garamask, and the two understood each other. They would fight to the death, but they recognized each other for what they were, excellent ones, superior ones, Panther, Man, Rogha, firstlings, not to be compared to Oganta or Swine or Sloths.

Garamask made the attempt to break out of his sliding strip. He exchanged terrific clawing blows with Sinek, got the worse of it, and came much nearer to going off the mountain as he slid reeling back.

“Fear you nothing, Papa Garamask,” the Oganta Chavo called from where he had scrambled higher. “I will roll boulders down on Sinek and kill him.” And Chavo did roll boulders, badly, inaccurately, dangerously. Then Garamask understood from the oafish laughter that Chavo was trying to kill him and not Sinek; trying to knock the man off the mountain with the rolling boulders, or to induce a rockslide that would carry him irrevocably down.

With a mixture of stark terror and upsurging courage that was peculiar to himself in moments of deep crisis, Garamask battled up the sliding rocks, greatly impeded by his arms, and closed with Sinek the panther again.

“I am as large, I am as strong, I am as armed, dammit, I am as animal!” Garamask gibbered. “We close together, good comrade. If I go off the mountain, you go off it too.”

But Garamask was wrong. The panther was more animal than he. It was doing him to death in the close fighting, though puzzled by the throat and crotch armor. “Who waits below to eat out my skull, Chavo?” Garamask howled out furiously. “Who waits below to crack my skull and eat my brains? That is not Sinek here. It is scavengers below me, and a scavenger above me, you!”

“Papa Garamask,” Chavo chortled in a booming giggle from above, “fear you nothing. I will roll boulders down on Sinek and kill him.” And Chavo was rolling boulders down on them both, grappled together, to kill them both.

Garamask was losing, slipping. He broke off his capping fangs and his own canine teeth under them tried to slash through the sinews of panther; and he was choked on his own sudden blood. He raked the animal with elbow, knee, toe, and heel daggers, and was nearly disemboweled by a back foot of Sinek that equaled all the dagger functions. For the last time he broke free from the slashing, smashing panther and rolled in a stream of scree, trying to keep himself on the mountain.

Chavo set a large boulder at him to help him over the edge. Sinek the panther came lithely for the kill, and caught the boulder amidships as he flicked himself sly-footed along the edge of firm rock. And Sinek could not halt himself when he was knocked heavily into the sliding rock stream. Sinek the panther flowed off the mountain and fell into gaping space.

“Papa Garamask, I save your life,” Chavo the Oganta chortled from above. “Now I must make certain that Sinek is really dead where he has fallen so far below. I will roll yet more boulders down on him, and down on him till I am sure that he is dead.”

And Chavo rolled boulders down at Garamask to knock him off the mountain; and the man scrambled in the sliding scree to avoid them. Three, six, nine boulders Chavo rolled down at Garamask, and then he had trouble in getting a fine boulder loose from its embedment. Garamask found a hidden spur of solid rock and went up quickly. Chavo turned, and they were on a level face to face: Garamask bloody and crippled and earless, and full of muskiness and ghostliness, for part of the spook of Sinek, falling to death, had passed into Garamask. And Chavo, what can you say of the oaf Chavo of the species Oganta? Could he meet Garamask's eyes? No, but he never could have; all Oganta are wall-eyed. Did he blanch at the encounter? How can you tell with an Oganta? But the light blue bloom that was his complexion had lost a little of its sheen.

“Why do you pause, guide Chavo?” Garamask asked as a waiting volcano might ask. “We go up, we go up! We have not yet reached the top of the first mountain of Three-Mountain. We have killed only one of the four prey. We go up, we go up!”

They went up. They wore out the day with their climbing. They saw sineks and sineks who bounded away from them and would not stand. But they did not meet Sinek himself again that day. Sinek was dead for the while. Garamask took off his weapons and armor pieces and hooked them into his belt. Thereafter he climbed more easily. And just at last sun they came to the top of Domba Mountain, the first mountain of Three-Mountain.

It was a high plateau; it was another mountain-foot, for out of it rose the Mountain Giri, the second mountain of Three-Mountain. They ate bitter mountain rations and chewed green coill-nuts for water. They bedded down for the night, so Garamask thought.

But Chavo brought a stringed instrument from his pack and began some of the twangingest and most nauseating noise ever heard. He mixed his bumptious booming voice with it in a curdling cry, and Garamask understood that he would not be able to sleep with this.

“You have convinced me, pup,” he growled. “You have established one of the universal ultimates — the most raucous noise ever. But is it necessary that you belabor the point?”

“You do not like it?” Chavo was surprised. “I pride myself on my music and my singing. We consider such to be dynamic perfection and cosmic looseness of sound.”

“I consider it something else. The Rogha are said to be the most musical creatures in the universes. How could their co-dwellers here, you Oganta, be the least?”

“I had hoped you would like my music,” Chavo sorrowed. “I still hope that you will like me. Really, we are likable creatures. Even some of the Rogha have said so, with a certain exasperation, it is true.”

“You are crude unlicked calves, Chavo, and I understand your world less and less. Why, and how, are you killing the Rogha? For I believe that to be the case.”

“But there are so few of them left, Papa Garamask! And they become fewer and fewer. So is it not imperative that we kill them, much as we respect and love them?”

“If there were millions of them left, would you kill them?”

“No, certainly not. That would be an abomination. Why should we kill them if there were many of them? They are so greatly above us that we will do anything for them.”

“Even kill them, Chavo, to show how much you love them? And why did you try to kill me during my battle with Sinek?”

“For mixed reasons. First, you have a dignity of aspect, and you seemed almost like a Rogha to me as you were embattled there. I respect and love you almost as much as I do any of the Rogha. And then, it has been discovered that World-men will do as well as the Rogha for us, and companions of mine were waiting below the crag to tear you apart if you should fall there. And we Oganta have an impulse to kill those whom we find in a position to be killed. Very often we kill other Oganta simply because we find them in a vulnerable position. And this, I believe, is irrational of us.”

“I think so too, Chavo. Several small rocks are dancing there on the slope. Do my eyes deceive me? Are they small animals frisking that look so much like rocks?”

“No, they are rocks dancing, Papa Garamask. Your eyes do not deceive you. Here, I will play my hittur again and they dance to it. Hear! See! Is that not nimble music, Papa Garamask?”

“I'd call it something else. Dammit, Chavo, must I ask the obvious question? What makes the rocks dance?”

“I make the rocks dance, Papa Garamask, or my dark companion does. Why are you surprised? The same thing is done on World?”

“If it is, I have not heard of it.”

“But it is. On World, so I have been told, one young person in ten has a dark companion, and a World-German name is given to this. But in both cases, the dark companion is a satellite of self. On World, I am told, the fact is often hidden or denied. But here, where the majority of us are capable of projecting the dark satellite, there is no way to hide it. Besides, it is fun. Watch me rock and sway that bush as if I were a wind. See!”

“Weird oaf, you have a poltergeist!” Garamask was interested in this thing.

“Yes, that is your World-word. No, I am a poltergeist. And I am also a visible creature. It used to be that, with time, we would give up one form or the other: stand clear of the dark body and be visible creatures only; or decay the body and be spook only. But now, in the time of waiting of the Oganta, we have both forms, and we are not able to go beyond these forms.”

“This is a time of waiting for you, Chavo? What do you wait for?”

“To see what will happen to us. It is a very uneasy time of waiting. It's so narrow a ladder, and so few of us can climb it at one time. And at the top, it is not what it once was, not what it should be.”

“I am going to sleep now, Chavo, and I do not want to hear your damnable instrument or your voice again this night,” Garamask said evenly. “But how do I know that you will not kill me while I sleep?”

“Papa Garamask, would an Oganta violate the night!”

“Hell, I don't know what you'd do! I'm going to sleep.” And he did sleep, angrily and rapidly and deeply. And in the deepest part of Garamask's sleep, Allyn loomed up there, standing a slight distance up on Giri Mountain.

“Watch the raw cub Chavo,” the looming Allyn called down to Garamask. “He is not so clever as was Ocras, but you are not so clever as was I.”

“I am every bit as clever as you, Allyn,” Garamask told the appearance. “Now tell me what it was that you were so close to finding out when you died. Give me something to go on.” But Allyn did not hear Garamask. He had come to speak and not to listen. “I was so very close to it then,” Allyn called again. “Avenge me on Ocras, Garamask, whatever he is now. I'd do as much for you.”

“I will continue my sleep, Allyn,” Garamask told him, “and I do not want to hear any more dead-man talk from you tonight unless you have something new to tell me.” And Garamask continued his sleep.

He woke eagerly and easily at first gray light. “First sun should not find me at this mountain-foot either,” Garamask told himself silently. “I see the ledge where I should catch first sun. There is always the ledge above; mountaining would not be mountaining without it. Treorai the Rogha told me that the Oganta are not morning types. Let me see.”

Garamask hooted and hollered at Chavo, then kicked him awake. Amused, he watched the oaf fall back to sleep again, then kicked him awake the second time. “It must be my dark companion, it could not be myself who does this.” Garamask laughed. “But it is fun.” He finally roused the sleepy Chavo. They ate bitter mountain rations.

Clawed and taloned and spiked and armored, they climbed up the Mountain Giri. They took first sun at that ledge above. They rested. Then they climbed again.

Not entirely unpleasant, not so to a man with a strong and traveled nose, not really repugnant; but stark, tall, penetrating, slavering, rampant, murderous, challenging, of a grave-like putridity, of a life-terminal gagging, was the odor, the strong stench that began to pervade the climb on Giri Mountain. There was a person here making himself known. It was Riksino, the cave-bear, the musk-bear, the lord of this middle-mountain. He was at home and he had his flag out.

“No need for me to ask what it is,” Garamask said. “He's declared himself. Did I not already know it, I believe that I could guess his very name from his coded stench. He'll be easily found, and I didn't come on a hunt to bypass such a prey. How is the best way? To go to him directly as he waits, and attack him?”

“Papa Garamask, there isn't any best way to fight Riksino,” Chavo quaked. “I am afraid of this person and have always been. He is much rougher and stronger than Sinek or Shasos, or even than Bater-Jeno. He can be killed, he has been killed, I have had a piece of his killing before. But each time it is a great wonder that he can be killed at all, and each time I go in fear and trembling.”

“It's catching, oaf,” said Garamask. “I feel a little fear and trembling myself. We'll skirt above, and we'll hunt down on him from above.”

But Garamask was very uneasy himself, and his excitement for this part of the hunt was of a sinking sort. He was sick and fevered today. The breaking off of his fang-sheathed eyeteeth in his yesterday's battle with Sinek had swollen his face from eyes to throat. His whole face and head ached, his throat was sore, and he was slobbering through the unaccustomed gaps. Moreover, his shredded ear was bothering him. Even a very strong man suffers under heavy gravity if he is sick.

And they would have difficulty skirting above Riksino, and hunting down on him from above. Riksino was shuffling upward, keeping pace with them. His personal stench rose higher and higher. They had his location from it pretty well, though they could not yet see him. So they wore out a few tiring hours and ascended most of the mountain.

“This will have to be the Big Riksino, the King Riksino,” said Chavo. “None other ever dens so high, and no Riksino will fight except in the mouth of his den. This is the first time that the Big Riksino has returned since he was last killed more than two equivalent years ago.”

“You really believe that the same animals return to life?” Garamask asked him.

“The Rogha do not believe it, Papa Garamask, but we Oganta believe it. And yet, it may be that when a Riksino grows larger and stronger than any of the others, he will go up and occupy the old den of the Big Riksino as a sign that he is now the king. I have fought with riksinos before, but never with the Big Riksino, and I am afraid. Be assured that he will be very large and fierce.”

“I see him,” said Garamask when they had climbed a while further, “and he is big. I'll go after him, since he doesn't seem to make up his mind.”

“What you see is not Big Riksino,” said Chavo, “and none other will fight while the big one is on the mountain. Besides, as you notice, he has not the full stench.”

“It's full enough for me,” Garamask gawked out of his sore throat. “I'll have him.”

Garamask rushed the animal. It reared up roaring, half again the man's height. It batted big paws around in the air and opened a big mouth. Garamask went in low, knifing the back legs of the animal with toes and knees knives, ripping its belly with his skull saber, delivering terrible blows on its loins with his hand claws. The animal toppled over backward, rolled, scrambled up, and ran away howling. And Garamask shambled after it, not at all able to catch it unless it should slow.

“It is no good that you chase it, Papa Garamask,” Chavo called. “That is not Big Riksino. It is only a pup that runs away like a pup. Do not waste the day chasing a callow pup.”

“I seem to spend several days climbing the mountains with one,” Garamask panted. He was tired, and he had been a fool. The real stench, the king stench was still high above him, and he had only blooded a whimpering whelp. He climbed, he climbed. Then the stench stood and prevailed. The riksino person was waiting, quite near.

“We are almost to the top of Giri Mountain,” said Garamask, “and his den cannot be any higher. We will reach that ridge, and we will follow it to the left till we are above him. It's all clear rock above. His den will have to be in that jumble somewhere just below the ridge.”

They were onto a fearful and crumbling ledge, crawling along it, Garamask in the lead. It is an awkward sort of crawl with toe and knee sabers in place. Garamask began to sight in on the very large animal. He could hear it panting and gnashing now, and he smelled it overpoweringly. He could hear it scratching big claws on the rocks; he could even hear the blood pounding in it, the strong pulse. But when he first saw it, paralyzingly close, it was the inside of it that he saw.

He was looking into the open mouth of it, a meter across, two meters below him. Then, in a flick, half of Garamask's nose was gone as he peered, fascinated, too close. The animal was in a strain with its forepaws extended as high as he could reach; and one of its high traveling claws had caught the leaning-over Garamask in the face.

Garamask had claws of his own. Angrily he raked the backs of Riksino's paws with his own hand talons when the big bear was extended on the rock as high as he could reach. Using his own bloody face for bait, Garamask counter-clawed every time the bear struck up at him. He found the animal slow and witless. The animal closed its gaping mouth once, drew back its great front limbs, and licked its bleeding paws. Garamask let himself half over the ledge and raked the animal's muzzle terribly with his heel saber. He half-blinded it with the slash, either cutting one of its eyes out or filling it so full of blood that the animal could not use it. And Garamask was back on the ledge before Riksino could slash out at him again.

The riksino bear crouched low on four feet, gathered himself, and leaped up toward the ledge. He got his great forepaws over it and hung on. Garamask slashed the big paws pulpy with his foot sabers, and then gashed the animal full in the face again and again and again as it hung there. The paws slipped off, and the animal slipped back to the lower level. And yet it was of such great size, had so much blood and meat in it, that this little whittling that Garamask had done could have very little effect on it.

“Bear, you're a stumble-bum, but a big stumble-bum,” Garamask talked. “What? What? You're turning something else on? Have you more exudations than your stench? What do you do, bear?”

The riksino bear had reared up again and opened its great mouth. And now it reeked with an influence on another level from its stench. “Papa Garamask, do not fall!” Chavo called. “Do not fall into the open mouth of the Riksino.”

“You fool! Why should I fall into the bear's mouth?” Garamask asked in amazement. “Bear, bear, you turn it on, do you? What are you, an amateur hypnotist? It might get you the birds and the small game, not a man. Turn it on, bear, turn it on as strong as you can! The Garamask will never be so fascinated as to fall into a bear's mouth.”

And Garamask fell head-first into the mouth of the riksino bear.

From above there was another roaring, terrified and hysterical, and a third weight came down heavily. From the bowels of the riksino came an agonizing groan; and Garamask was being crushed to death, but not instantly. His skull spike aided him. His elbow sabers, for he was into the maw of the animal beyond them, did slashing service. Then he was crushed in together in spite of them and his head began to split open. And then he was crushed no more, as his enveloping cosmos went limp.

And after a while he was climbing again, up to the top of Giri Mountain. He was alive, more or less, and he was dazed and gagging. Had it all been a bloody dream, the fight with Riksino? Chavo was booming as offensively as ever, but the thing had not been a dream.

“I save your life, Papa Garamask,” Chavo boomed. “Am I not wonderful? I kill the Big Riksino in the throat while he is straining there to crush you in his gullet. The Big Riksino can think of only one thing at a time, and the Big Chavo can knife through even the thickest strained sinews very rapidly when he is given a free way to it. There is no other way that Riksino can be killed but by two hunters similarly; but the bait-hunter in the mouth almost always dies.”

“You tried to kill me after Sinek had fallen off the mountain to his death, Chavo,” Garamask panted. “Why did you not let the Riksino kill me, since you want me dead?”

“The way the Riksino kills, you would be of no use to us dead,” said Chavo. “He devours too rapidly.”

“And otherwise I would be of some use to you dead, Chavo?”

“Dead, very freshly dead, or still dying, you would be of greatest use to us,” Chavo said blandly. “Dying or new dead, you will represent our ultimate hope.”

Just at last sun they came to the top of Giri Mountain, the second mountain of Three-Mountain. They ate bitter mountain rations, and Chavo dabbled medicaments on Garamask's wounds.

“Were you to survive the mountain hunt (and you will not) you could get a new nose made and be beautiful again,” said Chavo. “Now, I suppose, you must live noseless until your death the tomorrow sun-fall. Or shall I attempt to make you a surrogate nose from the wood of this thorn-bush here?”

“Don't bother, Chavo. I'm going to sleep.”

But Garamask was not going to sleep. Chavo took his stringed hittur from his pack and played his damnable music and sang.

“Chavo!” Garamask spoke sharply. “Do you know why Spain on World fell from the highest nation in Europe to the lowest within one generation?”

“Perhaps they offended the frog-god.”

“No. No, we have no frog-gods on World.”

“What? What? Are you sure? No frog-gods on World? You dash me down.”

“A devilish Arab, angered by the expulsion of the Arabs from Spain, brought a guitar into that unfortunate country. It was adopted. So that unfortunate country fell, its once noble soul shriveled into a miserable whiney-ness.”

“I understand, Papa Garamask,” said Chavo, still strumming. “They fell, as though the noble Rogha should fall to become ourselves Oganta.”

“A good parallel, Chavo. And once in the Pacific Ocean on World, there was a noble kingdom of Hawaii. A sea-faring man introduced the guitar there, and the noble kingdom soon begged to be accepted into servitude by a land-nation.”

“Yes, of course that would be the effect, Papa Garamask. We Oganta would accept such servitude gladly, but there is no longer anyone to accept us into it.”

“My own land, the Conglomerate States, fell similarly,” said Garamask sadly. “And once it had been a noble land.”

“The noble Rogha, of course, despise the instrument,” Chavo mourned. “But to us it is the Shetra, the holy instrument. It is our religion. It is our love.”

“It is the noise of accepted inferiority in all things.”

“Of course it is, Papa Garamask. And who are more inferior than ourselves, the Oganta? But we will give it up, we promise this, if we are ever able to give up being Oganta.”

“Oh, go to sleep, Chavo!”

“But you say that you have no frog-gods on your world, and yet you have frogs? And we have our frog-gods, and have no frogs except those introduced from World. And these are small frogs that have been imported. The largest of them can be held in the two hands. I dream about the frogs of World. How big are they, Papa Garamask? As big as the King Riksino?”

“Oh no. You've a completely mistaken idea, Chavo. The frogs on World are the same as the frogs imported here from World. The most of them you could hold in one hand.”

“Are you sure? They are not as big as myself? They are not even as big as yourself?”

“No, no, Chavo. They are quite small. I've often wondered about the frog-cult on Paravath. What is the meaning of it?”

“You dash me down again, Papa Garamask. There should be frogs of great size. Why, the frog is the most wonderful of all creatures! It is the only one that is able to make the frog-leap easily. Oh, may that thing come back to us!”

“Go to sleep, you damnable oaf.”

Chavo sighed deeply. “I dream about frogs,” he murmured. Then he did seem to go to sleep.

Allyn came then, but he was a thinner and more vapory Allyn than in his previous appearances to Garamask.

“The Shasos, the eagle-condor, isn't very hard to kill,” said Allyn. “He will attack you when you are roping up the cliff face, of course; for there is no other time he will fight. If you can belay yourself on the rope, and if you are not overpowered with fear, you have a chance. Wring his neck like a chicken if you can, for he is a chicken.

“But he will rip you apart to get to your kidneys and spleen if he can. Prevent him in this! He will gobble your eyes out of your head. Let him not do this! Let him not do it with both of them, at least, or you are at a disadvantage.”

“Allyn, I will go as far as you went,” said Garamask. “I'm as good a man as you ever were. Tell me now, what is the mystery at the end of it that you didn't find out till you died? What is peculiar about the final prey, the Bater-Jeno? What were you on to, Allyn?”

But wraiths are notoriously hard of hearing.

“You will do well to weaken the bridge after you have crossed over it, and to keep your gaze always fixed on the back of your head,” the dead-man Allyn said. Then he became thinner, and he was gone.

Garamask again woke eagerly and easily at first gray light. His face and his throat were not as sore as they had been. Though bereaved in ear and nose, he was happy. He lifted up his heart to the morning. Enjoyably, he kicked Chavo the Oganta awake, for the Oganta are not morning types.

They ate bitter mountain rations, donned sabers and claws and spikes and armor, and began to climb Bior Mountain, the third and highest mountain of Three-Mountain. Here it was steep and sheer, Bior a saber mountain rising out of its sheath which was Giri Mountain. It was a different sort of hunt now, and a climb in a different element.

There were the slanting slick shields of rock, and the slanting slick grass and cobble-moss. There were the rodents and poke-snakes that ate the grass and the moss and slithered over the rocks. There were the great birds that stood in from the tall skies and ate the rodents and poke-snakes. The greatest of these birds was the Shasos, the eagle-condor.

“Is it with Shasos as it was with the first two prey: that there are many of them, and that there is one special one?” Garamask asked Chavo.

“Yes, it is Shasos himself who will attack, and the others will not. It is the big Shasos himself whom we have to fear, he who nests on the third moon.”

“Moon-brained muggledoon! Where do the other Shasos nest, Chavo?”

“On the second moon. The less noble of the large birds nest on first moon, and small birds nest on Paravath itself. I am told that you do not have such large birds as Shasos on World.”

“There are no birds on World so large as those three swooping there now, Chavo. Are they Shasos?”

“No, Papa Garamask, they are of the less noble of the big birds, Geier-Birds. When we are a little higher in the sky we will come to the hunting cliffs of Shasos. Now I will climb up here dangerously, and then I will run a line down. We will be running many of these lines.”

The oafish Chavo could climb. He oozed up the overhanging rock like slightly viscous oil. He climbed with all his armor, and he seemed sure of his grip on these rocks that were slick with cobble-moss.

From forty meters above he let down a line, and Garamask climbed it — very tiring work.

“What was to keep you from letting me fall with the line?” Garamask asked Chavo when they were up to that next hint of a ledge in the rocks.

“Would an Oganta violate the sanctity of the line?” Chavo asked him.

It was a very long hard day. Garamask went up long lines a dozen times, terrifying overhangs out over nothingness. Slate-gray clouds were below them, and Paravath could no longer be seen below. The grass and cobble-moss became stronger, shattering the rocks with their growth and making them all very soft and dangerous. The rodents and poke-snakes became larger; and there were larger birds that stood in from the stark sky to prey on them. This was fearful exaltation here, stunning height without support. First moon, cragged and misshapen in the day-sky, seemed nearer than the glimpses of Paravath below. Indeed, the little first moon was only eight times the distance from Mountain-Foot.

“There is shasos, and there, and there,” said Chavo as they were resting on an imaginary ledge, actually only a band of discoloration on the rock. “But it is not yet Shasos himself. Quite soon he, though.”

Garamask followed Chavo up several quite difficult stretches, refusing to let a line be strung. And then there loomed above them a very long and very difficult overhang that Garamask knew he would never be able to climb.

“It is the line again here, Chavo,” he said, “and I hate to be dependent on you. Can even you climb this?”

“I can climb this, and it is the hardest of the climbs. But first I will tell you something here. It is at this place, on the line that I will drop, that you will have your encounter with Shasos. He is out there now, the black dot in the sky, sleeping on furled wings, motionless. But he sleeps with one eye open, and watches. He will attack you midway in your climb up the line. He will rip you apart to get to your kidneys and spleen. He will gobble the eyes out of your head.”

“So I've been told by another, Chavo. Yes, I remember birds in legend eating the spleen and liver of a certain one forever.”

“I suppose that World-birds and World-gods eat the spleen, Papa Garamask, to bring them through their time of change. Here we require a different food. I climb.”

Chavo the amazing Oganta climber went up the longest and most dangerous climb, flowing like oil up the cliff. He disappeared and reappeared to Garamask four different times, following the contours of the cliffs, and then he seemed to achieve a real base. Soon the very thin line, one hundred meters of it, came down; and Garamask began the very tiring climb up it.

Halfway up he was arm and leg weary and sick, and he heard the sky-whistle. It was the wings of big Shasos powering toward him. Garamask wrapped his legs in the line, having achieved at that point a slope that supported him slightly, and waited the attack with fist, elbow, and skull knives flashing.

“Like Prometheus bound to the rock for the attack of the great birds!” he said. “And why did I never realize that it had to be a high rock in the sky he was bound to?”

Shasos had a wingspan of perhaps twenty meters, and a great head with sickle jaws. In actual body the bird was about the same size as Garamask.

Shasos was in fast, slashed Garamask deeply over the groin, and Garamask jagged the bird still more deeply in the back of the head. The line twisted with Garamask. On the second swoop Shasos got Garamask in the small of the back, and Garamask countered effectively again into the bird-head. Again, and Shasos gaped open Garamask's lower side, held there, had him now ripped open fore and aft; and perhaps he did eat somewhat of the spleen. But Garamask smote half through the head of the creature, and Shasos staggered in the air.

“I have you now,” Garamask reveled. “You die a-winging. But now you come the last time, and you come for the eyes. You'll gobble them out of my head, will you? ‘Do not let him do it to both of them or you will be at a disadvantage,’ the dead man Allyn told me. Have at me, chicken! It's the end of you.”

Shasos did slash Garamask over his eye, and something was hanging down the man's cheek. Whether it was a fold of flesh or the eye itself Garamask did not know. He had fist claws into the throat of Shasos, into the long stringy neck that was sinewed like a cable. He strained, and the sinews gave a little. Then they gave up completely. He wrung Shasos' neck like a chicken, for he was a chicken. And the big broken bird fell like a leaf toward the slate-gray clouds below.

“I'm ripped up pretty gapingly,” Garamask said, “but nothing is looping out of me. I was always a sound man in my entrails. It's up the weary climb again, and to find the fourth prey that is the mystery to me and was the death of Allyn.”

So Garamask completed the very tiring climb up the line. He was met by the oafish grinning face of Chavo. They were on top of Bior Mountain, the third mountain of Three-Mountain.

“I have a nice surprise for you,” Chavo boomed. “I will ready it for you while you rest.”

“I have two surprises for you,” said Garamask, “and I will have them ready in due time.”

You will do well to weaken the bridge after you have crossed it, and to keep your gaze fixed on the back of your head, the dead man Allyn had said. Chavo was busy with his surprise. Garamask weakened the bridge he had just crossed, the line he had climbed, gashing it with heel saber. He didn't cut it through. It would still, he believed, support his weight going down, if he had guessed wrong, and if he would not have to seek another way down. But the line would not now support a weight several times greater than Garamask's.

“I am soldering a device to a deep boulder,” Chavo said. “You from World do not understand rock-soldering, but you will not be able to get this device loose to fling it off the mountain; and you will not be able to silence it.”

“And I am doing a thing of my own,” said Garamask, and he had cut a small teleor tree with his heel saber and was trimming it with his fist claws. “We are on top of Bior Mountain, Chavo, and it is a small flat top; and there is nobody here but ourselves. Where is the fourth prey, the Bater-Jeno, called either the crag-ape or the frog-man?”

“Bater-Jeno is here,” said Chavo. “He sets his signature, as surely as Riksino set his own below.”

Garamask had hurriedly sliced a length of line from Chavo's pack as the sound began, a stronger thing than even the stench of Riksino. With the line, Garamask lashed the teleor pole to one of his elbow sabers that he had removed. Then it was over him like putrid waves, the gagging cacophony of hittur music and Oganta singing. It was a recorder that Chavo had soldered to the rock, but Garamask had a good long spear now.

“You will not be able to silence the playing, Papa Garamask,” Chavo chortled. “It will drive you bugs in your last moments. And Bater-Jeno is here. He is myself. Or he is yourself. Come and face me and we will find out which.”

Garamask knocked Chavo down with the butt-end of the teleor-tree spear. Chavo had not even noticed it. Then Garamask put the blade to the Oganta's chest, just below the throat armor.

“You have violated the weapon code,” Chavo complained.

“Not really, Chavo. I'll give up my edge and fight the fourth prey even, after we have talked. If I do go to my death now, I do not want to go fuzzy in my facts as Allyn did. Quick now, Chavo. Talk! Where is the person Ocras who killed Allyn? Is he really dead?”

“Dead? No, Papa Garamask, he is translated. Ocras (the hunger) has become Treorai, a noble Rogha. You have talked to this Treorai. It was he who ate the backbrains of your friend Allyn, and so was transformed.”

“Chavo, that hellish music and wailing will burst my brains! What wildness are you saying? The Oganta become Rogha? You are the same species?”

“Pop your head like a pippin, Papa Garamask, drive you bugs. We are the same species, the noble Rogha and the unnoble us. We turn into the Rogha, but now we can no longer turn into them. We have lost the ability to make the frog-leap, except under special stimulus.”

“Seventh Hell! It's the same noise they have down there. May I never fall so low. What is the frog-mystic, oaf? Talk.”

“The frog-leap, it is our transformation from Oganta to Rogha. What other creature, except the holy frog, changes from a form so unbelievable so suddenly? Strangers believe that we are two different species, as they would believe the tadpole and the frog were two different species. We worship the frog as the high sign of ourselves.”

“What went wrong, oaf? What happened to the transformations? What is the difficulty now? Fill it all in. Nice spear, isn't it?”

“Nice spear, Papa Garamask, but I cry foul. The difficulty — perhaps a cosmic difficulty. For one hundred equivalent years no Oganta has turned into a Rogha without special stimulus. We generate as Oganta, and we live out our lives as Oganta, and we are not able to maintain the high civilization of the Rogha. We have lost our adult form, and we try to regain it.”

“How, Chavo? What does the murder of Allyn have to do with this? How did the Oganta Ocras become the Rogha Treorai? What was his special stimulus?”

“To eat the back-brains of a Rogha will transform an Oganta into a Rogha, if both are strong and capable. We calculate that there is enough there to transform four Oganta. We have also discovered (Ocras discovered it in becoming Treorai) that eating the back-brains of certain fully-charged World-men will bring on this transformation in us — those of such World-men who might be able to stay with a mountain-hunt till the fourth prey.”

“Lie still, oaf. I'll spear you through. What now will happen to Treorai who was Ocras the murderer of Allyn?”

“What will happen to Chavo, the sun-fall murderer of Papa Garamask? Treorai's time is up, as mine will be after a like period. Treorai has had two equivalent years to grow in wisdom as a Rogha. This very week (he will not know the time) he will be set on and killed, and his back-brains eaten.”

“ ‘And to keep your gaze fixed on the back of your head,’ the dead-man Allyn told me,” Garamask mused. “But the Ocras-Treorai will not die so. I will finish the business up here, and then I will go down and arrest the fellow regularly for the murder.”

“And in place of one Rogha there will be four,” Chavo continued as though he had not heard Garamask. “In this way we will reestablish the Rogha and shorten our time of waiting. When there are again enough Rogha, they in their wisdom will be able to find what went wrong with the transformations; and they will find a less grotesque way to bring them about.

“And you yourself, Papa Garamask, do a good deed in your death this sun-fall. From your death there will spring four new Rogha.”

“You violate a code yourself, Chavo. Dying, or freshly dead, I would be good for you. And for four of you? I hear your three companions coming up the line now, so you think you have me fresh? Will the line hold, do you think, Chavo?”

“It will hold. Papa Garamask, you have not violated the code of the line also?”

“Lie still, oaf. Call it what you will. Oh, it will be close, and I will not slash it again. I stand by my bet. It frays, Chavo, it gives a little, and the highest one of them is so near the top! It gives more! It parts! It breaks! They have fallen, Chavo!”

The Oganta was sobbing and crying noisily on the ground for the death of his friends, and the deathly ineptitude of the recording seemed to give a fitting dirge. Garamask laughed with black amusement, withdrew the spear, unlashed the elbow saber from it and put it on himself again. He looked at the Oganta.

“Get up, Chavo. What is the name of the fourth prey again?”

“It is you, the crag-ape, Papa Garamask, for World-men do look funny to us, and we call you so. Or it is myself, the frog-man, if I can kill you here and now and eat and make the frog-leap. We fight, Papa Garamask, and I eat your back-brains! Hear my battle-cry on the recorder that you cannot turn off! Does it not twang beautifully?”

“Damnable eternal teenagers!” Garamask howled as they closed in bloody battle. “There is enmity between us from the beginning of the worlds! I'll break you down! I'll choke you to death with the strings of your own hittur.”

“Papa Garamask, you lie about frogs' size. I be a very big frog here very soon.”

They fought in the late day on the top of the needle in the sky, gnashing and knifing in their eschatological fury. And one of them would be dead by sun-fall.

The Skinny People Of Leptophlebo Street

 — and turned into Leptophlebo Street (it's always a scruffy sort of delight to come into it). It was a minor discovery and a sudden entrance, like going through a small and florid door into a whole new world, a world of only one street.

The chattering of the monkeys was what struck him first, and then the chattering of the people in a kindred tone: and then the absolute cleanliness of the place, and the pleasant bouquets of selected and superior smells. Close on that was a whole dazzle of details that would take days to assimilate.

The poverty of the street struck him last of all, and then it seemed a more pleasant poverty with some other name. It was picked-clean poverty, as if every speck of dust had been hand-gathered from between the cobblestones as something as valuable as lepto pepper or gold.

Canute Freeboard, adventurous investor and freebooter-at-large, had come to Leptophlebo Street for what money could be found there; but the street seemed bare of value. He had come looking for a man named Hiram Poorlode. Canute needed money, and that was the year that money was very tight. There were those who said that money might be got in Leptophlebo Street, but they all laughed when they said it.

“Could you tell me where I might find a man named Hiram Poorlode?” Canute asked a friendly-looking young fellow there.

“Kmee-fee-eee-eee-eee,” the young fellow said, and Canute saw that a mistake had been made. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I hadn't noticed that you were a monkey.”

The monkey nodded as if to say that it was quite all right, and he motioned for Canute to come along with him. They stopped in front of a man who was sitting cross-legged on the stones of the street. The man had a sign, Nuts, Wholesale and Retail: he had a pandanus leaf in front of him and on the leaf there were seven filbert-nuts and two almonds. The monkey pointed the man out to Canute and Canute to the man and he said “Knee-fee-eee-eee-eee.” Then he skittered away.

“Yes, I am Hiram Poorlode,” the nut-man said. “Thank you, Hoxie.” He spoke the latter to the skittering monkey.

“Get your clothes rewoven, sir. Get your clothes rewoven,” a young boy chanted at Canute. “My father reweaves clothes free. Turn those baggy clothes into trim fit real fast.”

“My clothes aren't baggy,” Canute said.

“Boy, they sure will be baggy in a little while,” the boy said. “Better get it done now.”

“Get your teeth cleaned sir!” another young boy chanted at Canute. “My father cleans teeth excellent free.”

“Is he your son?” Canute asked the street-sitting nut-merchant Hiram Poorlode.

“Oh no. This one is Marquis Shortribs,” Hiram introduced. “His father is Royal Shortribs who is a tycoon in teeth. And I am Hiram Poorlode, nut-merchant, investor, moneylender. Sit down on the cobbles, sir, and talk to me. You are the only customer in my shop at the moment so I can give you my full time.”

“I am Canute Freeboard, a stranger in this country and in this town. I expressed strong interest in obtaining investment money. The man to whom I had introduction must have been a humorist and he played a lopsided joke on me. Ah, how is the nut business?”

“It hasn't been a bad morning,” Hiram said. “I received twelve filbert-nuts on consignment this morning and I have already sold five of them. With my mark-up, this gives me enough equity in filberts that I can eat one myself and still have enough cash on hand to cover those sold. This is known as eating free and it is the first rule of economic independence. As to the almond nuts, I own them outright. I started the day with five of them and I have sold three for cash. This is the best sales record that I can remember, up to this time of day, for almonds. I also own the pandanus leaf. That being so, I am almost insulated against misfortune. If I sell nothing for the rest of the day it will still not be a complete catastrophe.”

“Haircut, sir? Haircut, sir?” a small boy cried in set-chant. “My father does supreme haircutting and head-grooming free.”

“No, I don't believe so, boy,” Canute mumbled. “Is he your son, Mr. Poorlode?”

“Oh no. This is Crispin Halfgram the son of Claude Halfgram the biggest man in hair and heads in Leptophlebo Street. Some of the finest garments here are woven by his wife Rita from the hair that Claude collects in his studio. You are looking for investment money? I am the most promiscuous money-lender in Leptophlebo Street. How much do you need?”

Hiram Poorlode, as did all the skinny people of Leptophlebo Street, wore a very large, flat, wide-brimmed hat that was crawling all over with rambling greenery. Canute now saw that what Hiram really wore on top of his head was a growing vegetable and fruit and grain garden. And all those garden-hats were tilted to catch all the sun possible.

“I'm afraid that we're not thinking on the same scale,” Canute said dourly. “I need eighty-five thousand dollars for an opportune deal, such a deal as will come only once in my life. I need the sum at no more than seven percent interest and I need it today. Yes, my acquaintance in this city must be a humorist.”

“Here are the shoes back again, Mr. Poorlode,” a small boy said, and he set a good-looking pair of smooth shoes down beside Hiram. “He will not need them again for two hours, but he believed that Mr. Shortribs may want them before that.”

“Thank you, Piet,” Hiram said, and the boy skipped off. “That is Piet,” Hiram told Canute, “the son of Jan Thingruel who gathers more astatic grain out of cracks than does anyone else on the Street. We have but one pair of shoes here, and whatever person goes to make a prestigious visit will wear the shoes. They fit all persons in the street, since Claude Halfgram had the final joints of four of the toes removed last year. They are good shoes and we take excellent care of them. I am shoe custodian this week.” Hiram Poorlode lifted up one of the flagstones of the street and put the shoes down into a shoe-hole that was underneath it.

“I have the money by me now,” Hiram said then. “Nothing is easier than eighty-five thousand dollars in gold. And, with me, a man's face is his security. Give me half an hour to consider you for I am a cautious man. Spend the time pleasantly: visit and observe our rather odd Leptophlebo Street here. Enjoy yourself, sir, and be assured that your case is under active consideration. I can tell a lot about a man by watching how he reacts to Leptophlebo Street.”

“All right,” Canute said. “I'd given up hope of raising the money anyhow. Money is tight this season. Ah but it was a sweet, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Yes, it's an odd little street here. How much do you sell the filberts for?”

“Three for a mill. Oh, it's the standard coin to the Street. One tenth of a cent.”

One might as well enjoy the drollery. Really, Canute had never seen anything quite like Leptophlebo Street; never such skinny monkeys or such skinny people. The monkeys couldn't talk properly. There's an old saying that whenever monkeys do talk there's some monkey-business going on. Well, there was plenty of it going on here, but all that the monkeys could say was “Khlee-fee-eee-eee-eee.” The monkeys wrote notes on little pieces of paper and gave them to the merchants of the Street. They brought in fruit and they traded it or sold it. From the merchants they bought a few nuts that were out-of-season in the woods, bought them for clay coins or in trade for their in-season fruits or nuts. The people asked the monkeys about their families and about the situation in the woods, and the monkeys wrote the answers on little pieces of paper.

“The monkeys are so smart,” Canute said, “that it seems as if they could talk. As long as you are doing business with them anyhow you could teach them speech.”

“People of the monkey caste are not allowed to talk,” Effie Poorlode said (she was the wife of Hiram the nut-merchant). “Everyone has his niche in the world, and the monkeys don't have talking niches. And it would be no profit to us to teach them speech. We have plenty of time to wait for them to write out their notes, and we do make a good profit on the paper that they write them on.”

The people of Leptophlebo Street were the skinniest folks that Canute had ever seen. How the ribs stood out on them! Two ribby young ladies were in a booth down the street.

“What? Do you sell the paper to the monkeys?” Canute asked Effie Poorlode.

“Get your teeth cleaned free, sir!” the boy Marquis Shortribs was soliciting a passer-by. “My father does excellent tooth-cleaning free.” But the passer-by continued on.

“If the tooth-cleaning is free, and if there are no customers anyhow, then where is the profit?” Canute asked.

“Oh, there will always be customers,” Effie told him. “Suppose that ten thousand persons go by and do not avail themselves on this service. But then the very next person might stop at the Shortribs' booth, and you can see how that would make all the waiting and solicitations worthwhile. As to your question, no, we don't sell the pieces of paper to the monkeys. The monkeys make the paper in the woods, and they make the ink too. They write their notes on the paper and they give them to us. You can see that the profit will be enormous. If we get only eight or ten of these little pieces of paper a day look how they will count up. We dissolve the ink off the paper, and when we have a thousand pounds of the ink we can sell it to ink-bottlers or pen-makers of the city.”

“How long will it take to accumulate a thousand pounds?” Canute asked.

“Oh, it would probably take us a thousand years, but what's time so long as we keep busy? And we find all sorts of uses for the little pieces of paper. I tell you that there is money in paper; there is money in everything.”

“How much money is there in everything, Mrs. Poorlode?” Canute questioned.

“Yesterday my husband and I cleared one cent and three mills from all our businesses,” Effie answered. “And we also achieved equities in three other mills. This is better than most of our days, but all our days are good. Oh the wealth does accumulate!”

Mrs. Poorlode was like the valiant woman in scripture as she stood proud and skinny, with her garden on top of her head and with her hands busy leaching nut-shells in a bowl.

“This processes the nut-shells for industrial use,” she said, “and we have the Nut-Shell Bitter Tea left over to drink. It makes the bones glossy. My husband gives a rebate to every purchaser of one of our nuts if he returns the shell after he has eaten the meat out of it. We are blessed to live on a street that has so many business opportunities.”

There was nothing very interesting about the gaunt ribcage of Effie Poorlode.

“Yes,” she said, reading the thoughts of Canute Freeboard, “the townsmen lust after our ribs and after our ossuary generally. There is nothing wrapped up about us. There are some persons in the town with so much flesh grown onto their bones that their fundamental persons and passions are buried away and their real impact is never felt. Luckily that is not so with the people of Leptophlebo Street.”

“How is the street kept so clean and swept?” Canute asked.

“Brooms with both astatic and static bristles are the secret,” Effie told him. “Organic dust clings to the static bristles, and the non-organic dust is swept clean into gathering vessels by the astatic bristles. Then we pass the brushes over degaussing jets that release the organic particles, and we make soup from them. And the non-organic dust is separated into flammable and inflammable piles.”

“They mean the same thing,” Canute said.

“Not on Leptophlebo Street they don't,” Effie insisted. “So we make briquettes to burn as fuel out of the one sort. And we make bricks and flagstones and face-stones for buildings out of the other sort. So we have our soup and our fuel and our bricks, and we keep the street clean all the time.”

A medium-sized bird, probably a grackle, came down onto the rim of the garden-containing hat that Effie carried balanced on her head. And the bird was stuck fast. Canute saw that the edge of the hat was bird-limed to catch anything that landed there.

“I will wait,” Effie said. “The pot wants a bird, but the pot must wait also. These grackle-birds attract one another for a while. This is not one of our own grackles that I know; it's one of the newly-arrived grackles from the countryside. They will not be wary of one bird stuck there, nor of two birds stuck. They will not be wary of less than three stuck birds. I will be patient and I will have three grackles for food and for by-products. Will you not stay with us this evening and have a look at our nightlife on Leptophlebo Street?”

“I don't know what I will do,” Canute said. “I haven't comprehended it all yet.”

“Lose weight free in seven minutes surgery, sir,” a small boy chanted. “My father does good free work. He is one good loser.”

“No, not right now, boy,” Canute said.

“Have your appendix out, sir? Have your appendix out?” another small boy was putting the shill on. “My father performs faithful appendectomies free.”

“No, not right now,” Canute said.

“This boy is Pat Thingruel, the brother of Piet and the son of Jan Thingruel,” Effie told Canute. “The father is as stylish a free appendectomist as you will find anywhere.”

“I do not understand how all the people of Leptophlebo Street can work for free,” Canute said. “How do they profit by it?”

A second curious grackle-bird came down and got itself squawkishly stuck in the bird-lime of the edging of Effie's garden-hat.

“Oh, there's lots of profit!” Effie exclaimed. “A vermiform appendix, especially when inflamed, is a veritable storehouse of richness. Master microchemists like ourselves can manufacture all sorts of useful things from such rich material. And the teeth that Royal Shortribs cleans, do you realize just how super-organic are the deposits taken from teeth? Do you know how many things can be woven and fabricated from the hair that Claude Halfgram cuts? Garments, rugs, tents, seines, modish gowns for the modish ladies in the town. Almost solid profit. And the head-grooming that he does, do you know that there are some very lively products to be had from that? Our greatest industry, though, is the night soil that we gather from the cooperative of people of the town. And I will tell you something else if you will promise not to tell the monkeys.”

“No, I won't breathe a word of your secret to the monkeys,” Canute promised.

“We pay the monkeys only half as much per equal weight for their night soil as we pay the people in the town. And the monkeys bring theirs to us; we don't have to go and get it. Ah, there is profit everywhere you look, in the stones, in the air, in the very rain. What a money-harvest we do have! Mills and mills and cents and cents, and at the end of a week we may even have another nickel for our hard work.”

“It's a wonder you don't gather belly-button fuzz and process it for profit,” Canute laughed.

“Of course we do,” Effie cried. “We gather more than a pound a year of it from the people of the town, and this in spite of the fact that many of the burghers will not cooperate with us and say that the whole thing is silly. But there are a few friendly people in town who wear wool. The woolies are the best for the fuzz. And it can be made into the softest of all sheens. Oh do stay over and have a look at our nightlife tonight, Mr. Freeboard! Really, it's wonderful the times that we do have.”

A third grackle came and stuck itself in the bird-lime on Effie's head-garden. And then was heard ‘Sorrow in Three Voices by Grackles’: but only those three would be stuck there. Others would veer away from the three birds in trouble.

But a fourth bird did come, a bird carrying a long piece of broken looking-glass in its beak. It was too wise to get caught in the bird-lime, but it was watched with avid eyes. Sometime it would drop that piece of silvered glass, and some person would rush in and catch it before it hit the ground. There's profit to be had from old mirror glass.

A man with affluent gestures arrived at Hiram Poorlode's booth in a sudden hurry. He had the sharp, lean, craggy face of a bird of prey. He was taut and of a restless thinness in every part. Why, he was none other than the Lean Eagle from Lean Eagle Street!

“Hiram, I'm caught short,” said that opulent man who wore diamonds on every finger. “I have to cover. I'm overextended. It will be only for a few days. I need two and a quarter million dollars and I need it now. I have my dray here.”

But the Lean Eagle was the highest-flying and the most rapacious money-man ever. Why should he come to Leptophlebo Street to borrow?

“With me, a man's face is his security,” Hiram Poorlode said, “and I know your face, Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof. A man of such a name and reputation is security itself.”

Hiram removed three of the largest flagstones from the street on which he had been sitting. He passed the heavy bars of gold up to the nine lackeys who served Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof. It took a fair number of gold bars to amount to two and one quarter million dollars.

“There has to be an explanation to this!” Canute Freeboard howled out loud. “Oh, but by all the equivocating things that be, there can't be any explanation to it!”

When the lackeys had loaded all the gold bars onto the dray, Mr. Schlemel kurz Karof signed a note and gave it to Hiram Poorlode. Then that opulent man went away with his dray and his lackeys, and Hiram Poorlode replaced the three flagstones in the street.

Canute Freeboard hummed a little tune to himself. There were some notes missing from that tune. “How long did it take you and your husband, at a nickel a week, to get to a position where you could make instant loans of two and a quarter million dollars and still have lots more gold glittering in your gold-hole under the street?” Canute asked Effie.

“It sure did take a long time,” she said. “There just aren't any short-cuts.” Effie took from her husband the note that Schlemel kurz Karof, the Lean Eagle, had given him. She dissolved the ink off it and put it in the ink accumulation. And she put the de-inked paper with the paper accumulation.

“How will you collect when the writing is dissolved off the note for the ink?” Canute asked Hiram.

“Ah, a man's face is his security to me,” Hiram said. “He will pay me back. And if he does not, what is the difference? In time I will accumulate the amount again, and I have lots of time.”

“Hey, is the handsome man going to stay around for the nightlife this evening?” two pretty young skinny ladies asked. “We sure do have a lot of fun at nightlife fiesta.”

“These nice young ladies are Regina and Maharana Shortribs,” Effie Poorlode introduced them. “I believe that a good-looking you man like you could have a lot of fun just skylarking with them at nightlife, Canute.”

“You know what we do for the climax of a nightlife go-it-all?” Maharana asked. Oh, the skin and bones of that young girl! They'd send shivers of delight through anyone.

But sometimes one must put second things first.

“Ah, about that loan,” Canute spoke to Hiram. “Oh by the swept cobbles of Leptophlebo Street, there has got to be an explanation to this! About that loan, Mr. Poorlode?”

“Oh, certainly,” Hiram said. “I've been observing you and I now have complete confidence in you. I'll lend you the money. Eighty-five thousand dollars, was it not? Do you want it in gold or in certified cash warrants?”

“In gold, in gold. Oh, what a beautiful, hard-scrabble, skinny street this is!” Canute rejoiced. “How have you done it? How have you accumulated millions of dollars in gold on a nickel a week?”

“In bad weeks we don't make near that much,” Effie Poorlode said.

“Ah, but where does the gold come from?” Canute pursued the matter.

“Oh, there's several legends about the origin of the gold,” Hiram told him. “One story is that it's rabbit gold and that it reproduces itself, that it all comes from two nuggets that got together under the flagstones.”

“But there is raw nugget gold there. There is bar gold and ingot gold. And there is coined gold of various coinages,” Canute protested. Hiram had already removed the stones that covered the gold in the street.

“Yes,” Hiram agreed, “several pair of different forms of rabbit gold would be required, wouldn't they? Then there's the story that it's all monkey gold. The monkeys find it and refine it in the woods. Then they give it to us noble burghers of the Street. They are afraid to keep it. It is said that they did keep it when they were men, and that that's what made monkeys out of them. You don't believe that entirely? Oh, I see that Hoxie has been monkey-facing my act behind my back.” And Hoxie had been doing that. But had he been saying ‘Do not believe all of it’ with his monkey-facing, or had he been saying ‘Do not believe any of it’?

“The third legend is that it is all pound-of-flesh gold,” Hiram said. “This legend states that we sell pounds of flesh for the yearly bashes of the Extortioners Guild and the Hatchet-Makers Guild and especially for that dread secret society Glomerule; and that we receive our gold for the pounds of flesh. Ah, there it is, Canute, all ready for you to take it: eighty-five thousand dollars worth of gold. It's quite a bit over a hundred pounds. The young ladies will help you carry it.”

“Which of the three legends is true, Hiram?” Canute asked softly.

“Oh, they're all a little bit true, but all together they would only account for only a fraction of our gold.”

“What accounts for the rest?”

“How can we tell you that? It's a secret. We know you are not so base a person as to want us to tell you the answer. You will have the pleasure of guessing it as the years go by, but we will not tell it to you. Ah, your gold is ready for you, Canute.”

“We know you are not such a fink-dink as would like to be told,” Effie said. “It took the last one about a thousand years to guess it, and you want to miss all that fun?”

“Who was the last one to guess it?” Canute asked.

“Me,” said Hiram.

“We know you are not such a cheap-creep as would listen even if someone whispered the answer to you,” Maharana Shortribs said. “We know you are better than that. My sister and I will help you carry the gold.”

“You will not tell me where it comes from,” Canute mused. “And you offer it to me so freely that there has to be a catch to it somewhere. What is the catch, Hiram? There's a hook in the bait, isn't there? It's logical that there would be a hook.”

“Oh sure, but it's so thin a hook that you'll hardly notice it. And believe me, the hook isn't a logical one.”

“Hardly notice it, huh? That may be like saying that a knife is so thin that you'll hardly notice it when it goes in between your fifth and sixth ribs,” Canute said doubtfully.

“Yes, exactly like,” Effie Poorlode chimed in. “How did you know about the cut between the fifth and sixth ribs, Canute? It isn't one of the major cuts.”

“Lose weight free in seven minute process,” a little boy chanted at Canute. “My father is king of all the weight-takers-off in Leptophlebo Street.”

“Not right now,” Canute said.

“Get your clothes rewoven free,” another little boy chanted. “My father reweaves baggy too-big clothes for slim-trim limb.”

“Not right now,” Canute said. “Does the hook hurt, Hiram?”

“Only a little bit. Only for a minute. Take the gold, Canute, and go close your deal. Then come back here for certain entertainments and kindnesses that we will have scheduled for you. You'll really like them. And when you have experienced them, and the mark that goes with them, then you will be one of us and you may enjoy Leptophlebo Street for as often as you like and for as long as you like. And you won't even notice the hook when it goes in.”

“And afterwards? When I do notice it?”

“I told you that it hurts only a little bit, and for only a little while. We do want you to be one of us. We want you sincerely.”

Canute Freeboard looked up and down the crooked length of Leptophlebo Street.

“Choose us, join with us,” said that skinny young lady Regina Shortribs. “Have fun with us. And come back often.” And Canute looked at the wonderfully bony form of Regina.

He looked at Hiram Poorlode's sign which read Nuts, Wholesale and Retail. He looked at the three sad grackle-birds that were stuck to the top-of-the-head garden of Effie Poorlode, and at that other unstuck grackle that was flying around with a piece of looking-glass in its beak. He looked at Highfellow, Redbone, Roxie, and Hoxie, the solemn monkeys of the street.

Hoxie wrote a note and gave it to Canute. “Join with us. Stay with us. We like you,” the note read. Effie Poorlode took the note from Canute to dissolve the ink off it. A tear ran down Canute's face for he was genuinely moved by the friendship of the monkeys. The little boy Crispin Halfgram raced in and caught the falling tear in a special little cup before it hit the street.

“My mother can use it,” Crispin said. “Each teardrop is a storehouse of balanced chemicals. The special salinity is quite prized.”

“Analyze your dreams, analyze your dreams!” a little boy of the street was making a pitch. “My father makes fine dream analyses free. Lie down on the cobbles.”

“How can your father make a living by analyzing dreams free?” Canute asked.

“Residuals,” the little boy said. “He gets rich on the residuals.”

“Choose us, join us,” said that skinny young lady Maharana Shortribs. “Have fiesta with us and come back all the time. Hey, do you know what we do for the climax of one of our nightlife go-it-alls?” Canute looked at the wonderfully bony throat of Maharana.

“I make my choice,” he announced. “I swallow that bait, hook and all. I become a partisan of this street.” (Even the lop-eared dogs of the place raised their ears and snouts in joy.) “I take the loan now in cash.” (The people began to cheer.) “I will go and seize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” (Folks began to laugh and to tune musical instruments.) “And then I will come back here for the entertainments and kindnesses and the nightlife.” (The monkeys were clapping their hands.)

There was real welcome in the wind, and somewhere near there was the joyful whetting of knives. Canute and the Shortribs sisters picked up the gold bars and went with them and closed the deal. So Canute nailed down the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but he knew that it was small stuff compared to the mysterious opportunity of Leptophlebo Street itself.

They came back to Leptophlebo Street, and a ‘Gala and Welcome’ banner was stretched clear across the street. So it was quite impossible to decline any of the activities. And who would want to? The trumpet was blowing a great blast, and the other instruments were joining in.

Canute was having his teeth cleaned, his head groomed, his appendix removed, his dreams analyzed, some other pleasant surgery being done to him, and his clothes rewoven all at one time. This was life at its most full, and the dazzle and confusion were to be expected.

“This is the first appendectomy since my father got his knife sharpened,” Pat Thingruel sang happily in Canute's ear. “Oh, you are lucky! Listen now as I join the rowdy-dow band for you. I play eighth flute.”

“And this is the first free seven minute surgery since my father got his knives sharpened,” another little boy was chirruping. “Listen when I join the band. I play fifth drum.” Canute couldn't remember what the free seven minute surgery was about but it had to be good. He heard the eighth flute and the fifth drum join the band and it was rapturous music. His dreams were being analyzed right on the glittering edge of his senses and he could only guess what rich residuals they would have. And a written note was placed shyly before his eyes.

“Listen now as I join the rang-dang band,” it read in the handwriting of the monkey Hoxie. “I play third bagpipe.” Canute passed the note to Effie Poorlode for processing and salvaging. Everything that was done on Leptophlebo Street contributed to the fortune of that famous place. With joy Canute heard the third bagpipe join the rang-dang band. He was in glowing confusion as he recovered from his surgeries (there had been several of them) and his cleanings and groomings and reweavings and other things. Oh it all did make him feel light and lightheaded and slick-fit and trim-limbed and happy!

“Hurry up and heal up,” Regina Shortribs was talking into his ear. “Heal real fast. Drink this cup of Nut-Shell Bitter Tea. It's medicinal, and it also makes the bones glossy. Then we will go and honkey-tonk.”

“You know what we do for the climax of our nightlife go-it-alls?” Maharana Shortribs asked once more.

“No, but I will like it,” Canute gloated happily. He was feeling almost healed now. In another minute he would be healed completely. “What do you do for climax, Maharana?”

“Eat bowls of real organic soup,” the skinny girl breathed the delightful information. She made it sound wonderful, and of course it was. But Canute was watching the way that her skinny throat moved when she spoke. It was sheer witchery of ligament and sinew.

As Canute rose to his feet with a little help, the band played on with flutes and drums and bagpipes and all the wonderful and skinny-sounding instruments. It was certainly fine just to be there between the two beautiful and meager Shortribs girls.

“I have swallowed the hook without noticing it,” Canute said, “and it didn't hurt a bit. I wonder what distinguishing mark has been placed upon me? And my rewoven clothes fit me so trim! How is it possible that anything should be so trim? I feel wonderful and light. I wonder how I look?”

“Bird, bird!” Maharana cried, and she clapped her hands. “Bring the looking glass!”

“Oh gee, now it comes,” Effie Poorlode said apprehensively.

“Remember that even the Lean Eagle was known as the Fat Eagle before he trafficked here,” said Regina.

“And remember that it only hurts a little bit and for a little while,” said Hiram.

“No man can have everything, but on Leptophlebo Street he sure can come close,” Canute gloated. “Now let's just see whether I look as fine as I feel.”

The grackle-bird brought the piece of looking-glass to him. And Canute took it.

He looked at his image in it.

He cried out in shock!

His face cracked in a spasm of agony. And the looking glass shattered into tinkling slivers that fell, and were caught before reaching the street, by a small boy who would have profitable salvage from them.

But it hadn't been Canute in that mirror. It had been a horrifying skull-and-bone thing. That slick seven minute free surgery had removed more than a hundred pounds of his flesh by a hundred cuts, one of them between the fifth and sixth ribs.

There was a ghastly screaming going on and on.

It hadn't been Canute in the glass. And it couldn't be him now. It was a horrifying devil. It was a starved and demented ghoul. It was a malodorous ghost. It was a misbegotten bony abomination. It was — 

It was one of the skinny people of Leptophlebo Street. It was himself, of course: and the screaming voice was his own.

Heavy tears were running down Canute's face

(“It only hurts for a little bit and for a little while,” Hiram was saying again.)

in outrageous streams

(“You'll learn to like yourself this way,” Maharana was saying. “We like you this way.”)

and falling

(“But how could you become one of us if you didn't become one of us?” Effie was chiding.)

to be caught in a special cup by Crispin Halfgram

(“The special salinity is quite prized,” he was saying.)

before they hit the Street.

Great Tom Fool

or The Conundrum of the Calais Customhouse Coffers

“Project ‘Shake the Spheres,’ is it?” Dude asked in his reptilian and bumptious voice. He was sensitive to the stigma of being an American-made machine, and he often reacted arrogantly. “I always liked ‘Shake the Cubes’ better. Well, a lot can be done if the corners of the cubes are a bit rounded, and as I am project director…”

“You're droll, Dude,” said Shepherd O'Shire, the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., “but you'll not be put in charge of any project, not ever again. We've learned better than that. You will be a working computer on this project, no more than that. And you will see to it that your two friends, the British and the French machines, will put their tomfoolery aside and work with you with quiet dedication on this job.”

“I smell money connected with this case,” Dude uttered.

“No, there will not be any money at all connected with it,” Shepherd countered. “There is no appropriation at all.”

“A preemptive séance is the only way to get the information out of the dead people,” Lavender Brodie interrupted. (Her name, Brodie, signifies a “precipice”; did you know that?) “Dead people are at a disadvantage anyhow. Put pressure on them, I say. Have them by the ears!”

“I have evidence, in my storage brain downstairs, that there is money connected with this case,” Dude insisted, “and I'm not talking about anything as petty as an appropriation.”

Dude, a clown to his last compensating planetary gear, was present in his “riant giant” mobile form. In this mobile he didn't carry a lot of brains around with him, but he did have quick access to his storage brain.

“And, Lavender,” the machine Dude went on, “a ‘séance’ is only a sitting down, and I have whipped that problem. I can do it now, in this my favorite extension. The giant dragon tail will snap off to let me sit down. I love myself when I solve insoluble problems like that.”

Dude was the only nonhuman member of that learned society, Happy Braindom Ltd., but he had many nonhuman guests at its sessions.

“And yet he's a bit too human for comfort,” Arsene Gopherwood often stated it, “especially when he's in that damned ‘laughing giant-dragon’ costume.”

The human membership of Happy Braindom Ltd. was Shepherd O'Shire, Lavender Brodie, Emery Briton, Byron Verre, and Arsene Gopherwood.

“This is a serious project, Dude,” Shepherd said nervously. “I repeat that there must be no tomfoolery.”

“And yet ‘Tom Fool’ is the contingent name of the person we are investigating.” Dude smiled his meter-long smile. “ ‘Tom Fool and his Polylogues’ will be the title of the investigation.”

“I prefer ‘The Conundrum of the Calais Customhouse Coffers’ for a title,” uttered the French machine Dingo. He had just arrived in his extension of a French Navvy in a striped sweater and a small artist's mustache and beret. “Yes, didn't I get here quickly though! We French are always so prompt. I can aid you all immeasurably on this project. And remember that by ‘Coded Information Storage Time’ I am only three minutes from my backup brain in France.”

“Where's Toff?” Lavender asked. “He always gives a project class. You other two machines only give it performance. I always like class best.”

“He's somewhere near,” Dude uttered. “He's trying to calculate just how late would be properly late in this case. He may be tapping his storage brain in London for some good entry lines.”

“ ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,’ ” Toff intoned as he entered with a jaunty actor's step — 

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

This Shakespeare, this great Toft yet, “hardy” both,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Then Toff fell flat on his face, a planned maneuver. Did you know that the English have their own humor, very subtle? Toff had arrived in his Noël Coward extension. He was Noël to the death, just as he is today. You know that Noël didn't stop wrinkling when he died.

“We work very fast here, kids,” Lavender said. “I am sure that the best format for this will be the séance, and I believe that we had better get the first séance started.”

“Gracious lady, there is no such thing as a workable séance,” the English machine Toff said with clipped finality.

“Listen, you limey junkie, I've been to plenty of séances that worked.”

“There is, however, the ‘deep psychic scan’ which comes through as a ghostly sort of apparition, very like a séance figure in appearance,” Toff admitted. “We are experts on these things. We go to our storage brains for them, and the storage brains produce the ‘scans’ from their bottomless accumulations of data. The psychic scans appear like threads of smoke. They hover, they thicken, they coalesce. And then they speak like séance evocations.”

“Let us not be too pompous about this,” the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., Shepherd O'Shire, instructed them. “A quick-hitting sortie will do us better than a ponderous siege of the problem. All we intend to do is answer all the unanswered questions about old Shakespeare, to clear up all the clouds that have obscured his identity and authorship, to define his significance and depth, and to duplicate his effect if that is possible. Let us go into the lounge and be at our ease now, and we will lay out whatever data we have to consider.”

“Yes, yes, at once.” Dude gawked out of his wide, green-leather dragon mouth. “And these thirteen gentlemen and nine ladies here will also be present for our discussions. In a real way it is they who are motivating the discussions.”

“What? Why? Who are these people?” Shepherd demanded. “Whence did they spring? From under what rocks?”

“I know most of these thirteen gentlemen and nine ladies,” Arsene Gopherwood said, “and I'd recognize them as a type even if I didn't know them individually. They are what is known as publishers' representatives or pub-reps, and they all walk with a canted list because of the weight of the checkbooks they carry.”

“But this is all wrong,” spoke Emery Briton. “Somebody has gulled these bright-eyed people into coming here under a misunderstanding. Don't they know that Computer Romances are about on a par with Nurse Romances? Such things turned out by machines are steady, perhaps, but they are not earth shakers, and they are not in short supply.”

“Gentlemen, ladies, members of Happy Braindom Ltd., do come in and be seated,” Dude uttered in honeyed tones. And then he spoke in a lower tone to the Happy Braindom people only: “Play along with us, fellows. There really is big money connected with this. Look impressed when we refer to the ‘Treasure Chest’ that has already been found and exploited so rewardingly for these four centuries. Look triply impressed when we refer to ‘the other treasure chest,’ three times as large as the first, ten times as heavily laden, a hundred times as wonderful.”

“Sure, we'll play along with you three contraptions,” Proctor Shepherd said. “For about ten minutes we'll play along with you. Now how about letting us see the ‘deep psychic scan’ of Shakespeare himself, the projected data that will look like an attending ghost. We'll put William on the stand, as it were, and question him in depth. If he balks, then we'll turn Lavender loose on him. If he can't answer the questions about himself, then who can answer them?”

They were all seated in the lounge now. This was in the Old Drapers Guild Hall in East Lodestone, which is quite close to London, to Calais, to the Azores, and also to the Americas. Dude, after snapping off his dragon tail, was the last of them to sit down.

“The difficulty, of course, is that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare,” that British machine Toff uttered. “That is to say that the plays and most of the poems were written at least eighty years before they were discovered in an old trunk by the historical Shakespeare.”

“Why do you say this?” the pub-rep Agnes Wankowitz asked.

“The plays nowhere mention America, tobacco, coffee, or tea, things that were having rather conspicuous and exciting reigns during the time of the historical Shakespeare,” Dude said. “But, eighty years earlier, the latter three had not been known at all, and the first of them, the New World, was still referred to as That Spanish Hoax by the English-speaking world. Potatoes likewise are not mentioned in the plays nor known in their time, but eighty years later everybody was eating that exciting new food, potatoes.”

“And the pronunciation is the real giveaway,” the machine Toff said. “Historical pronunciations can be deduced by the rhymes of the times. In the plays we find hither rhyming with weather, eats rhyming with gets, eat rhyming with great, ear rhyming with hair, have rhyming with grave, love rhyming with prove and with move and with Jove (all were likely pronounced as we pronounce Jove today). We find propose rhyming with lose, gone rhyming with stone and also with moan, swear rhyming with were, tongue rhyming with wrong, gone rhyming with alone, granting rhyming with wanting. Ah, that's all the instances that I have with me right now.”

“Do you have other instances somewhere else?” asked a pub-rep named Donald Dranker, a top negotiator.

“Yes, I have about five hundred other instances in my storage-brain in London,” Toff uttered. “But the point is that none of these rhymes rang true at the time when the historical Shakespeare burst upon the scene like a funky comet; and all of them would have rhymed true eighty or a hundred years earlier. Leaving the Shakespearean corpus aside, the documented sound changes of the English language in the sixteenth century are clear enough. It is only the displaced Shakespearean evidence that ever confused the history. And one play, Henry the Eighth, has to be pulled out. It isn't a part of the original Shakespearean corpus. It really did appear as a new thing eighty years after the others. Oh, it's long been known that there was something very fishy about the accepted time setting of the plays.”

“I am almost convinced,” said the pub-rep named Stanley Klumpstone.

“Let's have the first apparition!” cried Lavender Brodie of the Happy Braindom bunch. “Put him in the witness box and put the screws to him!”

Crackling lightning and obscure thunder! The iron hinges of time groaning as they swing open! Three callow young machines appraising what effect their devices were having on the people!

And then a personable and intelligent looking, though somewhat harried, man was in their midst there in the Happy Braindom Lounge.

Yes, he was the historical Shakespeare, though his nose was more bumpy and his face more of a mug than is shown in the accepted portraits. Whether he was a deep psychic scan or a called-up ghost was a matter of definition.

“Though I have admired you within reason, yet I've always wanted to put you under the power of my hands and tongue to see whether you couldn't be shaped into something better,” Lavender declared to the apparition. “Now I will just follow my own peculiar line of questioning and see whether — ”

“ 'Twill do you no good, Dame Lavender,” the apparition spoke. “I am not here consciously.” (But a twinkle in its eye showed that it lied a little.) “I am not such a thing as could be conscious. I am — what is it that those droll machines that extracted me call me? — I am a deep psychic scan of all existing and extrapolative data of one William Shakespeare. Now let me say my say and do not interrupt me.”

Oh, they'd interrupt him, of course, all of them. “I smell concatenated trickery here,” Lavender sputtered, and other people sensed other irregularities. But here are the words of the apparition as he followed his preemptive data while at the same time rolling with and responding to the interruptions.

“I am William the son of John the glovemaker of Stratford in Warwickshire. But at the same time I am Tom. I am, I believe, the second focus of the ellipse that is the Tom Manifestation, for it was I who obtained the masterworks of that manifestation (or something between one-fifth and one-sixth of them) and made them public. I have been called Tom Rymer, Tom the Piper's Son (my father John did play the pipes better than any other man in Stratford), and Tom Fool. And indeed I have been all of these. I believe there were about eighty years between the two foci, between Giant Tom and my corporeal self.

“Do I call myself an upstart? Somebody asks me the question. Aye, I do. I was more than an upstart. I was an upsurge, an upswarm. I knew my own limits (they were not low), but I let no one else know them.

“Who was Tom Fool, you ask, and how did I come to possess one of his treasure chests? I believe that Tom Fool was not one but several men, that he was really Tom Foule or Tom Crowd. Several powerful and talented men, contemporaries and acquaintances, but too different to be friends or allies, were somehow joined in an amazing tomfoolery.

“The only trait or talent that these several powerful men had in common was an unusually masterful way of writing in the Latin and the English languages. But their collaborations in the tomfoolery were likely involuntary and posthumous. The semi-secret, small-audience masterworks of all these were somehow collected by a man of comprehensive taste (he may even have been the last surviving of those powerful Toms) and hidden away, from reaching English hands, in the customhouse at Calais. They were deposited there in a greater and a lesser chest. It was the lesser chest that I was able to obtain.

“But get this straight: Those Masterworks were not always the worse for passing through my hands. I knew how ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,… To… add another hue unto the rainbow,’ as 'tis writ in lines of my own that I added to one of the masterworks, lines that are somehow misquoted in your day, so I'm told.

“And please note one other thing. The boards-play Henry the Eighth was not from the chest. It was written half by me and half by a friend of mine. We wished to test our own powers against those of the mysterious writer or writers of the masterworks from the chest, against the powers of Great Tom Fool. And we did not disgrace ourselves in the test.

“No, I cannot explain more than I know. The treasure chests had been signed into the customhouse of Calais under the title ‘Tom Fool — His Polylogues.’ I believe that it was so titled more in humor than in ignorance. Though a monologue means a speech of one person, and a dialogue means speeches of several persons, a polylogue could only humorously mean the speeches of quite some several persons. The word would rather mean a ‘much talking’ or a ‘garrulousness.’ And I did have great profit out of the lesser of those garrulous old chests, those polylogic coffers.

“Can I not make a guess as to the true identity of Tom Fool or Tom Crowd, you ask me? Aye, I can and I will. I was never shy about making educated guesses.

“Sometimes it takes history several centuries to coalesce several apparently different persons into one truly valid person. Thus great Caesar really was a ‘triumvirate,’ a uniting of three apparently different men, though the manner of it, in his case, is still unexplained in history. Men of great power do sometimes produce fetches or doubles or appearances of themselves without wishing to do so. We know from Holy Scripture that the name Thomas means ‘twin.’ I believe that our Tom Fool was a double twin, that he was one overflowing man with several attendant spooks who were only aspects of himself. And I believe that these spooks or aspects could and did have independent names and careers; and could even survive, for a while, the bodily death of the prime man. It had to be a full man to compose those masterworks which I later acquired and made known to the world. It had to be an absolutely overflowing (into several different vessels) man to compose those still greater and much more numerous masterworks that are in that larger chest that I had not gold enough to ransom and acquire and make known.”

“Is somebody having us?” Emery Briton of the Happy Braindom bunch mumbled. “Who do we know who makes up stories of that flavor?”

“Oh, I don't think so, Em,” Byron Verre of the same Braindom said. “I believe this is the real Shakespeare, as well as he can be called up, spinning his real guesses on the subject.”

And the real Shakespeare, as well as he could be called up, continued: “Certainly I had seven hidden years in my life, as this lady over here asks me. 'Twas in those hidden years, and not in the open years, that I found the Treasure Chests.

“Was I burned at the stake? someone asks. Or beheaded? Or stabbed to death? No, not I, though I have smelled the smell of all those deaths as coming from Great Tom Fool of the masterworks. But I died with my boots off, and in bed. Or rather in a little day bed in the kitchen whence I could see the larch trees out of the window, and the green garden, and the duck pond.

“ — and the duck pond, and the duck pond, and the duck pond…”

“That is the end of this psychic scan conjured up out of my data storage brain in London,” said Toff, the extension of the talented British machine. “I wonder how to turn the fellow off. Oh, he turned himself off.”

The psychic depth scan of the historical Shakespeare fell silent and disappeared at the same time.

“Oh, I'll open for a million dollars. I'd be ashamed to mention a lesser sum,” a pub-rep named Donald Waxley-Williams spoke with feigned indifference.

“What are you talking about, interloper?” Shepherd O'Shire, the Proctor of Happy Braindom Ltd., demanded.

“It wouldn't be fair to open the auction before the end of our presentation,” Dude uttered. “Not fair to us.”

Then there appeared the scan or spook of a man who radiated talent, though not real intelligence or real power. Several of the viewers believed that they recognized him from the portrait that Fliccius had done of him. But there was much less of the fellow in the scan-flesh or the spook-flesh than in the old portrait. The painter had filled the empty places of the man with his own invention.

The apparition began to speak in a nervous and jerky manner:

“I am Tom, the younger son of a small English gentleman of the Midlands. I was the most presuming upstart of all of them. I was not born to such poverty as two of the others, but I had great poverty inside myself.

“But I rose, and not by intelligence or strength. I rose by fury. Listen, I sent God Himself into a state of shock and recoil from which He never recovered. But the details of my life show a rising order that was not in myself. I belonged to Jesus College at Cambridge. I had two wives, one of them English and one of them German, and I had to give both of them up. My resentment at these unwilling renunciations almost set fire to the realm. I became Archbishop of Canterbury. Great power was in my hands for some years, and yet it was always a sly power.

“Yes, though I wonder how you came to ask such a question — yes I did have seven hidden years in my life. No man can be properly mysterious without them.

“I was really a sort of jeweler, a lapidary who did wonderful and fiery things, mostly in miniature. But I speak in analogy. I did that exquisite work in words and not in stones. I am possibly the finest stylist who ever wrote in Latin — or in English. And I produced two sorts of masterworks. One of them has been published in millions and millions of copies for hundreds of years now. How ironical that it should be called The Common Book. And my other masterwork was the Scenario for England. I wrote it in the form of many sly directives and instructions and letters to key persons. I wrote it, and England lived it out, followed my Scenario.

“The other things? What other things are you asking about? Oh, the plays and the poetries. They were not bad at all. They were really the best things of their sort ever done in this world. Yes, I suppose I should count them among my masterworks.

“They were found in coffers in Calais, you say? Yes, I always had a Calais connection. In our century, Calais was the place. In your century, I suppose, such things would be lodged in a Swiss bank rather than in the Calais customhouse.

“What end did I have? But it is not ended. There is still a tall score to settle for that. They burned me at the stake; that was my bodily end. I hated it, every horrible second of it. I hated it, hated it, hated it, hated it…”

The spook-scan fell silent and then disappeared.

“Oh, I believe that I like the gadget more and more as we go along,” pub-rep George Hebert said. “I'll bid ten million dollars for it just to get the ball to rolling.”

“Why are we back to this meaningless jabber about money?” Proctor Shepherd O'Shire asked.

“Wait till the end of the presentation, folks,” uttered that French machine Dingo. “Things will get richer and richer.”

Then, after a bit, another scan-spook appeared. Several of the viewers believed that they recognized him from the portrait that Hans Holbein the Younger had done of him. But there was much more to the fellow, in scan-flesh or spook-flesh, than there had been in the old picture. The painter had not been able to crowd near all the power of this man into his portrait. Then the apparition began to speak in sparse words, but with a richly toned voice. In scope that voice was equal to a short orchestra at least:

“I am Tom, the son of a beerhouse keeper in Putney. Aye, you know the disreputable place, on the south bank of the Thames a little above London.

“I was a vagabond, then a mercenary soldier in Italy and other places, then a moneylender. For only a short time did I lend money to small men. Then I loaned it to dukes and princes and kings, and I held kingdoms in pawn. Yes, I was a baseborn upstart, an upstart of the upstarts.

“Yes, I did have seven hidden years in my life. May they remain hidden!

“I was much in the company of intelligent men, of the most intelligent generation there has ever been from the beginning of the world until now. But in all my life I never met another man so intelligent as myself. I had a lust for magnificence, but at the same time I had a lust for plainness. And the second lust won. I had a burning compassion, but I also had a burning cruelty. And the second fire consumed the first. I was accounted a complex man, but my genius in administration lay in my being able to simplify things.

“ 'Twas I who looted the monasteries and all the abbey lands of England. I manipulated realms. I was a man of power. I became a baron, and Lord Great Chamberlain, and Earl of Essex. The king was like whiting in my hands, for a while. Yes, for a while.

“I had private excellences also. I had as fine a singing voice as there was in all England. And I had a masterly way with words. The plays you ask? The entertainments? How do you queer people and queer machines (I can hardly tell some of you from the others) know about them? Yes, I wrote golden entertainments. They were loaded full of the greatness of human people. I wonder what became of them? I left instructions for disposing of all my other belongings, but I left no instructions for disposing of the entertainments. I had kept them in a carpenter's tool chest.

“No, no, I was not burned at the stake. How could such an error have crept into the plain account of my life? I died on the scaffold, beheaded. I had always worked the hell side of the road, along with the king. It was over mere details of our hellish advocacy that we fell out and he had me killed. But I rather startled them all when I declared for the full faith on the scaffold. No, of course I did not recant my declaration. Has such a lie been told of me? I died in the full faith. And so I saved my tarred and gnawed and besmirched and marinated and brine-pickled (but immortal and spacious) soul. And yet I find that the temporary (though the centuries of it seem tedious), tall flames of Purgatory bother me more than they would a less corpulent man.

“How much do I believe the plays, the entertainments, are worth? you ask. Oh, they are priceless, utterly priceless. And I do not speak lightly there!”

Then Big Tom from Putney, the powerful and many-worlded man, faded away.

“What a consummate gadget it all is!” Efraim McSweeny, a pub-rep, cried in creamy ecstasy. “What good copy we can build on these imaginative foundations! I'll jump the bid to fifty million.”

“I do not understand this money madness at all,” Shepherd O'Shire the Proctor growled. “It is Tom-Fool money indeed.”

And then still another scan-spook came like smoke, thickened, and took form. And several of those present believed that they recognized this newest apparition from a picture John Melo had done of him.

The arrival spoke with a pleasantly ringing voice, almost like bells, like laughing bells:

“I am Tom, the son of a rich lawyer. An upstart? you ask. No, not I. I was ‘to the manner born,’ a phrase of my own that is usually mishandled. But perhaps there was nowhere for me to go except down, after such a start.

“No, no, I did not come from Putney. Why would anybody come from Putney? Mostly I lived in Chelsea.

“Did I say that the king was like whiting in my hands? I don't remember saying it, and it wasn't so. Am I the same spook who was here just two moments ago? you ask. Really, I don't know. Where I am now we have neither time nor sequence. Oh, surely I'd remember such curious folks as you if I'd been here just two moments ago! I visit here singly in my person, but you may well be seeing me split or doubled for all that I know.

“I tried to mold the king, yes, but I failed at it. I led him like a horse to the water, but I could not make him drink — that's a phrase of my own.

“Of what accomplishment in my life am I most proud? Oh, of bringing Greek to newest Europe and helping to unlock its sciences and arts and treasures. I was one of no more than twenty men in Western Europe whom you might have called a Greek scholar without laughing. But really I am most proud of standing against a tide when most people were not able to withstand it.

“Oh, certainly I was a man of power. I was Lord Chancellor of England, no mean office. Did I have seven hidden years in my life? you ask me. No. There was never anything hidden about me. It's true that I did have seven very obscure years, but that was only the way my tide of fortune ebbed for a while. Well, so one of you asks with some exasperation, did I not at least have a mysterious journey during my obscure years? Yes, I did that, several of them, very long and very mysterious. And I will not make them less mysterious by telling you about them.

“Aye, I did write plays or dialogues. I gave the name polylogues to them to indicate that they were more deep-textured and more action-hinged than other dialogues. And I gave the name to them because it had a comical sound. Yes, I did polylogues and entertainments and enjoyments. They were for very small audiences, so small that every person present would be given one or two sets of lines to read. Somehow they made a busy life seem less busy. I left a cofferful of the pleasantries. Yes, very likely they did go to Calais with some of my other pleasant things. As Lord Chancellor of England, I naturally kept my more lively papers at the customhouse at Calais in France. In our century, many of us kept things at that customhouse.

“Do I believe that I had the finest singing voice in all England? you ask. How odd and how probing of you to ask such a question. Yes, I do believe it, for it was true. I was quite vain about it.

“Yes, I recognize the occupation of some of you present. You are publishers' bagmen (ah, and women) are you not? I'd recognize you more easily perhaps than would some of my other aspects.

“Am I now, or have I ever been Shakespeare? one of you bagmen asks me. I heard the name Shakespeare only on one evening in my life. When I was a young man we played a game of looking into a glass globe and asking of the spirits who lived in it such questions as ‘Who is walking on my grave a century hence?’ ‘Who is wearing my mantle and speaking with my voice?’ ‘Who is eating my fruit and breathing with my breath?’ And when I asked these questions of the glass globe, the name Shakespeare was spoken back to me clearly.

“Are the polylogues, the plays, truly worthy and remarkable? you ask. Yes, they are. There have never been such remarkable devices since pen first learned to speak with human voice. They are so rich that it is like not being able to see the field for the pearls buried in it. Bagmen, look to your bags!

“Was I burned at the stake? No, no. There's some confusion if the records show that I was. I was beheaded on the scaffold as a man of distinction would be. I was not burned at the stake like a meanling. And I did not, as prelude to my death, say the cute things that are attributed to me. Gah, they cloy!

“Of course I died in the faith. And of course I did not recant. Had I recanted, I would not have died then. Perhaps I'd be living yet.”

Then the apparition faded out. Well, it faded out about ninety-nine percent. And it apologized for hanging around, in wispy words as easy as a breeze:

“I'll be quiet here, and hardly to be seen. But I must bide here a while to satisfy my own curiosity. I must learn the price of him who is priced, since I am a part of that him. Continue, people and metallurgies, as if I were not here, for I'm here but slightly.”

“Some proof, some coherent proof,” the pub-rep named Marjory Manmangler sang out. “When can we see and examine the ‘greater’ treasure chest that is supposedly in the Calais customhouse yet?”

“Oh, we can have a scan of it here almost immediately,” Toff the talented British machine stated. “But whether we recover the great coffer or not does not really matter, except for the carefully staged drama of its recovery and presentation; and that could be better done at another location with other props. The contents of the great coffer have all been copied. And a copy of that copy now resides in my data brain in London.

“And the texts themselves will not matter, except that Tanglewood Press, if the successful bidder, would probably build a large shrine with an eternal flame to house them. But you folks would put your Harrisburg Hacks to rewriting them anyhow. What do you call them — The Harrisburg Nine?”

“The Harrisburg Nineteen now. We've expanded,” pub-rep Manmangler said, “and we call them revisionists, not hacks.”

“I'll bid a cool hundred-million dollars.” Pub-rep Enox Eberly spoke solidly. “This penny-ante approach is so tedious.”

“Wait till the presentation is finished, folks,” Dude uttered. “Let's be fair, to us.”

“Dude,” Arsene Gopherwood of the Happy Braindom group whispered to that mechanism-in-residence, “there's a proverb: don't wait till the iron gets too damned hot before you strike. And three shells and one pea are enough for any con game. More shells will confuse it.”

“They won't confuse us, pea-shooter human,” the French machine Dingo stated. “Do you think you can teach us how to suck eggs?”

“Oh, there isn't any way they can overdo it,” said pub-rep Sheila McGuntry. “Let the little machines shovel it on. It's super-gadget all the way anyhow. They aren't missing a trick. The great man must have a humble beginning, or he must at least be interiorly humble. And the seven hidden years of the life are essential, with the presumption that they were spent imbibing knowledge in High Tibet or in the Kingdom of Prester John on the Blue Nile or some other fulfilling place. And the cruel execution at the end is essential also. So is it that the great man must have the best singing voice in England. And the archiest of the archetypes is the business of the treasure chests in the Calais customhouse, that dark and sinister building that is prototypically identical with Aladdin's Cave. It gives us so much to work with. Oh, don't change a line of it. It's perfect!”

“We will proceed.” Dude spoke grandly, and it was as if a curtain went up for one more act of the polylogue drama. Then a rather grandiose scan-spook-person solidified in flowing scarlet and gold robes. Some of the viewers believed that they recognized him from the painting Sampson Strong had done of him a few centuries before. And the appearance spoke with firm regality:

“I am Tom, the son of a hog butcher of Ipswich in Suffolk. One can't be more baseborn than that. But I rose, by my pleasant and urbane ruthlessness, as one admirer of mine had worded it.

“No, I was not at Jesus College at Cambridge. I was at Magdalen College at Oxford. Get your facts straight, people. Archbishop of Canterbury? No. No. I was Archbishop of York. Yes, it's true that I was Lord Chancellor of England. Who wasn't, in those decades of flux? And I was also a cardinal of the Church. And twice I reached for the papacy, but it escaped my hand. I thought then that the Holy Ghost was mistaken to pass over me, but now I see that He may have been correct.

“Did I have the best singing voice in England? you ask. And you laugh as you ask it. Yes I did. I had the best. And many of my high contemporaries had wonderful voices.

“Yes, I wrote great things, both in Latin and in English. My known works of hand — but I believe that you may be referring to the chests full of livelinesses, and full of lives. Have they been found? That's delightful. 'Twill be like an extra springtime to the whole Earth if you make them public now. They'll still be a fresh breath after the centuries.

“What words are you trying to put into my mouth, little machine? What thoughts into my electronically assembled head? ‘Impress on them that the works are worth tons of kale’ — is that it? Is the contingent translation correct? Of course they are worth many tons of kale. I assume that kale is still the name of the Flemish cabbage.

“Were there seven hidden years in my life? you ask. I would guess that you have somehow woven the seven-hidden-years motif into a fiction about the excellent entertainments, about the plays stored in great chests in — in Calais. Where else? And I can hear the tinny thunder of the plot you're putting together. Why, I believe that it is our old friend the Spanish Prisoner Mystery! It's come back to visit us. Somebody look outdoors and see whether it's springtime. The Spanish Prisoner Mystery always blooms in the springtime. Oh yes, there were seven hidden years in my life. Perhaps they weren't hidden well enough, for they caught up with me and ended my life finally.

“No, I did not burn at the stake, nor was I either hanged or beheaded. An executioner's dagger found me at Leicester on my way to London to stand trial for treason. I had been taken sick at Leicester and was dying. But my dying had to be interrupted by the irregular execution to make it official. This is not generally known, that I was murdered and did not die of sickness.

“I must go now, though I'd like to stay for the end of it. I salute you, happy shills and thrice-happy gills. And some day, on the other side, when we are all finally sanctified, we will talk about such things over rum of the Indies. I myself was the most adept confidence man in England and perhaps in all Europe. I pulled some of the most towering cons ever. Ah, those were the days, those were the days! But you little machines aren't bad at it at all.”

And then that fourth and final aspect of Great Tom Fool faded away.

“Dude,” Proctor Shepherd O'Shire ordered sharply, “project immediately the four historical portraits done by Fliccius, Hans Holbein the Younger, John Melo, and Sampson Strong, of what are possibly the several aspects of Tom Fool. I want to compare them.”

“Quite impossible, Shep,” Dude snapped. “They are not available. Perhaps I could obtain them after a few weeks, after an exhausting search.”

“You lie, Dude,” Shepherd accused. “You have them available here and now. You projected them subliminally when each of the scan-persons appeared. Lavender, I recall when we were programming Dude, you were the one who said ‘What's the use of having a machine that can't lie a little bit?’ But Dude lies too easily.”

Dude projected the four pictures together for one one-hundredth of a second.

“A little bit longer projection, Dude,” Shepherd ordered. So Dude projected them for a little bit longer, for .010101 of a second. That still wasn't quite long enough, but there was a good possibility that the four pictures were all of the same man, the same man perhaps not wearing exactly the same flesh in every case, the same man who created his own dumfounding resonances that walked and talked and strode as great men among the great. And the pub-reps caught all the implications and were impressed.

“Gentlemen and ladies, we may as well begin,” Dude stated. He stood up and snapped his dragon tail back on and strode to the fore.

“Why, it's a great confidence game that our machines are playing on these credulous people.” Shepherd O'Shire spoke to Arsene Gopherwood in admiration. “It's well done, in a crude way. The four greatest Englishmen of their century, Tom Cranmer, Tom Cromwell, Tom More, Tom Wolsey — they do add up to more than themselves, to Tom Foule, to Tom Crowd. Yes, those four great contemporaries do make a convincing Tom Fool. And it may have taken somebody of the scope of this Amalgamated Great Tom to be the Shakespeare herein expanded by more than a hundred new plays. But it's so weakly verified, Arsene. The Happy Braindom institution can't allow it to pass without more verification. The gills do come avidly to it though. And how could you, Arsene, the unofficial con man of the Braindom you are, be left on the outside of such a clever con pulled by mere machines?”

“I'll go a flat billion dollars for all rights to the Shakespearean and pseudo-Shakespearean works in the great chest in the Calais customhouse,” said pub-rep Kendell Kimberly. “But put the homegrown small fry outside first.”

“What makes you think I am on the outside of this con, Shepherd?” Arsene Gopherwood asked. “To be left on the outside of a con, that wouldn't be like me at all. Ah, Shep, and you others, they mean you when they speak of the homegrown small fry. Out, Shep. Out, the rest of you Happy Braindomers!”

“Don't push me out, Arsene,” Shepherd O'Shire howled. “I'll inform, I'll peach, I'll grass, I'll stool! Gills, gills, don't you know that you're being gilled? Don't you understand?”

“Don't you understand, voicey man?” pub-rep Greta Samuelsdatter asked with a sneer. “We want to go as high as we can. This is for prestige and glory. Who'd want to win a bid at a half-billion dollars when, with proper management, he could win it at two or three billion? I bid two billion. And the announced figure, of course, will be double the real figure. Get those poor twits out of here, Dude!”

The twits, all the members of Happy Braindom Ltd. except Arsene Gopherwood, were being pushed out of the auction lounge. They fought hard to stay, but they were pushed out harder. Shepherd O'Shire, Lavender Brodie, Emery Briton, Byron Verre, they were plain thrown out of that place, the lounge of their own Happy Braindom.

“Three billion dollars,” pub-rep George Hebert bid. “There's a lot of ridiculous anomalies in the cover story, but our script writers can fix up anything.”

“I'll hear, I'll hear how it goes!” Lavender was squalling. “I'll listen at the keyhole.”

“If you do, Dame Lavender, remember that there is nothing harder to reconstitute than a vaporized ear,” said that French machine Dingo. “Out, Dame, out!”

“Four billion dollars,” pub-rep Efraim McSweeny bid.

Even if they weren't very good, a hundred or more “new-and-genuine” Shakespearean plays, presented to the world with a whanging cover story that could be smoothed in the rough places, were bound to bring a pretty good price.

“Five billion dollars,” pub-rep Agnes Wankowitz bid.

But all the Happy Braindom people except Arsene Gopherwood had been locked out of there, out into the exterior darkness. And there was weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Eurema's Dam

He was about the last of them.

What? The last of the great individualists? The last of the true creative geniuses of the century? The last of the sheer precursors?

No. No. He was the last of the dolts.

Kids were being born smarter all the time when he came along, and they would be so forever more. He was about the last dumb kid ever born.

Even his mother had to admit that Albert was a slow child. What else can you call a boy who doesn't begin to talk till he is four years old, who won't learn to handle a spoon till he is six, who can't operate a doorknob till he is eight? What else can you say about one who put his shoes on the wrong feet and walked in pain? And who had to be told to close his mouth after yawning?

Some things would always be beyond him — like whether it was the big hand or the little hand of the clock that told the hours. But this wasn't something serious. He never did care what time it was.

When, about the middle of his ninth year, Albert made a breakthrough at telling his right hand from his left, he did it by the most ridiculous set of mnemonics ever put together. It had to do with the way a dog turns around before lying down, the direction of whirlpools and whirlwinds, the side a cow is milked from and a horse is mounted from, the direction of twist of oak and sycamore leaves, the maze patterns of rock moss and of tree moss, the cleavage of limestone, the direction of a hawk's wheeling, of a shrike's hunting, and of a snake's coiling (remembering that the mountain boomer is an exception, and that it isn't a true snake), the lay of cedar fronds and of balsam fronds, the twist of a hole dug by a skunk and by a badger (remembering pungently that skunks sometimes use old badger holes). Well, Albert finally learned to remember which was right and which was left, but an observant boy would have learned his right hand from his left without all that nonsense.

Albert never learned to write a readable hand. To get by in school he cheated. From a bicycle speedometer, a midget motor, tiny eccentric cams, and batteries stolen from his grandfather's hearing aid, Albert made a machine to write for him. It was small as a doodlebug and fitted onto a pen or pencil so that Albert could conceal it with his fingers. It formed the letters beautifully as Albert had set the cams to follow a copybook model. He triggered the different letters with keys no bigger than whiskers. Sure it was crooked, but what else can you do when you're too dumb to learn how to write passably?

Albert couldn't figure at all. He had to make another machine to figure for him. It was a palm-of-the-hand thing that would add and subtract and multiply and divide. The next year when he was in the ninth grade they gave him algebra, and he had to devise a flipper to go on the end of his gadget to work quadratic and simultaneous equations. If it weren't for such cheating Albert wouldn't have gotten any marks at all in school.

He had another difficulty when he came to his fifteenth year. People, that is an understatement. There should be a stronger word than “difficulty” for it. Albert was afraid of girls.

What to do?

“I will build me a machine that is not afraid of girls,” Albert said. He set to work on it. He had it nearly finished when a thought came to him: “But no machine is afraid of girls. How will this help me?”

His logic was at fault and analogy broke down. He did what he always did. He cheated.

He took the programming rollers out of an old player piano in the attic, found a gear case that would serve, used magnetized sheets instead of perforated music rolls, fed a copy of Wormwood's Logic into the matrix, and he had a logic machine that would answer questions.

“What's the matter with me that I'm afraid of girls?” Albert asked his logic machine.

“Nothing the matter with you,” the logic machine told him. “It's logical to be afraid of girls. They seem pretty spooky to me too.”

“But what can I do about it?”

“Wait for time and circumstances. They sure are slow. Unless you want to cheat — ”

“Yes, yes, what then?”

“Build a machine that looks just like you, Albert, and talks just like you. Only make it smarter than you are, and not bashful. And, ah, Albert, there's a special thing you'd better put into it in case things go wrong. I'll whisper it to you. It's dangerous.”

So Albert made Little Danny, a dummy who looked like him and talked like him, only he was smarter and not bashful. He filled Little Danny with quips from Mad Magazine and from Quip, and then they were set.

Albert and Little Danny went to call on Alice.

“Why, he's wonderful,” Alice said. “Why can't you be like that, Albert? Aren't you wonderful, Little Danny. Why do you have to be so stupid, Albert, when Little Danny is so wonderful?”

“I, uh, uh, I don't know,” Albert said. “Uh, uh, uh.”

“He sounds like a fish with the hiccups,” Little Danny said.

“You do, Albert, really you do!” Alice screamed. “Why can't you say smart things like Little Danny does, Albert? Why are you so stupid?”

This wasn't working out very well, but Albert kept on with it. He programmed Little Danny to play the ukulele and to sing. He wished that he could program himself to do it. Alice loved everything about Little Danny, but she paid no attention to Albert. And one day Albert had had enough.

“Wha-wha-what do we need with this dummy?” Albert asked. “I just made him to am — to amu — to make you laugh. Let's go off and leave him.”

“Go off with you, Albert?” Alice asked. “But you're so stupid. I tell you what. Let's you and me go off and leave Albert, Little Danny. We can have more fun without him.”

“Who needs him?” Little Danny asked. “Get lost, buster.”

Albert walked away from them. He was glad that he'd taken his logic machine's advice as to the special thing to be built into Little Danny. Albert walked fifty steps. A hundred. “Far enough,” Albert said, and he pushed a button in his pocket.

Nobody but Albert and his logic machine ever did know what that explosion was. Tiny wheels out of Little Danny and small pieces of Alice rained down a little later, but there weren't enough fragments for anyone to identify.

Albert had learned one lesson from his logic machine: never make anything that you can't unmake.

Well, Albert finally grew to be a man, in years at least. He would always have something about him of a very awkward teenager. And yet he fought his own war against those who were teenagers in years, and he defeated them completely. There was enmity between them forever. Albert hadn't been a very well-adjusted adolescent, and he hated the memory of it. And nobody ever mistook him for an adjusted man.

Albert was too awkward to earn a living at an honest trade. He was reduced to peddling his little tricks and contrivances to shysters and promoters. But he did back into a sort of fame, and he did become burdened with wealth.

He was too stupid to handle his own monetary affairs, but he built an actuary machine to do his investing and he became rich by accident. He built the damned thing too good and he regretted it.

Albert became one of that furtive group that has saddled us with all the mean things in our history. There was that Punic who couldn't learn the rich variety of hieroglyphic characters and who devised the crippled short alphabet for wan-wits. There was the nameless Arab who couldn't count beyond ten and who set up the ten-number system for babies and idiots. There was the double-Dutchman with his movable type who drove fine copy out of the world. Albert was of their miserable company.

Albert himself wasn't much good for anything. But he had in himself the low knack for making machines that were good at everything.

His machines did a few things. You remember that anciently there was smog in the cities. Oh, it could be drawn out of the air easily enough. All it took was a tickler. Albert made a tickler machine. He would set it fresh every morning. It would clear the air in a circle three hundred yards around his hovel and gather a little over a ton of residue every twenty-four hours. This residue was rich in large polysyllabic molecules which one of his chemical machines could use.

“Why can't you clear all the air?” the people asked him.

“This is as much of the stuff as Clarence Deoxyribonucleiconibus needs every day,” Albert said. That was the name of this particular chemical machine.

“But we die of the smog,” the people said. “Have mercy on us.”

“Oh, all right,” Albert said. He turned it over to one of his reduplicating machines to make as many copies as were necessary.

You remember that once there was a teenager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teenager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in an eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teenagers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. And there was one thing about the teenage machine that Albert made: it was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teenager eyes.

“Why is your neighborhood different?” the people asked Albert. “Why are there such good and polite teenagers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It's as though something had spooked all those right around here.”

“Oh, I thought I was the only one who didn't like the regular kind,” Albert said.

“Oh, no, no,” the people answered him. “If there is anything at all you can do about them — ”

So Albert turned his mostly invisible teenager machine over to one of his reduplicating machines to make as many copies as were necessary, and set one up in every neighborhood. From that day till this the teenagers have all been good and polite and a little bit frightened. But there is no evidence of what keeps them that way except an occasional eye dangling from the jab of an invisible guitar pluck.

So the two most pressing problems of the latter part of the twentieth century were solved, but accidentally, and to the credit of no one.

As the years went by, Albert felt his inferiority most when in the presence of his own machines, particularly those in the form of men. Albert just hadn't their urbanity or sparkle or wit. He was a clod beside them, and they made him feel it.

Why not? One of Albert's devices sat in the President's Cabinet. One of them was on the High Council of World-Watchers that kept the peace everywhere. One of them presided at Riches Unlimited, that private-public-international instrument that guaranteed reasonable riches to everyone in the world. One of them was the guiding hand in the Health and Longevity Foundation which provided those things to everyone. Why should not such splendid and successful machines look down on their shabby uncle who had made them?

“I'm rich by a curious twist,” Albert said to himself one day, “and honored through a mistake in circumstance. But there isn't a man or a machine in the world who is really my friend. A book here tells how to make friends, but I can't do it that way. I'll make one my own way.”

So Albert set out to make a friend.

He made Poor Charles, a machine as stupid and awkward and inept as himself.

“Now I will have a companion,” Albert said, but it didn't work. Add two zeros together and you still have zero. Poor Charles was too much like Albert to be good for anything.

Poor Charles! Unable to think, he made a — (but wait a moleskin-gloved minute here, Colonel, this isn't going to work at all) — he made a machi — (but isn't this the same blamed thing all over again?) — he made a machine to think for him and to — 

Hold it, hold it! That's enough. Poor Charles was the only machine that Albert ever made that was dumb enough to do a thing like that.

Well, whatever it was, the machine that Poor Charles made was in control of the situation and of Poor Charles when Albert came onto them accidentally. The machine's machine, the device that Poor Charles had constructed to think for him, was lecturing Poor Charles in a humiliating way.

“Only the inept and deficient will invent,” that damned machine's machine was droning. “The Greeks in their high period did not invent. They used neither adjunct power nor instrumentation. They used, as intelligent men or machines will always use, slaves. They did not descend to gadgets. They, who did the difficult with ease, did not seek the easier way.

“But the incompetent will invent. The insufficient will invent. The depraved will invent. And knaves will invent.”

Albert, in a seldom fit of anger, killed them both. But he knew that the machine of his machine had spoken the truth.

Albert was very much cast down. A more intelligent man would have had a hunch as to what was wrong. Albert had only a hunch that he was not very good at hunches and would never be. Seeing no way out, he fabricated a machine and named it Hunchy.

In most ways this was the worst machine he ever made. In building it he tried to express something of his unease for the future. It was an awkward thing in mind and mechanism, a misfit.

Albert's more intelligent machines gathered around and hooted at him while he put it together.

“Boy! Are you lost!” they taunted. “That thing is a primitive! To draw its power from the ambient! We talked you into throwing that away twenty years ago and setting up coded power for all of us.”

“Uh — someday there may be social disturbances and all centers of power seized,” Albert stammered. “But Hunchy would be able to operate if the whole world were wiped smooth.”

“It isn't even tuned to our information matrix,” they jibed. “It's worse than Poor Charles. That stupid thing practically starts from scratch.”

“Maybe there'll be a new kind of itch for it,” said Albert.

“It's not even housebroken!” the urbane machines shouted their indignation. “Look at that! Some sort of primitive lubrication all over the floor.”

“Remembering my childhood, I sympathize,” Albert said.

“What's it good for?” they demanded.

“Ah — it gets hunches,” Albert mumbled.

“Duplication!” they shouted. “That's all you're good for yourself, and not very good at that. We suggest an election to replace you as — pardon our laughter — the head of these enterprises.”

“Boss, I've got a hunch how we can block them there,” the unfinished Hunchy whispered.

“They're bluffing,” Albert whispered back. “My first logic machine taught me never to make anything that I can't unmake. I've got them there and they know it. I wish I could think up things like that myself.”

“Maybe there will come an awkward time and I will be good for something,” Hunchy said.

Only once, and that rather late in life, did a sort of honesty flare up in Albert. He did one thing (and it was a dismal failure) on his own. That was the night of the year of the double millennium when Albert was presented with the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy, the highest award that the intellectual world could give. Albert was certainly an odd choice for it, but it had been noticed that almost every basic invention for thirty years could be traced back to him or to the devices with which he had surrounded himself.

You know the trophy. Atop it was Eurema, the synthetic Greek goddess of invention, with arms spread as if she would take flight. Below this was a stylized brain cut away to show the convoluted cortex. And below this was the coat of arms of the Academicians: Ancient Scholar rampant (argent); the Anderson Analyzer sinister (gules); the Mondeman Space-Drive dexter (vair). It was a very fine work by Groben, his ninth period.

Albert had a speech composed for him by his speech-writing machine, but for some reason he did not use it. He went on his own, and that was disaster. He got to his feet when he was introduced, and he stuttered and spoke nonsense:

“Ah — only the sick oyster produces nacre,” he said, and they all gaped at him. What sort of beginning for a speech was that? “Or do I have the wrong creature?” Albert asked weakly.

“Eurema doesn't look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn't her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”

Everybody was watching him with pained expression.

“Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme! But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there are none of us defectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”

“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end to it? People will understand.”

“Of course I'm unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man.”

“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.

“Know you,” said Albert, “that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cattle who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes a new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous. Hey, you know the woman who said, ‘My husband is incongruous, but I never liked Washington in the summertime.’ ”

Everybody gazed at him in stupor.

“That's the first joke I ever made,” Albert said lamely. “My joke-making machine makes them a lot better than I do.” He paused and gaped, and gulped a big breath. “Dolts!” he croaked out fiercely then. “What will you do for dolts when the last of us is gone? How will you survive without us?”

Albert had finished. He gaped and forgot to close his mouth. They led him back to his seat. His publicity machine explained that Albert was tired from overwork, and then that machine passed around copies of the speech that Albert was supposed to have given.

It had been an unfortunate episode. How noisome it is that the innovators are never great men, and that the great men are never good for anything but just being great men.

In that year a decree went forth from Caesar that a census of the whole country should be taken. The decree was from Cesare Panebianco, the President of the country. It was the decimal year proper for the census, and there was nothing unusual about the decree. Certain provisions, however, were made for taking a census of the drifters and decrepits who were usually missed, to examine them and to see why they were so. It was in the course of this that Albert was picked up. If any man ever looked like a drifter and a decrepit, it was Albert.

Albert was herded in with other derelicts, sat down at a table, and asked tortuous questions. As:

“What is your name?”

He almost muffed that one, but he rallied and answered, “Albert.”

“What time is it by that clock?”

They had him in his old weak spot. Which hand was which? He gaped and didn't answer.

“Can you read?” they asked him.

“Not without my — ” Albert began. “I don't have with me my —  No, I can't read very well by myself.”

“Try.”

They gave him a paper to mark up with true and false questions. Albert marked them all true, believing that he would have half of them right. But they were all false. The regularized people are partial to falsehood. Then they gave him a supply-the-word test on proverbs.

“_ _ _ _ _ _ _ is the best policy” didn't mean a thing to him. He couldn't remember the names of the companies that he had his own policies with.

“A _ _ _ _ _ _ in time saves nine” contained more mathematics than Albert could handle. “There appear to be six unknowns,” he told himself, “and only one positive value, nine. The equating verb ‘saves’ is a vague one. I cannot solve this equation. I am not even sure that it is an equation. If only I had with me my — ”

But he hadn't any of his gadgets or machines with him. He was on his own. He left half-a-dozen other proverb fill-ins blank. Then he saw a chance to recoup. Nobody is so dumb as not to know one answer if enough questions are asked.

“_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ is the mother of invention,” it said.

“Stupidity,” Albert wrote in his weird ragged hand. Then he sat back in triumph. “I know that Eurema and her mother,” he snickered. “Man, how I do know them!”

But they marked him wrong on that one too. He had missed every answer to every test. They began to fix him a ticket to a progressive booby hatch where he might learn to do something with his hands, his head being hopeless.

A couple of Albert's urbane machines came down and got him out of it. They explained that, while he was a drifter and a derelict, yet he was a rich drifter and derelict, and that he was even a man of some note.

“He doesn't look it, but he really is — pardon our laughter — a man of some importance,” one of the fine machines explained. “He has to be told to close his mouth after he has yawned, but for all that he is the winner of the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy. We will be responsible for him.”

Albert was miserable as his fine machines took him out, especially when they asked that he walk three or four steps behind them and not seem to be with them. They gave him some pretty rough banter and turned him into a squirming worm of a man. Albert left them and went to a little hide-out he kept.

“I'll blow my crawfishing brains out,” he swore. “The humiliation is more than I can bear. Can't do it myself, though. I'll have to have it done.”

He set to work building a device in his hide-out.

“What you doing, boss?” Hunchy asked him. “I had a hunch you'd come here and start building something.”

“Building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I'm too yellow to do it myself.”

“Boss, I got a hunch there's something better to do. Let's have some fun.”

“Don't believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”

“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”

“It's a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They're at the top of the heap. They've won it all and arranged it all neatly. There's no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”

“Boss, I've got a hunch that you're seeing it wrong. You've got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”

“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That's the way of it, though, now that I look closer.

“Six billion patsies waiting to be took! Six billion patsies without a defense of any kind! A couple of guys out for some fun, man, they could mow them down like fields of Albert-Improved Concho Wheat!”

“Boss, I've got a hunch that this is what I was made for. The world sure had been getting stuffy. Let's tie into it and eat off the top layer. Man, we can cut a swath.”

“We'll inaugurate a new era!” Albert gloated. “We'll call it the Turning of the Worm. We'll have fun, Hunchy. We'll gobble them up like goobers. How come I never saw it like that before? Six billion patsies!”

The Twenty-First Century began on this rather odd note.

Selenium Ghosts Of The Eighteen Seventies

Even today, the “invention” of television is usually ascribed to Paul Nipkow of Germany, and the year is given as 1884. Nipkow used the principle of the variation in the electrical conductivity of selenium when exposed to light, and he used scanning discs as mechanical effectors. What else was there for him to use before the development of the phototube and the current-amplifying electron tube? The resolution of Nipkow's television was very poor due to the “slow light” characteristics of selenium response and the lack of amplification. There were, however, several men in the United States who transmitted a sort of television before Nipkow did so in Germany.

Resolution of the images of these even earlier experimenters in the field (Aurelian Bentley, Jessy Polk, Samuel J. Perry, Gifford Hudgeons) was even poorer than was the case with Nipkow. Indeed, none of these pre-Nipkow inventors in the television field is worthy of much attention, except Bentley. And the interest in Bentley is in the content of his transmissions and not in his technical ineptitude.

It is not our object to enter into the argument of who really did first “invent” television (it was not Paul Nipkow, and it probably was not Aurelian Bentley or Jessy Polk either); our object is to examine some of the earliest true television dramas in their own queer “slow light” context. And the first of those “slow light” or selenium (“moonshine”) dramas were put together by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873.

The earliest art in a new field is always the freshest and is often the best. Homer composed the first and freshest, and probably the best, epic poetry. Whatever cave man did the first painting, it remains among the freshest as well as the best paintings ever done. Aeschylus composed the first and best tragic dramas, Euclid invented the first and best of the artful mathematics (we speak here of mathematics as an art without being concerned with its accuracy or practicality). And it may be that Aurelian Bentley produced the best of all television dramas in spite of their primitive aspect.

Bentley's television enterprise was not very successful despite his fee of one thousand dollars per day for each subscriber. In his heyday (or his hey-month, November of 1873), Bentley had fifty-nine subscribers in New York City, seventeen in Boston, fourteen in Philadelphia, and one in Hoboken. This gave him an income of ninety-one thousand dollars a day (which would be the equivalent of about a million dollars a day in today's terms), but Bentley was extravagant and prodigal, and he always insisted that he had expenses that the world wotted not of. In any case, Bentley was broke and out of business by the beginning of the year 1874. He was also dead by that time.

The only things surviving from The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley are thirteen of the “slow light” dramas, the master projector, and nineteen of the old television receivers. There are probably others of the receivers around somewhere, and persons coming onto them might not know what they are for. They do not look much like the television sets of later years.

The one we use for playing the old dramas is a good kerosene powered model which we found and bought for eighteen dollars two years ago. If the old sets are ever properly identified and become collectors items, the price on them may double or even triple. We told the owner of the antique that it was a chestnut roaster, and with a proper rack installed it could likely be made to serve as that.

We bought the master projector for twenty-six dollars. We told the owner of that monster that it was a chicken incubator. The thirteen dramas in their canisters we had for thirty-nine dollars total. We had to add formaldehyde to activate the dramas, however, and we had to add it to both the projector and the receiver; the formaldehyde itself came to fifty-two dollars. I discovered soon that the canisters with their dramas were not really needed, nor was the master projector. The receiver itself would repeat everything that it had ever received. Still and all, it was money well spent.

The kerosene burner activated a small dynamo that imposed an electrical grid on the selenium matrix and awakened the memories of the dramas.

There was, however, an oddity in all the playbacks. The film-fix of the receiver continued to receive impressions so that every time a “slow light” drama is presented it is different, because of the feedback. The resolution of the pictures improves with use and is now much clearer and more enjoyable than originally.

The librettos of the first twelve of the thirteen Bentley dramas are not good, not nearly as good as the librettos of the Jessy Polk and the Samuel J. Perry dramas later in the decade. Aurelian Bentley was not a literary man; he was not even a completely literate man. His genius had many gaping holes in it. But he was a passionately dramatic man, and these dramas which he himself devised and directed have a great sweep and action to them. And even the librettos from which he worked are valuable for one reason. They tell us, though sometimes rather ineptly and vaguely, what the dramas themselves are all about. Without these outlines, we would have no idea in the world of the meaning of the powerful dramas.

There was an unreality, a “ghostliness”, about all the dramas, as though they were made by sewer light underground; or as if they were made by poor quality moonlight. Remember that the element selenium (the metal that is not a metal), the chemical basis of the dramas, is named from Selene, the moon.

Bentley did not use “moving pictures” of quickly succeeding frames to capture and transmit his live presentation dramas. Although Muybridge was in fact working on the zoopraxiscope (the first “moving picture” device) at that very time, his still incomplete work was not known to Aurelian Bentley. Samuel J. Perry and Gifford Hudgeons did use “moving picture” techniques for their primitive television dramas later in the decade; but Bentley, fortunately perhaps, did not. Each of Bentley's thirty-minute live dramas, however it appeared for the first time in the first television receiver, was recorded in one single matrix or frame: and, thereafter, that picture took on a life and growth of its own. It was to some extent independent of sequence (an effect that has been attempted and failed of in several of the other arts); and it had a free way with time and space generally. This is part of the “ghostliness” of the dramas, and it is a large part of their power and charm. Each drama was one evolving moment outside of time and space (though mostly the scenes were in New York City and the Barrens of New Jersey).

Of course there was no sound in these early Bentley dramas, but let us not go too far astray with that particular “of course”. “Slow sound” as well as “slow light” is a characteristic of selenium response, and we will soon see that sound did in fact creep into some of the dramas after much replaying. Whether their total effects were accidental or by design, these early television dramas were absolutely unique.

The thirteen “slow light” dramas produced by Aurelian Bentley in the year 1873 (the thirteenth of them, the mysterious Pettifoggers of Philadelphia, lacks Bentley's “Seal of Production”, and indeed it was done after his death: and yet he appears as a major character in it) the thirteen were these:

1. The Perils of Patience, a Damnable Chase. In this, Clarinda Calliope, who was possibly one of the greatest actresses of American or world drama, played the part of Patience Palmer in the title role. Leslie Whitemansion played the role of Simon Legree. Kirbac Fouet played the part of “the Whip”, a sinister character. X. Paul McCoffin played the role of “the Embalmer”. Jaime del Diablo played “the Jesuit”, one of the most menacing roles in all drama. Torres Malgre played “the Slaver”, who carried the forged certificate showing that Patience had a shadow of black blood and so might be returned to slavery on San Croix. Inspiro Spectralski played “the Panther” (Is he a Man? Is he a Ghost?), who is the embodiment of an evil that is perhaps from beyond the world. Hubert Saint Nicholas played the part of “the Guardian”, who is really a false guardian.

This Damnable Chase is really a galloping allegory. It is the allegory of good against evil, of light against darkness, of inventiveness against crude obtuseness, of life against death, of openness against intrigue, of love against hatred, of courage against hellish fear. For excitement and intensity, this drama has hardly an equal. Time and again, it seemed that the Embalmer, striking out of the dark, would stab Patience with his needle full of the dread embalming fluid and so trap her in the rigidity of living death. Time and again, it seemed that the Whip would cut the flesh of Patience Palmer with his long lash with viper poison on its iron tip that would bring instant death. At every eventuality, it seemed as though Simon Legree or the Slaver would enslave her body, or the Jesuit or the Panther would enslave her soul. And her mysterious Guardian seems always about to save her, but his every attempt to save her has such reverse and disastrous effects as to cast doubt on the honesty and sincerity of the Guardian.

A high point of the drama is the duel of the locomotives that takes place during a tempestuous night in the West Orange Shipping Yards. Again and again, Patience Palmer is all but trapped on railroad trestles by thundering locomotives driven by her adversaries (the West Orange Switching Yards seem to consist almost entirely of very high railroad trestles). Patience finally gets control of a locomotive of her own on which to escape, but the locomotives of her enemies thunder at her from every direction so that she is able to switch out of their way only at the last brink of every moment.

The Embalmer attempts to stab her with his needleful of embalming fluid every time their locomotives pass each other with double thunder and only inches to spare. The Whip tries to lash her with his cruel lash with its poisoned tip; and the Slaver threatens her with the outreached forged certificate of color, and only by fantastic cringing can she cringe back far enough to keep from being touched by it as their locomotives roar past each other in opposite directions.

It seems impossible that the racing locomotives can come so close and not hit each other, with their dazzling switching from track to track. And then (Oh, God save us all!) the Panther (Is he a Man? Is he a Devil?) has leapt from his own locomotive to that of Patience Palmer: he is behind her on her own locomotive, and she does not see him. He comes closer —  But the climax of The Perils of Patience is not there in the West Orange Switching Yards. It is at a secret town and castle in the Barrens of New Jersey, a castle of evil repute. In this place the enemies of Patience were assembling a gang of beaters (slack-faced fellows with their tongues cut out), and they were readying bloodhounds to hunt Patience down to her death. She somehow obtains a large wagon piled high with hay and pulled by six large high-spirited horses. With this, she boldly drives, on a stormy night, into the secret town of her enemies and down that jagged road (there was a lightning storm going on that made everything seem jagged) at the end of which was the castle itself. The bloodhounds leap high at her as she passes, but they cannot pull her from the wagon.

But the Panther (Is he a Man? Is he a Beast?) has leapt onto her hay wagon behind her, and she does not see him. He comes close behind her —  But Patience Palmer is already making her move. Driving unswervingly, carrying out her own intrepid plan, at that very moment she raises a key in her hand very high into the air. This draws the lightning down with a stunning flash, and the hay wagon is set ablaze. Patience leaps clear of the flaming hay wagon at the last possible moment, and the blazing, hurtling inferno crashes into the tall and evil castle to set it and its outbuildings and its whole town ablaze.

This is the flaming climax to one of the greatest chase dramas ever.

This final scene of The Perils will be met with often later. Due to the character of the “slow light” or selenium scenes, this vivid scene leaks out of its own framework and is superimposed, sometimes faintly, sometimes powerfully, as a ghost scene on all twelve of the subsequent dramas.

2. Thirsty Daggers, a Murder Mystery. This is the second of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas of 1873. Clarinda Calliope, one of the most talented actresses of her time, played the part of Maud Trenchant, the Girl Detective. The actors Leslie Whitemansion, Kirbac Fouet, X. Paul McCoffin, Jaime del Diablo, Torres Malgre, Inspiro Spectralski, and Hubert Saint Nicholas played powerful and menacing roles, but their identities and purposes cannot be set exactly. One must enter into the bloody and thrilling spirit of the drama without knowing the details.

More even than The Perils of Patience does Thirsty Daggers seem to be freed from the bonds of time and sequence. It is all one unfolding moment, growing always in intensity and intricacy, but not following a straight line of action. And this, accompanied by a deficiency of the libretto, leads to confusion.

The libretto cannot be read. It is darkened and stained. Chemical analysis has revealed that it is stained with human blood. It is our belief that Bentley sent the librettos to his clients decorated with fresh human blood to set a mood. But time has spread the stains, and almost nothing can be read. This is, however, a highly interesting drama, the earliest murder ever done for television.

It is nearly certain that Maud Trenchant, the Girl Detective, overcomes all the menaces and solves all the crimes, but the finer details of this are lost forever.

3. The Great Bicycle Race, the third of the Bentley television dramas, has that versatile actress Clarinda Calliope playing the lead role of July Meadowbloom in this joyful and allegorical “journey into summertime”. It is in The Great Bicycle Race that sound makes its first appearance in the Bentley dramas. It is the sounds of all outdoors that are heard in this drama, faintly at first, and more and more as time goes on. These are country and village sounds; they are county-fair sounds. Though the sounds seem to be an accidental intrusion (another ghostly side-play of the selenium response magic), yet their quality lends belief to the evidence that the full and original title of this drama was The Great Bicycle Race, a Pastoral.

But there are other sounds, sometimes angry, sometimes imploring, sometimes arrogant and menacing — more about them in a bit.

Sheep and cattle sounds are all through the play; goat and horse and swine sounds; the rattle of ducks and geese; all the wonderful noises of the countryside. There are birds and grasshoppers, windmills and wagons, people calling and singing. There are the sounds of carnival barkers and the chants of gamblers and shills. There are the shrieks and giggles of young people.

And then there are those intrusive sounds of another sort, the separate overlay. These seem to be mostly indoor sounds, but sometimes they are outdoor grandstand sounds also, bristling talk in the reserved shadows of crowd noise and roaring.

“No, no, no. I'll not be had. What sort of a girl do you think I am?”

“All these things I will give you, Clarie. No one else would give you so much. No one else would ever care so much. But now is the time for it. Now is the summer of our lives. Now we cut hay.”

“Let's just see the price of a good hay barn first, Aurie. Let's just get some things down on paper right now. We are talking about a summertime check that is as big as all summer. And we are talking about a much larger settlement to back up the other seasons and years.”

“Don't you trust me, Clarie?”

“Of course I trust you, Bentley baby. I trust that you will get that trust fund that we are talking about down on paper today. I am a very trusting woman. I believe that we should have a trust fund to cover every condition and circumstance.”

Odd talk that, to be mixed in with the sound of The Great Bicycle Race.

The race was in conjunction with the Tri-county Fair, which counties were Camden, Gloucester, and Atlantic. The bicycle racers rode their twenty-mile course every afternoon for five afternoons, and careful time was kept. There was betting on each day's race, but there was bigger betting on the final winner with the lowest total time for the five days, and the kitty grew and grew. From the great fairground grandstand, one could see almost all of the twenty-mile course that the riders rode, or could follow it by the plumes of dust. The grandstand was on high ground and the whole countryside was spread out before it. Cattle and mules were paraded and judged in front of that grandstand, before and during and after that daily race; then the race (for the approximate hour that it took to run it) was the big thing. There were seven drivers in the race, and all of them were world famous:

Leslie Whitemansion drove on a Von Sauerbronn “Special” of fine German craftsmanship. This machine, popularly known then as the “whizzer”, would get you there and it would bring you back. It was very roadworthy and surprisingly fast.

Kirbac Fouet was on an Ernest Michaux Magicien, a splendid machine. It had a socket into which a small sail might be fitted to give greater speed on a favorable wind.

X. Paul McCoffin was on a British Royal Velocipede. There are two things that may be remarked about the British Royal: it had solid rubber tires (the first rubber-tired bicycle ever), and it had class. It had that cluttered austerity of line that only the best of British products have.

Jaime del Diablo was on a Pierre Lallement “Boneshaker” with its iron-tired wooden wheels, the front one much larger than the rear.

Torres Malgre was on an American-built Richard Warren Sears Roadrunner, the first all-iron machine. “The only wood is in the heads of its detractors” was an advertising slogan used for the Roadrunner.

Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Cannon Ball?) was riding a McCracken's Comet. This Comet had won races at several other county fairs around the state.

Hubert Saint Nicholas had a machine such as no one in the state had ever seen before. It was a French bicyclette named the Supreme. The bicyclette had the pedals fixed to drive the back wheel by the ingenious use of a chain and sprocket wheel, and so was not, strictly speaking, a bicycle at all. The true bicycles of the other six racers had the pedals attached directly to the front wheels. There was one syndicate of bettors who said the bicyclette had a mechanical advantage, and that Hubert would win on it. But other persons made jokes about this rig whose back wheel would arrive before its front wheel and whose driver would not arrive before the next day.

It was on these great riders that all the six-shot gamblers around were wagering breathtaking sums. It was for them that sports came from as far away as New York City.

Clarinda Calliope played the role of Gloria Goldenfield, the beauty queen of the Tri-county Fair in this drama. But she also played the role of the “Masked Alternate Rider Number Seven”. (All the racing riders had their alternates to ride in their places in case of emergency.) And Clarinda also played a third role, that of Rakesly Rivertown, the splurging gambler. Who would ever guess that the raffish Rakesly was being played by a woman? The author and director of The Great Bicycle Race did not know anything about Clarinda playing these latter two roles.

The grandstand, the bandstand, the pleasures of a country carnival in the summertime! And the “slow smells” of the selenium-directed matrix just becoming ripe and evocative now! Smell of sweet clover and timothy hay, or hot horses pulling buggies or working in the fields, smells of candy and sausage and summer squash at the eating places at the fair, smells of dusty roads and of green money being counted out and thumped down on betting tables for the bicycle race! And then again there was the override of intrusive voices breaking in on the real summer drama just by accident.

“Clarie, I will do handsomely by you in just a day or so. I have placed very, very heavy bets on the bicycle race, and I will win. I am betting against the wildest gambler in this part of the country, Rakesly Rivertown, and we will have the bet up to a cool million with one more raise. He is betting the field against number seven. And number seven will win.”

“I have heard that this Rakesly Rivertown is about the sharpest gambler anywhere, and that he has a fine figure and makes an extraordinary appearance.”

“A fine figure! Why, the fraud is shaped like a girl! Yes, he is a sharp gambler, but he doesn't understand mechanics. Number seven, the Supreme, has a rear-wheel drive with gear-ratio advantage. Hubert Saint Nicholas, who is riding number seven, is just toying with the other riders so far to get the bets higher, and he can win whenever he wants to. I will win a million dollars on the race, my love. And I will give it to you, if you act a little bit more like my love.”

“Surely your love for me should transcend any results of a bicycle race, Aurie. If you really loved me, and if you contemplated making such a gift to me, you would make it today. That would show that your appreciation and affection are above mere fortune. And, if you can't lose, as you say that you cannot, you will have your money in the same amount won back in two days time, and you will have made me happy two days longer.”

“All right, I guess so then, Clarie. Yes, I'll give it to you today. Right now. I'll write you a check right now.”

“Oh, you are a treasure, Aurie. You are a double treasure. You can't guess how double a treasure you are!”

The wonderful Tri-county Fair was near its end, and its Great Bicycle Race with it. It was the last day of the race. Hubert Saint Nicholas on number seven, the Supreme, the French bicyclette with the mechanical advantage, was leading the field by only one minute in total elapsed time going into that last day's racing. There were those who said that Hubert could win any time he wanted to, and that he stayed so close only to keep the bets a-growing.

And the bets did grow. The mysterious gambler with the fine figure and the extraordinary appearance, Rakesly Rivertown, was still betting the field to win against number seven. And a still more mysterious gambler, working through agents, was betting on number seven to place, but not to win. These latter bets were quickly covered. Number seven would win, unless some terrible calamity overtook that entry; and, in the case of such terrible calamity, number seven would not finish second, would not finish at all most likely.

The seven intrepid racers were off on their final, mad, twenty-mile circuit. Interest was high, especially with moneyed gamblers who followed the riders from the grandstand with their binoculars. At no place was the winding, circuit course more than four miles from the grandstand; and there were only three or four places, not more than three hundred yards in all, where the racers were out of sight of the higher tiers of the grandstand. One of those places was where Little Egg Creek went through Little Egg Meadow. Something mysterious happened near Little Egg Creek Crossing that neither the libretto nor the enacted drama itself makes clear.

Hubert Saint Nicholas, riding the French bicyclette, number seven, the Supreme, with the rear-wheel drive and the mechanical advantage, was unsaddled from his mount and knocked unconscious. The race master later and officially entered this incident as “A careless rider knocked off his bicycle by a tree branch,” though Hubert swore that there wasn't a tree branch within a hundred yards of that place.

“I was slugged by a lurker in the weeds,” Hubert said. “It was a criminal and fraudulent assault and I know who did it.” Then he cried, “Oh, the perfidy of women!” This latter seemed to be an unconnected outcry; perhaps Hubert had suffered a concussion.

Fortunately (for whom?) the alternate rider for number seven, the Mysterious (though duly certified) Masked Rider, was in the vicinity of the accident and took control of the bicyclette, the Supreme, and continued the race. But number seven, though having a one-minute lead ere the race began, did not win. Number seven did come in second though in total elapsed time.

The Great Bicycle Race is a quaint little drama, with not much plot, but with a pleasant and bucolic atmosphere that grows more pleasant every time the drama is played back. It is a thoroughly enjoyable “Journey into Summertime”.

And there were a few more seconds of those intrusive “ghost” voices breaking into the closing moments of the pastoral drama.

“Clarie, I have been took bad, for a big wad, and I don't know how it happened. There is something funny about it all. There was something funny and familiar about that Masked Alternate Rider for number seven. (I swear that I know him from somewhere!) And there has always been something double funny and familiar about that gambler Rakesly Rivertown. (I swear and be damned if I don't know him from somewhere!)”

“Don't worry about it, Aurie. You are so smart that you will have all that money made back in no time at all.”

“Yes, that's true, I will. But how can I write and produce and direct a drama and then get taken in it and not know what happened?”

“Don't worry about it, Aurie.”

I myself doubt very much whether Aurelian Bentley knew about the “slow sounds” from nowhere-town that sometimes broke into the playing of his dramas, much less the “slow smells” which now began to give the dramas a character all their own.

4. The Voyages of Captain Cook was the fourth of the Bentley-produced television dramas of the year 1873. In this, Clarinda Calliope played the role of Maria Masina, the Queen of Polynesia. If The Great Bicycle Race was a journey into summertime, The Voyages of Captain Cook was a journey into tropical paradise.

Hubert Saint Nicholas played Captain Cook. Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Fish?) played the Shark God. Leslie Whitemansion played the Missionary. X. Paul McCoffin played the Volcano God. Torres Malgre played the God of the Walking Dead. Jaime del Diablo played Kokomoko, the bronzed surf boy and lover boy who was always holding a huge red hibiscus bloom between his white teeth.

The people of the South Sea Islands of the Captain Cook drama were always eating possum and sweet potatoes and fried chicken (a misconception) and twanging on little banjoes (another misconception) and talking southern U.S. Darky Dialect (but these ghost voices were not intended to be heard on the television presentation).

The complete libretto for The Voyages of Captain Cook has survived, which makes us grateful for those that have not survived for several of the dramas. The story is replete. It is better to disregard the libretto with its simultaneous curses invoked by the Shark God, the Volcano God, and the God of the Walking Dead, and to give oneself over to the charm of the scenery, which is remarkable, considering that it was all “filmed”, or “selenium-matrixed”, in the salt swamps of New Jersey.

The anomalous intrusive voices are in this drama again, as they will be in all the subsequent dramas.

“A ‘South Sea Bubble’, yes, that's what I want, Aurie, one that can't burst. Use your imagination (you have so very much of it) and your finances (you have so very much of those) and come up with something that will delight me.”

“I swear to you, Clarie, as soon as my finances are in a little better order, I will buy any island or group of islands in the Pacific Ocean for you. Do you hear me, Clarie? I will give you any island or group you wish, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji. Name it and it is yours.”

“So many things you promise! But you don't promise them on paper, only on air. Maybe I will find a way to make the air retain the promises you make.”

“Not on paper, not on air, Clarie, but in real life. I will make you the real and living Queen of Polynesia.”

The essence of the South Sea appeal is just plain charm. It may be that this Bentley drama, The Voyages of Captain Cook, was the original charm bush whence many things bloomed. No, in things of this sort, it is not necessary that a scion ever be in contact with its source or even know its source. Without the Voyages would there ever have been a Sadie Thompson, would there have been a Nellie Forbush? Would there have been a Nina, daughter of Almayer? Well, they wouldn't have been as they were if Clarinda Calliope hadn't, in a way, played them first. Would there have been a White Shadows of the South Seas if there hadn't first been The Voyages of Captain Cook? No, of course there wouldn't have been.

5. Crimean Days was the fifth of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas. In this, the multitalented Clarinda Calliope played the role of Florence Nightingale, of Ekmek Kaya, a Turkish lady of doubtful virtue who was the number-four wife and current favorite of the Turkish admiral, of Chiara Maldonado, a young lady camp follower with the army of Savoy, of Katya Petrova, who was a Russian princess as well as a triple spy, and of Claudette Boudin, a French lady journalist. Clarinda also masqueraded as Claudette's twin brother Claude, a colonel with the French forces, and as such she led the French to a surprising victory over the Russians at Eupatoria. The unmasqueraded Claude himself was played by Apollo Mont-de-Marsan, a young actor making his first appearance in the Bentley dramas.

The Crimean War was the last war in which the field officers of all sides (Leslie Whitemansion was a British field officer, Kirbac Fouet was a French, Jaime del Diablo was an officer of the forces of Savoy, Torres Malgre was the Turkish admiral, Inspiro Spectralski was a general of the Czar, X. Paul McCoffin was a special observer of the Pope), after their days of tactical maneuver and sometimes bloody conflict, would dress for dinner and have formal dinner together. And it was at these dinners that Clarinda Calliope, in her various guises, shone.

There was a wonderful and many-leveled table intrigue, and I believe that more and more of it will come through every time the drama is replayed. And it was here in this drama that one of the most strange of the Bentley-effect phenomena first appeared. There is unmistakable evidence that some of the subvocalizations (thoughts) of the people were now to be heard as “slow sound”, which was really selenium-triggered “slow thought”. Some of these manifestations were the role thoughts of the actors so strangely vocalized (Clarinda Calliope, for instance, could not speak or think in any tongues except English and her own Pennsylvania Dutch in normal circumstances: but in her triple spy roles we find her thinking out loud in Turkish and Greek and Russian); and other of the vocalizations are the real thoughts of the actors (the amazingly frank intentions of Leslie Whitemansion and of the new Apollo Mont-de-Marsan as to their lady loves of the evening after they should have received their two-dollar actors' fee for the day).

It was a wonderful play and too intricate to be described. This one, above all, has to be seen. But again there was the anomalous intrusion of voices that were not a part of the scenes of the play: “Get rid of that Greek Wop kid, Clarie. I told him he was fired, and he said that he would stick around and work for nothing. He said he loved the fringe benefits. What are fringe benefits? I told him I'd run him off, and he said that this was the free state of New Jersey and that no one would run him off. I won't have him around.”

“Oh, Aurie, there isn't any Greek Wop kid. That was me playing that role too. Am I not talented to play so many roles? And you will not fire me from this role. I will continue to play it, and I will be paid for it. It isn't the principle of the thing either: it's the two dollars.”

“Yes, I understand that much about you. But you say that was you playing the part of that smart-mouth Apollo Dago Greek? That couldn't be. I've seen you both at the same time. I've seen you two together too many times. I've seen you smooching each other.”

“Ah, Aurie, that was quite an advanced technique and illusion, not to mention double exposure, that I used there. What other actress could play both roles at once and get away with it?”

“Your techniques and illusions are becoming a little bit too advanced, Clarie. And do not be so sure that you are getting away with it.”

All through Crimean Days, there was some tampering with history going on for dramatic effect. The Light Brigade, for instance, was successful in its famous charge and it won a great victory. But the final outcome of the war was left in doubt. Aurelian Bentley had somehow become a strong partisan of the Russians and he refused to show them being finally defeated by the allies.

6. Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair is the sixth of the Bentley television dramas. In this piece, the dramatic Clarinda Calliope plays the part of Muothu, the Maid of Mars, for the Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair are on the planet itself. There are some fantastic elements in this piece, as well as amazing scientific accuracy. There is, in fact, a technical precocity that is really stunning. Aurelian Bentley has foreseen circumstances that even the scientific community did not then see, and he has dealt with those circumstances.

He posits, for instance, an atmosphere composed mostly of an enomagnetized, digammated, attenuated form of oxygen. Being eno-magnetized, that atmosphere would naturally cling to its planet even though the gravity would not be strong enough to retain it otherwise. Being digammated, it would produce no line in the Martian spectrum, would have no corona or optical distortion effect, and could in no way be detected from Earth. And yet a human Earthly would be able to breathe it freely.

This was a good-natured utopian drama of total realization and happiness. The Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair apply both allegorically to the planet Mars and literally to the highly dramatic Clarinda Calliope as Muothu. Muothu displayed rather more of the ruddy limbs than were ordinarily shown on Earth, but it was explained that customs on Mars were different.

Ruddy Limbs and Flaming Hair was the last of the dramas in which the apparently tormented and disturbed Aurelian Bentley still showed the strong hand of the master as scenarist, dramaturgist, director, and producer generally. After this we come to the four “Trough of the Wave” dramas, and then the three bewildering and hectic displays on the end of the series.

7. The Trenton Train Robbery is the seventh of the Bentley television dramas, and the first of the four “Trough” plays where Aurelian Bentley and his effects are sunken in the slough of despond and have lost their brightness and liveliness and hope. We will pass through them quickly.

In the Train Robbery, the peerless Clarinda Calliope plays Roxana Roundhouse, the daughter of the slain locomotive engineer Timothy (Trainman) Roundhouse. Armed with a repeating rifle, a repeating shotgun, a repeating pistol, and a few pocket-sized bombs, Roxana rides the rods of the crack Trenton Express in the effort to catch or kill the murderers of her father. These murderers have sworn that they will rob that very Trenton Express again.

And Roxana Roundhouse does catch or kill all the murderers of her father. In spite of some good shots of landscapes rushing by, this is not one of Aurelian Bentley's best efforts.

And again the voices of unknown persons creep into the drama: “You've already flayed me, Clarie, and scraped both sides of my pelt for whatever might cling to it. What more do you want from me? Go away with your lover and leave me alone.” And then in a fuzzier voice (apparently the “thought voice” made vocal) the same person said or thought: “Oh, if only she would go away from me, then I might have a chance! For I will never be able to go away from her.”

“Grow more skin, Aurie,” the other voice said. “I'm not nearly finished fleecing you and flaying you. Oh, don't look so torn up, Aurie. You know I could never love anyone except you. But a little token of our love is required now and then, and especially now, today. Yes, I know you are going to use your old line, ‘I gave you a million dollars last week,’ but Aurie, that was last week. Yes, I know that you have expenses that the world wots not of. So do I. Believe me, Aurie, I wouldn't ask for these tokens of affection if I didn't want them.” And then in a fuzzier voice, a “thought voice”, the same person said or thought: “I'll never get another fish like this one and I sure can't afford to lose him. But gentle handling doesn't get it all the time. When the hook in him shows signs of working loose a bit, it has to be set in again with a very hard jerk on the line.”

8. Six Guns on the Border is the eighth of the Bentley television dramas. In this drama, Clarinda Calliope (is there no end to her versatility?) plays the part of Conchita Allegre, the half-breed Apache and Mexican girl, on the Arizona border during the Mexican War. Conchita hates the American soldiers who are invading that area. She has them come to her secretly, with promises of love, and then she has them ambushed and killed. She kills many of them herself with her own six gun, and she makes antimacassars out of their skins. The sort of gentlemen that Conchita really likes use a lot of oil on their hair so Conchita needs a lot of antimacassars at her house.

But there are a few of the American officers so awkward and oafish that Conchita simply can't stand to have much to do with them, not even long enough to seduce them and have them killed. These horrible specimens are:

Captain James Polk (played by Leslie Whitemansion).

General Zachary Taylor (played by Kirbac Fouet).

Captain Millard Fillmore (played by X. Paul McCoffin).

Captain Franklin Pierce (played by Jaime del Diablo).

Captain James Buchanan (played by Torres Malgre).

Captain Abraham Lincoln (played by Inspiro Spectralski).

Captain Andrew Johnson (played by Apollo Mont-de-Marsan).

Captain Sam Grant (played by Hubert Saint Nicholas).

There was a lot of historical irony in this play, but maybe it belonged somewhere else.

There was a lot of “Comedy of Manners” stuff in it but it falls a little flat, mostly because the eight oafish officers spared by Conchita were too unmannerly to be in a comedy of manners.

Aurelian Bentley came near the bottom of his form in this piece. But for the energy of Clarinda Calliope (she played five other parts besides that of Conchita) there would have been hardly any drama at all.

And, as always, there were those intrusive voices hovering over the playbacks.

“Clarie, believe me! Believe me! Believe me! I will do all these things for you. I promise it.”

“Yes, you promise it to the earless walls and to the earless me. Promise it to the pen and ink and paper here.”

“Get rid of that Apollo kid first, Clarie.”

“You get rid of him. You have a lot of rough-looking men around.”

9. Clarence Greenback, Confidence Man was the ninth of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas. Hubert Saint Nicholas played the role of Clarence Greenback, the casino owner. It was the first time that Clarinda Calliope had not played the lead role in a drama. Is it possible that Clarinda had somehow slipped? Or was this another instance of the left lobe of Aurelian Bentley having lost its cunning, and casting badly. The talented prestidigitator of drama did not have his sure touch nowadays. Oh sure, Clarinda played other roles in the drama, but she did not have the lead role.

Clarinda played the role of Gretchen, the sweep-out girl at the casino. She played the role of Maria, the mounting-block girl in the street outside the casino. She played the role of Elsie, the chimney-sweep girl. She played the part of Hennchen, the scullery maid in the third and vilest kitchen of the casino. She played the part of Josephine, the retriever who had to gather up the shattered bodies of the suicides below Suicide Leap Window of the casino and take them to East Potters' Field and dig their graves and bury them. Elsie made a good thing out of her job, from the gold teeth of the late patrons of the casino, but the dramatist and producer did not know about the good thing she had there.

There were hazards in all these different roles.

“No, of course we can't put out the fires for you to clean the chimneys,” said Leslie Whitemansion, who was in charge of fireplaces and chimneys at the casino. “Clean them hot.” And it was very hot working inside those tall chimneys with the fires roaring below, and Elsie the chimney-sweep girl suffered.

For keeping a copper coin that she found while sweeping out the casino, the sadist Baron von Steichen (played by X. Paul McCoffin) had Gretchen hung up by her thumbs and flogged.

And Maria, the mounting-block girl, who had to stand in the muddy street outside the casino and bend her back for the gentlemen to step on her when they mounted or dismounted their horses, she had it worse on the muddy days. Oh, the great muddy boots of those men! “Maybe they're trying to tell me something,” Clarinda Calliope spoke or thought (by slow talk-thought). “I do like subtle people.” But a good actress can play any role, and Clarinda has her revenge today. Hardly anyone remembers the plot for Clarence Greenback, Confidence Man, but everyone remembers the tribulations of those pretty little servant girls.

And then there were those other intrusive voices of the overlay. It was almost as if they belonged in another sort of drama.

“Clarie, this has to stop. Not counting the special gifts, and they're fantastic, I'm giving you ten times as much as the President of the United States is making.”

“I'm ten times as good at acting as he is. And how about my special gifts? — and they're fantastic. Why do you have all the private detectives running around the last couple of days? To spy on me?”

“To spy on everything and everyone. To save my life. Frankly, Clarie, I am afraid of being murdered. I have premonitions of being killed, with a knife, always with a knife.”

“Like in Thirsty Daggers, a Murder Mystery? That one wasn't really very well worked out, and I believe it's one of the things bothering you. Your undermind is looking for a better solution, I believe, for a neater murder. It is seeking to enact a more artistic murder. I believe it will do it. I believe you will come up with quite an artistic murder for yourself. There are good murders and bad murders, you see.”

“Clarie, I don't intend to let myself be killed at all, not by either a good or a bad murder.”

“Not even for art's sake? It seems it would be worth it, for the perfect murder, Aurie.”

“Not when I'm the murdered one, Clarie.”

Then, a moment later, the female person said or thought something further, in a “slow thought-voice”.

“Sometimes persons have perfection thrust upon them in spite of themselves. An artful murder for Aurie would make up for a lot of the mad art that he's been guilty of lately.”

10. The Vampires of Varuma was the tenth of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas. This is the fourth and last of the “Trough of the Wave” dramas, which show Bentley's dramatic powers in almost complete decline and himself mightily disoriented. Yet, in this bottoming-out, there is a curious resurrection of his powers in a slightly different form. His sense of plotting and story movement did not return yet, but his sense of dramatic horror as motive force was resurrected to its highest pitch.

Clarinda Calliope played Magda the peasant maid, Miss Cheryl Somerset, the governess from England, and the Princess Irene of Transylvania. All three of these had been traveling to Castle Khubav on rational errands by the regular coach of the road; and each of the three had seen all the other passengers dismount hastily, and had then experienced the coach horses being whipped ahead frantically by an invisible coachman, or by no coachman at all. And each of these ladies had arrived, on successive days, in the apparently driverless coach, not at Castle Khubav, but at the dread Castle Beden. And inside the Castle Beden were the seven (“no, not seven, eight” was written into the libretto in a weirdly different hand) insane counts in their castle of evil. These were:

Count Vladimel, played by Leslie Whitemansion.

Count Igork, played by Kirbac Fouet.

Count Lascar, played by X. Paul McCoffin.

Count Chort, played by Jaime del Diablo.

Count Sangressuga, played by Torres Malgre.

Count Letuchaya, played by Inspiro Spectralski (Is he a Man? Is he a Bat?)

Count Ulv, played by Hubert Saint Nicholas.

And then there is another one added in the libretto in that weirdly different hand: Count Prividenne, played by Apollo Mont-de-Marsan.

There is a slip-up here somewhere. Apollo is supposed to have been “gotten rid of ”, to have shuffled off the mortal coil, and the sheriff 's report said that he died of indigestion. But if Apollo has not been “gotten rid of ” then certainly money was paid in vain.

The seven (or eight) evil counts are sometimes conventional counts in evening clothes and monocles. And sometimes they are huge bat-winged creatures flitting ponderously down the lightning-lit corridors of Castle Beden. The castle, in fact, is the main character in the drama. It does not have formal lighting, as it is lit by lightning all twenty-four hours of every night (there is no daylight at Castle Beden). The floors and walls howl and chains rattle constantly. The counts have sometimes conventional six-inch-long eyeteeth, and then suddenly they will have hollow fangs eighteen inches long and deadly. And there is a constant lot of howling and screaming for what is supposed to be a silent television drama.

A flying count will suddenly fold his bat wings and land on the broad bosom of one of the three maidens and have into her throat with his terrible blood-sucking fangs. And every time it happens, there is a horrible flopping and screeching.

The voice of Clarinda Calliope is heard loud and clear and real in a slow angry sound.

“Dammit, Aurelian, that's real blood they're taking out of my throat.”

And came the suave voice of the master dramatist Aurelian Bentley (but the voices shouldn't be breaking in like this): “Right, Clarie. It is on such verisimilitude that I have built my reputation as a master.”

Clarinda, in her three roles, seemed to lose quite a bit of blood as the drama went on, and she fell down more and more often. And the drama was a howling and bloody success, no matter that the storyline was shattered in a thousand pieces — for each piece of it was like a writhing blood snake that gluts and gloats.

And then, after the drama itself was ended in a spate of final blood, there came those intrusive voices that seemed to be out of some private drama.

“Aurie, if you are worrying about being killed, how about providing for me before it happens?”

“I leave you half of my kingdom, ah, estate, Clarie, right off the top of it. My word is good for this. And stop falling down.”

“I'm weak. It took a lot out of me. Yes, your written word is good on this, Aurie, if it is written and attested to in all the right places. Let's take care of that little detail right now.”

“Clarie, my spoken promise is enough, and it is all that I will give. I hereby attest that half of my estate, off the top, belongs to you. Let the eared walls of this room be witnesses to what I say, Clarie. If the walls of this room will swear to it, then surely they will be believed. Now don't bother me for a few days. I will be busy with something else. And stop falling down. It's annoying.”

The female person then said or thought something in a fuzzy thought-voice: “Yes, I believe I can make the walls of this room attest for me when the time comes. (I might have to put in another amplifying circuit to be sure.) And I believe that the attesting walls will be believed.”

The male person then said or thought something in a fuzzy thought-voice: “I have Miss Adeline Addams now. Why should I care about this Calliope clown? It's irritating the way she keeps turning chalk-white and falling down. I never saw anyone make such a fuss over nine quarts of blood. But now I am on a new and more glorious dawn road. Is it not peculiar how a man will fall in love with one woman and out of love with another one at the same time?”

11. The Ghost at the Opera is the eleventh of the Aurelian Bentley television dramas in the year 1873. The Ghost is based on Verdi's Il Trovatore, but Bentley's production is quite original for all that. The role of Leonora is played by Miss Adeline Addams. But the same role is also played by Clarinda Calliope, who was originally selected to play the role by herself. This business of having two different persons playing the same role creates a certain duality, one might almost say a certain duplicity, in the drama.

The “Ghost” is the doubling: it is the inept and stumbling Clarinda trying again and again to sing parts of the Leonora role and failing in it totally and being jerked off stage by the stage manager's crook; and it is the beautiful and brimming genius Adeline Addams coming on and performing the same role brilliantly. This provides the “cruel comedy” that is usually lacking in Verdi; for, without cruelty, only a limited success is ever possible in opera. But Clarinda took some very bad falls from the stageman's crook jerking her off her feet, and besides she was still weak and falling down from all the blood she had lost in her roles in The Vampires of Varuma. She was suffering.

“Why do you go through with it, Clarinda?” Hubert Saint Nicholas asked her once in an outside-of-the-play-itself voice. “Why do you allow yourself to be tortured and humiliated like that?”

“Only for the money,” Clarinda was heard to say. “Only for the actor's fee of four dollars a day. I am clear broke and I am hungry. But if I can stick it out to the end of the opera, I will have four dollars tonight for my wages.”

“Four dollars, Clarinda? The rest of us get only two dollars a day. Are you playing another role that I don't know about?”

“Yes, I am also playing the role of Wilhelmina, the outhouse cleaner.”

“But I thought that you had millions from that old tyrant, Clarinda.”

“It's gone, Hubie, all gone. I had expenses that the world wotted not of. I gave Apollo most of the money when I was in love with him. And I gave the rest of it to him today to do a special favor for me.”

“You gave the money to him today? But he was buried yesterday.”

“Time seems to go faster as we get older, doesn't it?”

Meanwhile, back on the opera stage, a new Verdi was being hammered out. Leslie Whitemansion was playing Manrico. X. Paul McCoffin was playing Ferrando. Hubert Saint Nicholas was playing Count di Luni. Apollo Mont-de-Marsan was playing the ghost. But was there a ghost in the libretto besides the double ghost of the two females playing the same role? Yes, there was; there was a real ghost in the libretto. It was written in there in a queer “other” hand, really a “ghostly” hand, and it wrote that Apollo was playing the role of the ghost.

So the merry comic opera went along almost to its end. It was just when Manrico was being led to the executioner's block and the evil Count di Luni was gloating in triumph, when everything was finally being shaped up in that drama that had some pleasure for everybody, that a horrible thing happened in one of the loges or boxes that overhung the stage.

Aurelian Bentley was knifed there in his box at the opera. Oh God, this was murder! “Your mind is looking for a better solution, I believe, for a neater murder.” Oh, that had been the voice of another sort of ghost. But now, to be slain by the ghost of a man dead only a day or two, and in the presence of several thousands of persons here! (For it was, possibly, none other than Apollo Mont-de-Marsan, who had been “gotten rid of ”, who was getting rid of Aurelian Bentley.) And again: “There are good murders and bad murders, you see… It seems it would be worth it, for art's sake, for the perfect murder.” Aurelian Bentley was stabbed to death in his box at the opera there, but even he had to admit, with some appreciation, as he went, that it was done with art.

And immediately, as the opera on stage came to its great conclusion, there welled up cries of “Author, Author, Bentley, Bentley!”

Then the dying (or more likely dead) man rose for the last time, bowed formally, and tumbled out of his box and onto his face on the stage, stark dead, and with the thirsty (now slaked) dagger twinkling between the blades of his shoulders.

What other man had ever made such an exit from or on life's stage! That was Theater! That was Drama!

12. An Evening in Newport was intended to be the twelfth of the Bentley television dramas. But it was never produced; possibly because of the death of its producer. It exists only as a libretto.

There was a high society “drama of manners”, as Miss Adeline Addams knew it, as Aurelian Bentley with his quick mind and quick mimicry knew it from his brief brushes with it. But does not a drama or comedy of manners depend largely on the quip and the arch aphorism? How could it be done in silent presentation?

By art, that's how it might be done: by the perfect art of the silent mimes, and Aurelian Bentley was master of that art. By the gestures, by the facial implications, by great silent acting this might be done. Was there any devastating riposte that she could not give with her autocratic hands? It was never tested, but Aurelian believed that she was pretty good.

On the lower level, An Evening in Newport was a one-sided duel between Mistress Adeline Addams of Newport, playing the role of Mistress Adela Adams of Newport, and Clarinda Calliope, playing the role of Rosaleen O'Keene, a low, vicious, ignorant, filthy, bad-mannered, fifth parlor maid newly arrived from Ireland. It was a stacked set in favor of Adeline/Adela.

On the higher level, the drama was the passionate portrayal of the total love of a beautiful and wealthy and intelligent and charming and aristocratic young lady (Adeline-Adela) for a man of surpassing genius and ineffable charm, a man of poise and power and heroic gifts, a man the like of whom will hardly appear once in a century. The drama was supposed to take on a note of hushed wonder whenever this man was mentioned, or so the libretto said. The libretto does not identify this exceptional man, but our own opinion is that the librettist, Aurelian Bentley, intended this hardly-once-in-a-century man, the object of the torrid and devoted love of Miss Adeline Addams, to be himself, Aurelian Bentley.

But An Evening in Newport, intended to be the surpassing climax of that first and still unsurpassed television series, was never produced.

13. Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is the noncanonical, apocryphal, thirteenth apocalypse of The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley, that first and greatest television series. There is no libretto to it. There is no formal production, and it does not carry the Bentley “Seal of Production”. But it does repose in one of the old television receivers, the one that was Aurelian's own control receiver, the one that was in Aurelian's own luxurious den where he spent so many hectic hours with Clarinda Calliope and later with Adeline Addams. It reposes there, and it may be seen and heard there.

Though Bentley was already dead when these scenes were ordered and live-presented, yet he walks in them and talks in them. The experience of hearing the thoughts and words of a hovering dead man spoken out loud and of seeing him as if in the flesh is a shattering but dramatic one.

The setting and sole scene of Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is that same luxurious den of Aurelian Bentley's, first placed under court seal, but then opened for a meeting which, as one of the parties to it stated, could not validly be held anywhere else. A probate judge was present, and pettifoggers representing several of the parties, and two of the parties themselves. It was a hearing on the disposition of the estate of Aurelian Bentley, of what might be left of that estate, he having died without having made a will. But one of the parties, Clarinda Calliope, insisted that Bentley had made a will, that the will was in this particular room and no other, that the will in fact was this room and the eared and tongued walls of it.

There seemed to be several meetings in this room superimposed on one another, and they cannot be sorted out. To sort them out would have been to destroy their effect, however, for they achieved syntheses of their several aspects and became the true meeting that never really took place but which contained all the other meetings in one theatrical unity.

The pettifogger of a second cousin once removed was there to present the claim of that distant person, as next in kin, to the estate of Aurelian Bentley.

The pettifogger of Adeline Addams of Newport was there to present the claim of Adeline to the estate, claims based on an irrefutable promise. This irrefutable promise was the marriage license for Aurelian Bentley and Adeline Addams. It was not signed or witnessed, of course. The marriage, the pettifogger said, had been scheduled to take place on a certain night after the presentation of an opera, that was contained in a television drama, that was contained in a riddle. But Aurelian Bentley had been killed during that opera, which voided the prospect of marriage, but he did not void the promise.

There were pettifoggers there for the different creditors. And all the pettifoggers were from Philadelphia.

And there was Clarinda Calliope representing herself (as Portia, she insisted, and not as a pettifogger), and she claimed rights by a promise too big and too intricate to be put on paper.

There was the probate judge of the private hearing who ambled around the luxurious den flipping a silver dollar in the air and humming the McGinty's Saloon Waltz.

“Oh, stop flipping that silly silver dollar and get on with the matter of the probate,” Miss Adeline Addams complained to that nitwit judge.

“The silver dollar is the matter of the probate,” the judge said. “The dollar is important. It is the soul and body of what this is all about.”

The piles of paper began to accumulate on the tables there. There were the documents and attestations of the distant next of kin, of Adeline Addams, and of the creditors in their severality. And not one scrap of paper did Clarinda Calliope put forward.

“Enough, enough,” said the judge after the flood of paper had narrowed down to a trickle. “Stop the paper,” but he didn't stop flipping that silver dollar or humming that McGinty's Saloon Waltz. “All a-sea that's going a-sea, Miss Calliope, it is time you laid a little evidence on the table if you are to be a party to these hearings.”

“My evidence is too large and too living to lay on the table,” Clarinda said. “But listen, and perhaps look. Due to the magic of the selenium ‘slow response’ principle, and to the walls of this very room being wired parallel to the receiver in this room, we may be able to bring to you a veritable reconstruction of past words and avowals and persons.”

And pretty soon the voice of the once-in-a-century man began, ghostly at first, and then gradually taking on flesh.

“Oh, Aurelian!” Adeline Addams squealed. “Where are you?”

“He is here present, in this room where he spent so many wonderful hours with me,” Clarinda said. “All right, Aurie baby, talk a little bit clearer and start materializing.”

“All these things I will give you, Clarie,” came the voice of Aurelian Bentley, and Bentley was there in shadow form of himself. “No one else would give you so much. No one else would ever care so much… trust me, Clarie.”

Aurelian Bentley was standing there solidly now. It was a three-dimensional projection or re-creation of him, coming into focus from all the eared and eyed and remembering walls of the room that was wired in parallel to the television receiver. Aurelian stood in the midst of them there in his own luxurious den.

“Clarie, I will do handsomely by you… a million dollars, my love, and I will give it to you.” Oh, these were startling and convincing words coming from the living ghost there! “I swear to you, Clarie… I will buy any island or group of islands in the Pacific Ocean for you… Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji. Name it and it's yours.”

What man ever made such tall promises and with such obvious sincerity?

“Not on paper, not on air, Clarie, but in real life. I will make you the real and living queen.”

If they will not listen to one risen from the dead, whom will they listen to?

“Clarie, believe me, believe me, believe me! I will do all things for you. I promise it.” How are you going to top something like that?

“I leave you… my kingdom, ah, estate, Clarie. My word is good for that.”

It was all in the bag, and the drawstring was being tightened on the bag.

“I hereby attest that… my estate… belongs to you. Let the eared walls of this room be witnesses to what I say, Clarie. If the walls of this room will swear to it, then surely they will be believed.”

The image of Aurelian Bentley disappeared, and his sound was extinguished with a sharp snipping sound. Adeline Addams was putting a scissors back into her handbag.

“I've meant to find out what that wire there was for several times,” she said. “That sort of shuts it all off when the wire is cut, doesn't it?”

“Here, here, you are guilty of destroying my evidence,” Clarinda Calliope said. “You can go to prison for that! You can burn in fire for that!”

A sudden flaming hay wagon with a wild woman driving it rushed into the room and seemed about to destroy everyone in the room. Everyone cringed from it except Clarinda and the probate judge. The flaming hay wagon did crash into all the people of the room, but it did them no damage. It was only a scene from one of the earlier plays. You didn't think that Clarinda had only one circuit in that room, did you? But several of the persons were shaken by the threat.

“Good show,” said the probate judge. “I guess it wins, what there is left to win.”

“No, no,” Adeline cried. “You can't give her the estate?”

“What's left of it, sure,” said the judge, still flipping the silver dollar.

“It isn't the principle either,” said Clarinda, “it's the dollar.” She plucked the silver dollar out of the air as the probate judge was still flipping it.

“This is the entire residue of the estate, isn't it?” she asked to be sure.

“Right, Calliope, right,” the judge said. “That's all that was left of it.”

He continued to flip an invisible coin into the air, and he whistled the last, sad bars of the McGinty's Saloon Waltz.

“Anybody know where a good actress can get a job?” Clarinda asked. “Going rates, two dollars a day per role.” She swept out of the room with head and spirits high. She was a consummate actress.

The other persons fade out into indistinct sounds and indistinct shadows on the old kerosene-powered television receiver.

The prospects of retrieval and revival of the first and greatest of all television series, The Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley, recorded and produced in the year 1873, is in grave danger.

The only true and complete version of the series reposes in one single television receiver; Aurelian Bentley's own control receiver, the one that he kept in his own luxurious den where he spent so many happy hours with his ladies. The original librettos are stored in this set: they are, in fact, a part of this set and they may not, for inexplicable reasons, be removed to any great distance from it.

All the deep and ever-growing side talk, “slow talk”, is in this set (All the other sets are mute.) All the final drama Pettifoggers of Philadelphia is recorded on this set and is in none of the others. There is a whole golden era of television recorded in this set. I bought this old kerosene-burning treasure from its last owner (he did not know what it was: I told him that it was a chestnut roaster) for eighteen dollars. Now, by a vexing coincidence, this last owner has inherited forty acres of land with a fine stand of chestnut trees, and he wants the chestnut roaster back. And he has the law on his side.

I bought it from him, and I paid him for it, of course. But the check I gave him for it was hotter than a selenium rectifier on a shorted circuit. I have to make up the eighteen dollars or lose the receiver and its stored wealth.

I have raised thirteen dollars and fifty cents from three friends and one enemy. I still need four dollars and a half. Oh wait, wait, here is ninety-eight cents in pennies brought in by the “Children for the Wonderful World of Aurelian Bentley Preservation Fund”. I still need three dollars and fifty-two cents. Anyone wishing to contribute to this fund had best do so quickly before this golden era of television is lost forever. Due to the fussiness of the government, contributions are not tax-deductible.

It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard:

“ — what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?”

Rivers Of Damascus

The caravan clowns came to the town about four times a year, usually in the service of a caravan, sometimes not. They came now to the town, the oldest town in the world, out of service and with no clear purpose. They were strictly on a bold-bashful skylark. There were a few less than a hundred of them. They were slight, smiling, shy desert Arabs. The guards of the city, though they usually treated the clowns with a lowering sort of theatrical harshness, really liked them — but especially they liked to devil them.

The desert gamins, first leaving long and rickety constructs of some sort at a little distance on the sand, came into the city by the east gate, whence the street named Straight (the Latins called it Via Recta and the Arabs Souk-el-Taouil) runs west to the heart of the city. They came in one by one, sideways, as though it were a narrow way, though the gate was high, wide, and completely open. This was in the month of March of the Year of Restored Salvation 635.

“Thieves, coney-eaters, camel-suckers, trench-straddlers, good-for-nothings — what do you want in our town?” several of the tall town guards demanded, and they clapped the slight desert youths roughly on the shoulders. The shortest of the guards was a head and a hand taller than the tallest of the Arabs.

“Bread, we want bread,” one of the Arabs, less bashful than the others, announced. The desert Arabs did not have bread of their own. They ate camel cheese and small animals that they killed in the sand and rocks. They ate wild figs or cultivated apricots and pomegranates and almonds when they could steal them. But bread they ate only when kind persons gave it to them. And now several of the kind (though thunderously threatening) guards bought hot bread from the bread booths and gave it to the Arabs. They ate it rapidly, almost furtively, but with real pleasure. All of them except one.

“I will not eat your bread,” said Khalid ibn-al-Walid. “It isn't right that I should eat your bread and then come back and cut the throats of all of you who do not kneel and beg for mercy.”

“Ah, squalid Khalid Walid, will you cut our throats?” one of the big town guards asked.

“Aye,” Khalid said nervously and looked around to be sure that his own jinni or angel did not hear him say such a thing. “I must cut the throats of all of you who will not submit. I will not like it any more than you will, but it is one of the things I must do.”

“With that little sword you will cut our throats?” the guard asked. “Let me see that wonderful little throat-cutter you have there.”

Khalid handed his sword up to the high hand of the tall guard. The guard snapped it in two with his fingers and gave the pieces back to the slight Arab. Khalid's face broke and he began to cry.

The other Arabs ate the wonderful bread that was given to them. They ate apricots and roasted meat. They talked with the town people and the town guards, for the chattering Arabs (after they had passed the moments of their shyness) were always full of news. The Arabs were called desert scrolls. They drank the bright wine that the people gave them. All the Arabs did these things except Khalid, who refused to eat or drink, though he had always loved the wine of this place. Then it was time for the Arabs to go, and they knotted about the east gate. Khalid still snuffled over the loss of his sword.

Several of the guards held quiet conference. Then one of the guards, the one who had broken the sword in his fingers, went and brought back a real Damascus sword out of his generosity: for this was in Damascus, the oldest town in the world, and the Arabs called it Dimisk es-Sham. The man gave the wonderful sword to Khalid (it was not ornate, but it was of good steel and manufacturing) and that Arab brightened up like the sun coming out from behind the mountain clouds of the Anti-Lebanon. Then all the Arabs went out by the east gate.

“That can not really be Khālid ibn al-Walīd the Great?” was the unbelieving protest of John Dragon who was dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech. “It just isn't possible.”

“It does strain credulity,” Joseph Waterwitch told him, “but that's the way it comes through and that's the way it's projected. I must suppose it's all valid. It couldn't be otherwise.”

John Dragon, Joseph Waterwitch, Cris Benedetti, and Abel Landgood were on expedition to observe certain events by para-archeological probe.

The Arabs shuffled along outside, beneath the basket wall. Khalid was grinning into his scanty beard. He usually pulled this little sword act and trick several times a year and he now had quite a collection of good Damascus swords. The Arab party, a little fewer than a hundred young men, shuffled carelessly back toward their desert.

For about a furlong.

Then they gave a great whoop. A dozen small horses seemed to spring out of the sand and were quickly mounted by the dozen or so of the Arabs so fortunate as to own riding animals. These dozen had also drawn bows from somewhere. And the others had swords suddenly. None of them except Khalid had had a sword earlier. Some of them picked up two rough ladders they had left on the sand before their first entrance to the city. They ran with these ladders toward the basket wall of Damascus.

“See if you can get better detail on the swords,” John Dragon asked Joe Waterwitch. “Hitti, who is never wrong, has written that the Arabs carried long, straight swords in scabbards flung over the right shoulder. And Belloc, who is also never wrong, has written that they carried short scimitars on their thighs.”

Joe Waterwitch emphasized the swords, and the observers all watched as the steel showed a little more clearly.

“There is every sort of sword and knife,” Waterwitch said then, and they all saw that it was so, “and they are carried every which way. There is no standardizing them and there is no seeing them any more clearly than this.”

The Arabs placed their two ladders against the basket wall (this section of the wall was so called because it was there that St. Paul had been let down out of the city in a basket). The ladders reached only about a third of the way to the top of the wall. Nevertheless, the Arabs crowded the ladders from top to bottom, resolutely climbing up and up, and those on the top waved their arms as if to try to fly upward.

“What are you trying to do, little sandmice?” the guards asked from the top of the walls. “You'll hurt yourselves. Those little ladders are about to break.”

“We are going to scale the walls,” Khalid the leader of the Arab sandmice called up boldly. “We are going to storm the town and slaughter the inhabitants and establish ourselves in this stronghold. And from here, we will conquer the whole world.”

“If you want to come in by the gates, they are always open,” the guards called down. “We think you are the same bunch that was in just a little while ago. Then you went out again. Those little ladders will not reach. Shall we put down longer ladders for you? Shall we let down ropes? Are you under some vow to scale walls?”

“Yes, we are under vow to scale walls or to batter them down,” Khalid cried. “We will not come in by the gate until we have received your total surrender. Defend yourselves! It is not to our glory if we conquer only cowards who fear to fight.”

Khalid and some of the others began to shoot arrows up at the guards. They hadn't true arrows, only crooked and badly fletched shafts. They hadn't strong bows, the arrows did not even shoot to the top of the walls in their flight. The only damage done by the arrows was to one of the Arabs. This man had shot his bolt straight up into the air. He stood and gazed at his arrow as it spent itself, then tumbled over and fell back toward him. The arrow pierced his eye. Some of the guards gasped with shock, but several of them laughed.

“If you laugh at him, if you laugh at us, then you laugh at God,” Khalid called up angrily.

“We do not mean to laugh at God,” others of the guards spoke down. “We are honestly grieved that the man injured himself.”

Both of the ladders broke with weak cracking noises and tumbled the Arabs onto the sand and rocks below. One man was killed and several were lamed. The Arabs shuffled off toward the desert, and those few who had horses turned them toward the barren and sunburnt hills.

“We do not retreat,” Khalid called from the back of his own horse. “It only seems that we retreat. We have breached your walls, and several of us, including myself, have entered. This night I will sit on the highest seat in your council room and will hold command of the city.”

“You may come to the council room if you want to,” one of the guards called, “and you may talk to the commandant of the city. He may be able to understand what it is you want. He is a man of great understanding. But you may not sit on the highest seat.”

“Yes, I will sit on the highest seat tonight,” Khalid insisted. “I am already inside the town and the room, though you know it not. I will command. I will order. I will rule. And I will slaughter. And after I have slaughtered sufficiently I also will become a man of great understanding.”

Khalid followed his men back into the hilly desert. They left a plume of dust behind them and when the plume dispersed, they were gone. There had been somewhat less than a hundred of these slight Arabs. And there were something more than ten thousand of the burly empire soldiers and guards garrisoned in the city.

“That cannot be the Moslem conquest of Damascus of the year 635,” John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences, was protesting in near panic.

“Yes, that was it,” Joe Waterwitch insisted sadly. “We have tuned it in pretty clearly — we have watched it to its end. That is what happened and that is all that happened.”

“There was supposed to be a six-month siege,” Abel Landgood commented. “And when that six months was over, Damascus was under Moslem control.”

“We will look for the siege, but we will not find it,” Waterwitch said. “There wasn't any siege of that sort. What we have just seen is all that happened. And as for Damascus turning from Christian to Moslem; well, I don't understand it either. A plum will be green and then it will be red (if it's a Damask plum it will be). There are no reasons at all for many of the changes in history. Let's leave it at that. I do not know why history, feeling guilty perhaps, is sometimes impelled to supply false reasons. Better no reasons than false, and there are no reasons for the results from Damascus.”

“I believe that there is one more event, Joseph,” Cris Benedetti said softly. “Our focus seemed to be on three hours before sunset. Let's allow two more hours for ablutions and the supper meal. So, let's see what we can pick up in the council room five hours after our last focus.”

Cris Benedetti was the revered professor of humanities and histories and literatures and esoterica at Southwestern Polytech. He possibly had more prestige even than John Dragon had. He certainly had more than Joe Waterwitch; Joe had a peculiar lack of prestige. But Joe believed in himself and his methods and he didn't like to be told that he might have missed something. He looked at Benedetti for a long minute.

“All right, we'll do it,” Joe Waterwitch said then.

The find-and-focus itself took nearly five hours, but the times were not connected and the delay in search did not matter. Then those of the expedition were able to see what was going on at the evening's session in the council room. And what was going on was a developing ruckus.

There were seven great men sitting in the high seats in the council room: pompous men, somewhat amused now and a little bit fearful.

They were amused by an audacious and slight man who was leaping about in the rafters over their heads. He mocked them. He harangued them. And they smiled.

But they were really alarmed by the monkey-like climbing of this man, actually fearful of his stark animality and his go-devil grinning and of the jinni-like secrets that were tumbling out of him in unbottled speech that sounded as if it would never be exhausted. They were disturbed by the gamin-like thievery of that rafter rooster who'd as soon steal the world as a sack of walnuts.

“I will command. I will rule. I will slaughter,” the monkey-like man in the rafters was heckling, “and when I have slaughtered enough, then I will become a man of even greater understanding than yourselves.” This heckling climber over their heads was Khalid.

“I wonder when the Byzantine look made its first appearance?” John Dragon asked his fellow observers.

“Surely not in Byzantium,” Cris Benedetti said, “but here in Damascus, in this place, on this night. Look at those seven in their high seats! It has just dawned in their minds that they have lost everything (that is the underlay of the Byzantine look), and that if they continue as they have been nobody but themselves will guess that they have really lost it (that is the brocade surface of the Byzantine look). I don't know how they have lost it, and they don't either. But such towering irony comes only after having lost everything, and having disregarded that loss.”

There were seven men there with that look on them. In the highest seat was the commandant of the city. At his right was the bishop. At his left was the treasurer. The commandant himself was pomposity justified. He was wealth and line and power and intelligence. He was the deep texture of past pleasures and the aromatic glow of pleasure still to come. He laughed at his own defeat and forbade it to speak.

The bishop on his right had exceptional ability, a highly refined and rarified sensibility, a canniness that had obtained an unusually good bargain from God Himself, a stormy sort of sublimation (channeled and diverted thunder), compassion, wit, well-being: and there was a foxy slyness that went with it all. This bishop had fished in stranger waters than his father Peter ever knew: in the Third Ocean of whose very existence both God and the devil are ignorant.

And the treasurer on the left had the endless geniality that comes from never exhausted stores. He had the money bags that pour out specie forever, to smooth the paths and to make friends. The bags remain full no matter how much is taken from them. He had the sack of inexhaustible pleasure, and the barrelful of those sweet serpents named Intrigue whose joy outlasts that of every other game. And into the eyes of this extraordinary treasurer had come a new glow now: happy treason, the last pleasure of the almost jaded.

Two other men sat on the right, two other men sat on the left; they were high and intricate men, of the sort who maintained the heavenly Byzantine Empire on earth.

“I sit in the highest seat in the council room,” jibed Khalid, who had made a seat up in the rafters. This man Khalid was an un-giant jinni who had escaped from some bottle. “And I will hold command of this city.”

One of the great men on the left of the commandant laughed: Khalid had nearly fallen from his high seat when he gestured too violently.

“It seems a very precarious command,” the great man said.

“I want it to be precarious,” Khalid howled. “I am already inside you, though you cannot suspect it yet. I will command. I will order. I will slaughter. I will breach your walls. I lay siege to you now.”

“How long is the siege that you lay for us?” asked one of the great men on the right, and he grinned in his beard.

“A half-year siege,” Khalid called down, and he danced on the smoke-blackened rafter. Guards were climbing after Khalid, but they could not scamper about with his quickness or his wittiness; they couldn't catch him. Khalid bounded to other rafters and cross-members.

“Your eyes are put into your heads wrong and you look out wrong,” Khalid taunted. “Your eyes look for me where I am no longer to be found. You'd double your defenses to keep me out, would you, city fathers? But I am not outside. I am the mind-worm working inside and I besiege you from inside. I came in under the walls and under your minds by the other river, the one that is not to be found in your country or in the maps of it. You great men cannot understand this.”

“I understand it,” said the great treasurer, and his eyes were a-dance with happy treason.

“I almost understand it,” said the great bishop, and his fingers were avid to be dealing with strange fish.

“And I almost understand it,” said Cris Benedetti, one of the men working on the para-archeological probe.

II

There is an absolute mystery covering all early Islamic expansion and military conquest. There is no possible way these things could have happened. Circumstances sometimes put forward to explain these happenings are in fact later circumstances created by these same happenings. The clear truth is that the desert Arabs were absolutely inferior to all their neighbors in wealth, numbers, technology, health, ability, intellect, location, ambition, sophistication, weaponry, organization, transportation, and experience in warfare. Their victories could not have been won in reality. It had to be a subjective religious rapture to make it seem to the Arabs that they were conquering. But how was the exterior world and its peoples conned into authenticating these subjective experiences of the miserable Arabs? Moreover, Islam was not then a rapture religion: it did not become so until nearly two centuries later. Nor was Islam then a militant religion. It became so only after the completion of those astonishing, early, world-shaking conquests.

At Damascus, the attacking Arabs had only one-hundredth the numbers of the defenders. They had nothing but short, curved knives and inferior bows with which to assault the walls. They had no battering rams or siege engines at all — they did not even have entrenching tools. How did they breach the walls after a six-month siege? How did they take the strong town that had one hundred defenders against every one attacker?

Here was an incredibly small and disorganized band of half-starved, half-demented desert men looking out of pus-caked eyes (Paul was not the first nor the millionth man to go blind on the dazzling road to Damascus), small men, sick men, nearly blind men, men with no ambition and no hope, beggars wrapped in euphoric dreams more ragged than their clothing, men sleeping away most of the hours to forget that they had nothing to eat. How did these men, at the very first step, conquer Damascus? How did they, at the incredibly swift second step, conquer the world?

Could one travel in a time wagon pulled by time oxen to Damascus in the year 635 and look at the events with informed, modern eyes, it is possible that a missing piece to this puzzle might be found. But I doubt even this. There is no way that those events could have happened.

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

“Gentlemen, we have missed it completely! We are stumblebums. That is what the respected scientists have been saying about us all along, and this seems to be the fact of the matter. There cannot be anything wrong with our methods. There cannot be much wrong with ourselves. There has to be something wrong with history. History was not there when we went back to examine her.”

 — John Dragon

“So much of this has depended on me, and I do not feel that I have failed in any way. I have been the instrument and the receiver, and I believe that I have received correctly what was there. The fact that what was there is impossible is beside the point — overwhelmingly beside the point, I'm afraid. I've been the dowser and the medium, but I certainly am not a happy medium over this. Where have we failed? Or rather, what is it that has failed us?”

 — Joseph Waterwitch

“This brings into question the whole subject of reality. Reality has been an assumption, a postulate, an evident basis and beginning. It now seems to have been a false assumption. Reality has disappeared on us when, in this test case, we had the temerity to examine it too closely. What we now need to find and use is an alternate to reality.”

 — Abel Landgood

“Gentlemen, I believe that our difficulty is that we have been using highly polarized information.”

 — Cris Benedetti

From the Landwitch Papers
(the minutes of the first para-archaeological probe)

The Rivers of Damascus as mentioned in Scripture are two: the Abana River and the Pharpar River. But where are they now? The Abana River is now named the Baroda. This is the only River of Damascus to be found in the physical world. There is no other river in that part of the country. There is no dry bed where any other river could ever have run. The Pharpar River is not to be found anywhere in that scorched land at all. There is no trace or remnant or body print of it to be discovered anywhere on Earth.

Well then, have you looked under the Earth? Have you looked inside the Earth? Have you looked inside the creatures of the Earth? When a river is lost, we must leave no land or mind unturned until we have found it, for a lost river may be anywhere. I believe that the Pharpar River has always been of the internal sort. It is the secret river that not only greens the soul but also runs under walls and gains entrance to all fortified and walled places of the world and of the mind.

Regard your own estate and case. Is your own town not built on two rivers which are separated by a firmament between? One of them is the impossible river by which all things may enter anywhere. We'd be robbed of our celestial birthright without it.

 — Ignace Wolff, The River Inside

The heterodyning of a brain wave produces a difference frequency or beat in conjunction with the normal brain wave — and this difference frequency can be both a sending and an echoing beat. It may also become a receptor beat and, in some cases, a reverberatory beat of very long duration. Of how long a duration? Oh, two thousand years or so before it becomes too greatly diminished to pick up.

But, scientifically, a beat may reverberate for only microseconds after the inaction of its source: this scientific objection may not be assailed in its own field or context. But may the scientific objection be heterodyned out of its own field? May it be super-heterodyned to a place where it accepts what it had seemed to deny?

The ever-changing modified or heterodyned wave pattern is a searching or tuning pattern. It seeks whatever is in resonance with its voice. It changes its voice till it finds that resonance. But hardly one person in a thousand can consciously heterodyne his own brain wave patterns to obtain the variations and the beats. The rare ones who can are sometimes called dowsers. True dowsers can get echoes from almost all physical substances — and also from many electrical coronas that are not really physical. Very good dowsers can get resonance and echoes from an even more rare sort of corona, which is called patina. The patina, that aged and weathered surface, is generally thought to be a physical effect and substance; but it hasn't a physical origin.

Adept dowsers may also get resonances from ancient reverberations (some of them associated with patinas or other coronas, some apparently associated with nothing but themselves) that may have become endemic to a location, to have lodged there securely and enduringly. And dowsers are peculiarly able to get echoes from underground streams, which may be heterodynings of surface streams which are not necessarily in the immediate location.

A good dowser can hear the signaling of rocks and sands and loams. He can hear water talk. He can hear air talk. He can hear a valley or a fortress speak. Joseph Waterwitch was a good dowser. He came by his talent honestly. He was a Shawnee Indian, and the Shawnees can out-dowse any other Indians in the world. Waterwitch had been given to Joe's folks as a family name because of their expertness in witching anything from water to fresh meat trails.

But dowsers are scientifically unacceptable. Joseph Waterwitch had been kicked out of the usually free and easy Geologists Club when he refused to deny that he had dowsing talents. He had been kicked out quite literally — out of the private bar, out through the dining room and the meeting room, out through the library and exhibit rooms. Then he was kicked violently down that short flight of five steps to the street, to the injury of both his pride and his coccyx.

But are all scientists absolutely closed to such things? May not some entry be made into some minds? At times it has been thought that an entrance could be made by certain underchannels, by streams that flow unsuspected below the medulla walls or that permeate the pons variolii to break through. Even at the Geologists Club, there had been one man drenched by the under-river, a man who might open the gates at the proper time — when he heard the off-key whistle of sweet treason. This man knew a lot about odd frequencies, and he could split stubborn rocks with his own double-tuned whistling.

A patina is a reverberating surface that is composed entirely of its own history and that possibly does not exist in the present time. But this definition beggars John Dragon's statement that there is no room for the present in present time, that the present must always be slightly in the future and cannot be perceived except by this very slight shift into future time. Present time is an anomaly: it is less than a quantum wide, and its very narrowness posits its nonexistence. It is too narrow a crack to exist; and yet, there may be a two-way traffic through that narrow crack. Unacceptable things do come through the narrow crack that is mistakenly called the present — things such as ghosts, cranks, and treasures.

A patina may be very deep and still retain all the characteristics of a surface phenomenon. It is made up of old vibrations and waves, and of nothing else; yet it has mass and physical substance, and waves supposedly do not. And a patina, though seldom containing metal, shows magnetic properties.

It is not only stones and rocks that acquire a patina. The patina is often spoken of as an aging and a weathering, but young and growing things sometimes show striking patinas. An adolescent plum just coming to full color may have a patina — a smoky surface ghost of that full color: it is a patina, whatever other name it bears. A human being may have a patina which contains all that being's experience. And a newborn child may have a surface patina that reflects the complete history of its ancestors as well as its own makeup and shorter history. In countries where the niceties prevail, this valuable patina is often washed off the newborn child. Such removal makes for trauma and dislocation. The child is permanently deprived. He will grow other patina, but it will never be the same. He will forever lack roots and history and surety. He will seldom become a truly reverberating person.

But is there any proof at all that patina may record and remember, and later transmit or recreate, persons and objects and events? Surely there is proof. Ghosts are the proof — the tens of thousands of reports of ghost persons and ghost events. Ghosts are the transmitting and recreating of old things and old doings.

You do not accept ghosts? You have not been touched even once by the ghost river named Pharpar? It is not good to remain untouched by it. It is the river of resurrection. If you will not accept ghosts, neither will you accept one risen from the dead.

The dowser turned inside out is the eidolon man. Joseph Waterwitch was a supreme dowser. His associate Abel Landgood was a dowser-inside-out, an image man or an eidolon man. As a projector of valid eidolons, images, and recreations, he was as expert as a formally untrained person can be.

The great breakthrough arrived with the acquaintance and association of Waterwitch and Landgood. Together they drew up the Landwitch Covenant. They had the whole procedure completed between them before they went to have it instrumented.

Abel Landgood had had a most normal childhood, even excessively normal. He had walked and talked with ghosts from the day he was able to walk and talk. All children do this, but not all are as good at fixing ghosts as was Abel. He was an imaginative and creative boy. He was weirdly happy in his relations with the world, and that is always important. And he did not like empty spaces at all. Whenever he found a stubbornly empty space, he filled it with his imagination. There had been an empty space between the alley fence and the alley behind his house. Abel filled it with three apple trees and some blackberry bushes, and he would eat apples and blackberries until he got sick.

There was also a little vacant half-lot across the alley. A house had once stood there. It had burned down. Abel put another house there, a funny-looking house. He put a very fat woman and a very thin man to live in the house, and he fixed their names to be Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster. He put a boy to live in the house and fixed his name to be Mikey Ostergoster. Mikey fixed a cat. Abel fixed a dog that chased the cat away. Mikey fixed a crazy man to chase the dog with a stick. Abel fixed a soldier to chase off the crazy man. Mrs. and Mr. Ostergoster came out and quarreled with the soldier. Everybody began to fight then. Abel's father came out and unhinged all those folks and the funny-looking house also. And those things were gone in a blinking.

“You shouldn't have brought back the Ostergosters,” Abel's father told him when they were alone and the echoes of the disturbance were retreating into the secondary patina. “There are people in the neighborhood who still remember them, and remember how they burned in the little house there, ah, in the little house that is not there. And you shouldn't have brought back the Confederate soldier to chase off the crazy man. With our reputation, you can't afford to seem too old-line Southern. And you shouldn't have brought back that particular dog. I remember that dog before they had to kill it. It was one mean dog — it's a wonder you weren't bitten. Cool it a little bit, Abel, or people will think you're an odd kid.”

But Abel Landgood wasn't an odd kid at all. He was absolutely normal. It's the kids who lack or lose the basic talents who are odd.

The Landgoods had to move twice during the childhood and adolescence of Abel. The family seemed to attract ghosts, and the neighbors objected. (Ghosts are normal, but people often react abnormally to ghosts.) It was not all Abel's doings about the ghosts. Like Joseph Waterwitch, Abel Landgood did not acquire all his talent in his own generation. Both his father and his mother had talent.

And, like his parents, Abel retained his talents after he had become an adult. An average child will lose such abilities, but a normal child will retain them.

Joseph Waterwitch (the man with the locating or homing beats, who could bring any interesting location or time or patina into focus and enjoy it) met Abel Landgood (the man with the strong imagination, the image-projecting or eidolon-making talent by which interesting old things could be enjoyed by everybody). They realized that between them they could recreate anything that had ever been — or anything that had ever existed strongly enough to leave its impress on time in patina-form, for patina is the living precipitate of time. On the basis of their meeting and acquaintance they drew up the Landwitch Covenant.

Needing guidance, the two men joined forces with John Dragon, the dean of soft sciences at Southwestern Polytech and with Cris Benedetti who was professor of miscellaneous subjects. Dragon got an appropriation, mostly travel money, to test the Covenant in a puzzling historical situation; one far enough distant to be beyond intervening personal passions and prejudices. Cris Benedetti took the two talented gentlemen down to Barnaby Sheen's electronics shop where two young electronics geniuses, a smooth-faced young man named Roy Mega and a hairy-faced young man named Austro, built imposing and sophisticated instruments that would reinforce the talents of the two men and would also give a scientific appearance to the enterprise.

“I believe that the patina-deposit complex is so complete,” Joe Waterwitch had said on the eve of their first monumental testing, “that it would not greatly matter if all life should disappear from Earth. Secondary life would immediately spring from these deposits. The many millions of micro-books written on skins (on the skins of the rocks, on the skins of everything) would bring forth recreated life — whatever life was most ready and most avid to be resurrected. I believe that I have already experienced glimpses and manifestations of the reactivating mechanism. It would be a curious life and a curious world then. Everything in it would be the ghost of something that had gone before, but the combinations would be new, the motifs and forums would be completely fresh. It would not be a sequential world or a rational one. Anomaly would be characteristic. It would be like — ”

“It would be like the world we live in now,” Cris Benedetti said. “You have described our own world perfectly and I suspect that your thesis is correct. We live in a recreated secondary. The evidence shows that absolutely. All life did suddenly disappear from Earth — I'm not sure when this happened. Secondary life, made up entirely of anomalous ghosts, did spring up from old residues written small on various skins. We are the anomalous ghosts and that world is our world.”

“I believe that there are a few slight objections to your theory,” John Dragon said with that deadly seriousness that is found only in citizens of secondary worlds. “There are so many things about us that have to be happening for the first time. There are things too flimsy ever to be reproduced. However, we may be living in an abortive secondary.”

III

The constituted body known as the Landwitch Covenant, that para-archeological investigating team, failed its first major test. Its little movie, The Fall of Damascus, filmed on a working site, may well have been the worst movie ever made. However its failures came about, it was a sick parody, ridiculously false history, and it simply could not have been a resurrection of the past. It received bitter assessment from the scientific community, for the para-archeological probe had been represented as somehow scientific.

The whole group had been completely discredited; and one Khalid had been voted the ironic award of “Worst Actor of the Year, of Any Year”.

“They gave us no credit at all,” Abel Landgood complained. “This is the first movie ever made to consist entirely of complete ghosts and of complete ghost sites. Who else was ever able to evoke an integrated past so entirely? And of course it is scientific! What else could it be? Admittedly there was something the matter with the past we evoked, but we'll solve that too.”

“ ‘The Worst Actor of the Year, of any Year’!” Khalid fumed. “I'll show them — ”

“Can you get another appropriation, Dragon?” Joseph Waterwitch asked.

“No. I'm out completely,” John Dragon said sorrowfully. “I am ragged, bagged, tagged, and fired from Southwestern Polytech. ‘You're making a mistake,’ I told them. ‘You're destroying the balance of things. You need a dean of soft sciences.’ ‘Not that soft,’ they said. Did you ever watch a ceremonial academic putdown? They cut the brass buttons off my dean's coat, broke my plate and turned my picture to the wall.”

“Worst actor of the year!” Khalid still smouldered. “I'll make them eat that! I don't know why I came through so badly, though. That just wasn't the real me.”

“It isn't fair,” Waterwitch groused. “We're put clear down, but everyone who touched us comes up smelling like lilacs. That kid Austro who works for Sheen, he has a write-up and an article in the latest Geology This Month. The article is Instrumental Reception of Igneous Rock Mantle Data by Means of Pulsating Heterodyning Grids, and it is subtitled Search and Focus, or Do Rocks Remember? And talk about a gadget! That kid must be a freak. It says that the ‘manuscript’ for his article was chiseled on thin stone tablets.”

“Who does he think that he is — Moses?” Abel Landgood exploded. “He's a friend of yours, isn't he, Benedetti? What kind of friends do you have anyhow?”

“Right now, all of us need all the friends we can get,” Cris Benedetti said.

“Worst actor of the year!” Khalid still moaned. “I'll rub their noses in that before I'm through. But why wasn't it the real me?”

“Maybe Austro can devise a filter for excessively polarized data,” Cris Benedetti said hopefully.

“What hurts is that Austro was working for us and got his ideas from us,” Waterwitch insisted. “And Geology This Month described him as ‘highly professional and impeccably scientific; if he were not so, his theories would be grotesque’. If that fuzz-faced clown is scientific, what are we?”

“Some have it, some don't,” Cris said.

“But he used us.”

“Then we'll use him,” Khalid said reasonably. “There's no doubting it; that kid has drunk from the older river. That means that he can enter and infiltrate and topple, and that's what he is doing. There have to be such manipulators working behind the scenes whenever you go into the business of tumbling walls down, and there have to be these awkward stalking-horses out in front. Though I never before thought of myself as a stalking-horse.”

“Well, just what are you, Khalid?” Landgood asked him. “And what are you doing here?”

“Yes, we've all been wondering about that,” Cris Benedetti said.

“You're a residue among residues, you Arab sand-flea,” Joe Waterwitch said. “I focused on you, and Abel Landgood catalyzed you into apparent being. You're a ghost, a recreation from the past. You aren't real.”

“What man is sure of his own reality?” Khalid asked. “Are any of you? We desert people have gone into this much more deeply than you Franks have. Thinking isn't your line. But you clods precipitated a Khalid as seen through Damascene-Byzantine eyes. No wonder I was selected worst actor of the year! Why didn't you catalyze the real me, the shrewd, brilliant, spacious, nonpareil political and military genius, the leader of the canniest and trickiest and most sophisticated bunch of men ever assembled?”

“Ah, because our data was polarized,” Cris Benedetti said. “We tuned in on residues and patinas as seen by Damascene eyes because those were the eyes that predominated in Damascus. That's the way you looked to those city people, so that's the way you looked to our instruments and film. I believe that it could have been corrected if we had had a little more experience in these things. But it's all water over the dam now.”

“No, no, water under the dam,” shrewd, spacious, nonpareil Khalid said evenly. “Oh, that water is our salvation! Let's go see those kids. Somehow they're at home in the other river.”

“How come you speak English, Khalid?” asked John Dragon, the ex-dean.

“More polarized data,” Khalid explained. “I don't really. But you know me by your own polarized English-speaking minds. So, to you, it seems as if I speak as you do.”

“Are you still in good graces at Polytech, Benedetti?” Landgood asked as the men (and a contingent man, Khalid, a barefoot ghost in odd robes) walked the half-mile down Six-Shooter Road to Sheen's electronic works.

“Oh, they've given me a sabbatical,” Cris said. “They said that I needed a rest. It's fine, I suppose, but it's without pay.”

“Won't it be a little hard on you to go a year without pay, Benedetti?”

“It's seven years. They convinced me that a sabbatical is for seven years. They also said that the sabbatical was renewable. They've always been nice people to work for, and they're scientifically orthodox. Some of them will appear on tonight's TV news spectacular, Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots.”

“Which are the crackpots?” Khalid asked.

“Such as ourselves,” John Dragon said. “Para-archeologists and such.”

“No, no, they're wrong,” Khalid protested. “Because a thing is done badly, as your thing surely was, is no reason to throw it away. Keep with it.”

“That other genius kid, Roy Mega, is just as ambivalent as Austro is,” Abel Landgood sighed. “In the latest Para-Electronics Today he is quoted a bit. I'll read it: ‘The Scientific Community may be a little too prone to suspect vivid depictments of time-residue data. Why should such representation not be vivid; as long as it is valid? The translation of residue data falls as easily into anthropomorphic forms as into modified sine wave or any other graphic form. It is no real indictment that a translation of residual men and sites should look like men and sites. However, we cannot condone the excesses of certain adventurers in their recent extravaganza. As the boys say, Do not task us with Damascus. That was a sad and discrediting thing. We wash our hands of such excesses’.”

“With which water does he wash his hands?” Khalid asked. “From which side of the she-wolf does this cub suck? Ambivalence may often be its own best tactic, but not always. We will see.”

“There's more,” Landgood said. “He writes, ‘We must begin to accept the fleshing of time-residue ghosts, just as we have arrived at accepting the solid fleshing of TV images. Yet we do well to be suspicious if they are of too funny a flesh. Malodorous and deformed ghosts disprove themselves’.”

“I'm one of those he means,” Khalid grumbled. “Worst actor of the year! Malodorous and deformed ghost! I'll come back on them. I'll rub their noses in it.”

“He goes on,” said Landgood, “ ‘We, along with all responsible scientists, must reject these current debasements of — ’ ”

Landgood, reading, collided with Roy Mega, who was strolling in front of Sheen's electronics building.

“It's good to hear oneself quoted with such total preoccupation,” Roy Mega said. “Gentlemen, ah, I see that you have one of the funny fleshies with you.”

“A care, young colt,” Khalid said with barefoot dignity. “I have dined on infidels' tongues before, and I'll have yours out by the roots. There's a special flavor to the waggle-well, young-fool tongue.”

“A care, old nag,” Roy Mega said with gathering hubris. “You aren't real and you aren't here. You are no more than the experimental after-image of a bad motion picture ghost. As an after-image, you are my experiment, and I can terminate you easily. Your apparent continuation after the show and its recordings were finished owes itself to a trick I intruded into the equipment. Your appearance depends on one holding-coil, one small electro-magnet, that I set in the circuits. And it is a time-release holding-coil, so your continuation is quite precarious. In fact, it should — ”

“The coil should have released itself some hours or days ago, should it not, young colt?” Khalid smiled. “It should have released itself when my days of grace were finished. These were days during which I tracked down these men who had had something to do with my awakening. I wanted to find out why I came through so badly, why it wasn't the real me. But now there is more than one holding coil in the equipment you built — and more than one in equipment that you know not of. Oh, I've insured and reinsured the circuitry on which I depend. I am even on the verge of making myself independent of all circuitry, of making myself of less funny flesh, of becoming again more than an electric man. Why should my continuance depend on fleshless circuitry? There is One on whom all depends.”

“Carrock,” said Austro, the young, hair-faced electronics genius, as he came out of the electronics building.

“An even stranger colt, you!” said Khalid, turning pleasantly to Austro. “You, if not the other, have drunk from the hidden and intuitive river. You at least can circumvent and enter the walled city. Possibly of funny flesh yourself, but yours is a greening genius from that hidden water.”

“Mud on my mouth! I have drunk from it!” Austro declared. “And so also has Roy here. He is as conniving and cantankerous a person as yourself, good Khalid. Carrock, why don't we all come inside?”

They all went inside.

“This Roy boy, this dolt colt here, he is not as conniving as myself,” Khalid preached when they had settled indoors. “He does not make sure. He does not check back. Had I placed a time coil in an equipment, I would know it when the time had run out and the coil had forgotten to release. Could so careless a young man have taken Damascus? Could he have taken Ctesiphon or Baghdad?”

“Like Grant took Richmond,” Roy Mega crowed. “Like Sungai took Dashbashpul!”

“Carrock, kids. To peace and to work,” Austro poured aromatic oil on the hidden and intuitive waters. “By the sour'd ears of science, we have more to do than set a-blowing the sand of old battles. Carrock.”

“Are you ever a fancy-talking hair-face!” Khalid jeered. “But I believe that I have heard that you are only a device manufactured by the jinni named Sheen.”

“Oh, Austro's real enough, Khalid,” Cris Benedetti assured the out-of-time Arab when they were all at ease in the lounge of the electronics building. “And Austro is right. We have to set a-blowing the sand of new battles. Now. But how will we do it? The great walls of science are guarded by so many that not even a mouse can get in. They even have a battalion of a thousand and one furious mouse-hunters. And the bright pennant Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots will fly over those high battlements tonight. Khalid, we do need an old desert warrior here.”

“I am the greatest ever,” Khalid answered. “But several times all of you have spoken of science without total respect, and this I do not understand. We are talking about the same thing, high science, Ilm itself? I thought that science was all to the good. The Byzantines believed that they had come to the end of it: we knew that we had just come to the beginning of it; but we came to that beginning with joy. We ciphered more intricate mathematics in the sand than they in their scrolls. We studied more complex star-ways from our sandy hills than they from their towers. We brewed more chemistries from the bark of one incense tree than they from all their archive dust. At desert smitheries and forges we built instruments and machines beyond anything imagined. And we made a rhetoric and eloquence to carry on and announce these things. After Him whom all adore, we most adored science, the holy Ilm. And now you hold science in bad repute? Has the Byzantine contempt and satisfaction come back? Has the wheel turned full circle? It's almost as if we hadn't whipped them completely.”

“Yes, the contempt and satisfaction with past knowledge have come back,” John Dragon said sadly. “And they have encrusted the thing itself. The noble old ship is sluggish and bottom-heavy with barnacles. The Free Brother of Man, your holy Ilm, has imprisoned himself behind walls and is longer free.”

“We know how to enter and to throw down walls,” Khalid said. “You, the two young geniuses, get yourselves busy instrumenting it. There will be an event, will there? Then we will capture and ride that event. We begin the assault tonight. We will assail the encrustation from inside.”

“This isn't Damascus, this isn't Baghdad,” Abel Landgood said.

“Yes it is,” Khalid insisted. “The encrustations, the wallings, the enclosures — they are Damascus, they are Ctesiphon, they are Baghdad. Young geniuses, are you at work on it?”

“Ah, I'm not quite sure what — ” Roy Mega hesitated. “We've been using doubletalk, and we've been washing our hands a lot. I don't know what else — ”

“Carrock, I know, I'm sure,” Austro said. “Here, Roy, come work. We make them use doubletalk in their own mouths.”

“If I only knew what we're supposed to be doing — ” Roy Mega complained.

“If you have to ask, you've missed it,” Khalid told him. “Surely a smart young man like you wouldn't miss it. We need your fine hubris. We need your sharp distinctions. The noble thing itself will be bruised a bit when we tear through its encrustations, but noble things are always tough. Come, come, Frankish men, we need the fine edge of your minds for our polarity. What we really need is irony, a little unconscious irony.”

“That's the hardest kind,” Cris Benedetti said.

“It's almost time for that damnable TV spectacular Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots,” Joe Waterwitch growled through clenched teeth. “I will hate the smugness of it, the exclusions, the cursed close-mindedness. And yet I'll be fascinated by that whole barrel of snakes, and I don't know why.”

“Carrock, so will I, and I do know why,” said the young genius Austro. “Is it two receivers we will set up, Khalid, sir? That way we can have one that shows what everybody sees and the other one to show it the way they're really doing it. That one will be tricky, but very instructive. We will need to follow along as we go so we can modify our patterns. We have to know what it is that we're heterodyning.”

“I can do it,” Roy Mega said. “I was slow to pick it up, and that isn't my way at all; but I know I can handle it now. Exquisite shielding for the check-set, and unscrambling the scramble! It will be the only set in the world to show our process in unmodified form, a real curiosity. And the modified one will show the full flowering, the tilt, the scramble. There's no limit to it — or to just how good we really are.”

“Is there power enough for such amplification?” Cris Benedetti asked. He wasn't an electronics man.

“Electrically, yes,” Roy Mega said. “Mentally — that's up to all of us. And do not be quite your usual kind self, Mr. Benedetti. We need a little urbane arrogance, and we need it from you. We need a little elegance from someone. Is there anyone here elegant besides me? Contribute, men, it is almost time.”

“Carrock, we hope, we hope!” Austro howled. And he was modifying equipment faster than you could blink.

“It shouldn't take much electricity,” Khalid guessed. “We took Damascus with only crude sparking coils and primitive Greek fire to amplify and reinforce our own mind-worm bit. Of course it took us six months before we blew down their minds. And our new assault may take us six months or six years or sixty, but we will finish the beginning of it tonight. As to the power, it couldn't have been more than a nudge the wrong way during your reactivation of us that turned me from the consummate genius and masterful person that I am into the worst actor of any year. This is the subtle touch that seems to change nothing and changes everything. One will hardly be able to point to a single element that is changed at all, yet the totality will be changed absolutely.”

“What is going on here anyhow?” John Dragon demanded.

“The damnable TV news special Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots is going on in thirty seconds,” Cris Benedetti said. “It's to the first audience of one billion persons ever. Be angry or be easy, Dragon, but be yourself. The world is going to see this show through our eyes and attitudes. We must give the world a really fine and new experience. Polarized data! The field has hardly been touched. One can do so many things with it.”

“Mind-worms. We will be mind-worms,” Khalid said. “We are inside them all. We begin the conquest now, and they'll never know what hit them. We ride the current of that intuitive river named Pharpar. We make the whole world see it through our own elegant eyes. I like that ‘elegant eyes’ part.”

“But we can't alter a TV program that is already going on,” Joe Waterwitch protested. “We would have to do — ”

“We are doing,” Roy Mega said.

“Joe, you're the dowser and you don't know where it's at,” Benedetti chortled. “Certainly we can alter it if we bring our equipment and minds and eyes to bear.”

It was quite a good TV spectacular. Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots was a program that people would remember. It would affect them for the rest of their lives.

It wasn't quite what had been expected. The crackpots; they came through as the entrenched inner sanctum boys. It took a lot of courage for the scientific community to confess to such weaknesses in itself.

And some of the things that you had always thought of as a little bit fringe, ah, they got an open-door welcome here. A few of them set you and the whole world thinking on new lines. There has to be something to them: there has to be a lot to several of them. Take that new para-archeology, that especially. By a combination of electronics and human minds, great hunks of the past are really recreated. Old ghosts walk, and they do not look ghostly at all.

And often, in the electronics building there, a glance at the check-set to see from what rough rocks these men present were fashioning such elegant gems! The original had been rough and intolerant. It had been smothering and shriveling. But the check-set was not seen by the billion persons, only by the seven.

Oh, but the great and gracious modification which now became the prime original! Yes, the noble thing itself was bruised a bit when the modification tore through the old encrustations, but noble things are always tough enough to survive: and now, for a while, it was no longer smothered and shriveled.

But the final, elegant, polarized presentation was like an old promise fulfilled, like a hidden river rediscovered. It was an unfolding, a full-flowing. It was finally to see all dimensions of time and space with elegant eyes.

Tongues Of The Matagorda

“I will tell you one of my early adventures,” said Esteban of Azamor, “the adventure that, more than any other, made me what I am today. It is an account that should be cut in crystal for the magnificence of it, but I can do no more than tell it in crystalline words.”

“Make it that they are Quevenes words then,” said a surly Quevenes Indian called Glaukos. “You know what will happen if you continue to use Spanish words.”

“Oh certainly, you will cut another piece out of my tongue. But I've saved you the trouble. Here is a piece of my tongue that I cut off already. So if in my account I do use a Spanish word now and then, it is already paid for.”

“This is no piece of your tongue,” Glaukos said. “It is a piece of moon-crab meat. But I am starving so I will eat it.” The Quevenes did not like their slaves to talk in words they did not understand; and to compel them to speak Quevenes they had indeed cut notches and slivers from the tongues of Esteban and also his companions in slavery, Captain Dorantes and Captain Castillo.

“It was in the year of Restored Salvation 1481 and I was the son of the Emperor Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire when I decided that I would reach out my hand and obtain as big a share of the world and its glory as I was able to do,” Esteban began his tale. “Oh, even more than I was able to do, for I intended to go into the area of the impossible. My father the Emperor had given me five realms in Europe and two in Asia, but that was hardly enough to satisfy a shining young man like myself.”

“I have never heard of the Emperor Maximilian having a black son,” Captain Castillo objected in that sunny voice of his.

“Did I say that I was a black person then?” Esteban asked. “No. I was fair of hair and skin. I was tawny as a lion, and as fierce. It was in the course of this heroic adventure that I became a black person. Pay attention and do not interrupt. There is a rite and ceremony which is enacted on the day when the son of an Emperor decides to reach out his hand. Certain Jinns (Christians pretend not to know about the Jinns, but the Moslems understand that God created three intelligent species, Angels, Jinns, and Humans) come to the son of even a Christian Emperor and pledge themselves to do favors for him and to stand by him in both success and adversity. They do this because every Jinn is himself the son of an Emperor somewhere. One of them promised me money unfailing; one of them promised me love unfailing; one of them promised me adequate might at arms against opponents of ordinary flesh. And so the promises were made by seven of them. But the eighth of them made me an odd and crabbed promise: ‘If you are ever in an encounter where you are overmatched,’ he said, ‘you will have the choice of changing places with your opponent in all ways.’ ‘It's a favor of which I will have no use,’ I said. ‘By whom would I be overmatched?’ ”

“With nine hundred and ninety-nine followers, all of them like young lions in their hearts, I conquered three more realms in Europe, three more in Asia, and three in Africa where I had been unrealmed before. Then I came to the central realm of Africa, the Kingdom of Sonrai. We had come over five hundred land leagues of desert to the wonderful City of Timbucktoo the capital of Sonrai which is like a paradise in the middle of the desert. There we met a force ten times our numbering that was captained by the tall and muscular son of King Askia of Sonrai. This son, who was named Esteban, was a great captain of combat. To each of my lion-spirited men he assigned ten of his strong and swift warriors. Each of my men killed the ten men sent against him, but each of my men lost his own life in slaying them. And finally there was nobody left except myself and Esteban the son of King Askia. ‘Well, find nine more men somewhere and I will battle you,’ I said. ‘It is time that I put a finish to this.’ ‘It is myself and thyself,’ the big Esteban told me. ‘I do not need nine other men. Perhaps you need them, but they will not be provided to you.’ We began to fight with swords, and suddenly I was afraid. This Esteban was stronger and quicker than myself.

“His sword was longer and heavier and his shield was taller and more massive. He began to kill me with sure and careful blows, and I caught the frightening scent of my own dead body as it would be by sundown of that day. So, in my mind, I called on the Jinns for help. The first seven of them said ‘We have already given you all that we promised to you, money and love and adequate might at arms against opponents of ordinary flesh. It is no fault of ours that this Esteban is of extraordinary and spectacular flesh.’

“ ‘Oh, eighth Jinn, I am overmatched,’ I cried then. ‘For what it's worth, let me change places with this strong opponent in all ways.’ At once I felt myself to be taller and stronger and faster of hand and arm and body. At once I was handling more easily a longer and heavier sword and taller and more massive shield. And my opponent was no longer a black African man, but a tawny lion man the color of desert sand, and his face was the face that had always been mine. And I saw that I myself now had black hands and arms and legs. So I killed the sand-colored man who had been myself, and cut off his head, and cut his body into four quarters. And by this I myself became Esteban of the spectacular flesh. ‘Oh my son!’ King Askia of Sonrai cried, and he came and put his arms around me. ‘There has never been such a warrior as you since myself in my youth.’ So I became Esteban the son of King Askia of Sonrai, and I have been that person ever since. I still have memories of the years when I was the son of Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire, but that old body of mine has long since turned to dust. I don't know what the original Esteban has memories of or where his essence is now. I guess I am living in that essence. That is my heroic adventure.”

“It is a good enough tongue,” a Quevenes Indian called Melas said, “but it would be better if we had drummers to drum it and fluters to flute it. It lacks a little without them.”

“But when I came upon you, Esteban, you were a boy of no more than thirteen years old,” Captain Dorantes said, “and that was thirty-two years after the year 1481 of Restored Salvation.”

“Oh, that is a part of a different story,” Esteban said, “in which I had found and drunk of the fountain of youth and had become a young boy from it. And in my boyish guise I had wandered away from the Kingdom of Sonrai, and I have lost it this while.”

“I'll tell you a tongue of an adventure that I had,” said the Quevenes Indian called Glaukos, “which concerned the devil and his ugly sister. This was the devil named Jube, not your own devil named Diablo, who is not a real person.”

There were five of them sitting on the mud-sand of Matagorda Bay of the Gulf of Mexico, and the year was probably 1530 or 1531. They were the big black man Esteban of Azamor, and the two Spanish men Captain Dorantes and Captain Castillo. These three were the first great explorers to cross the North American Continent, but there was no one to call them great here. They were temporarily (for more than a year now) slaves of the Quevenes Indian people. And there were two Quevenes Indian men, Glaukos and Melas. All five of these were ‘head-taller men’, men who stood a head taller than ordinary humans. All five of them, as it happened, were starving to death. In all other things they were distinctive and did not resemble each other very much.

This area was parched and its grass turned brown and black from lack of rain. Salt water had risen in all their water holes. Black buzzards were hanging in the hot air discussing whether this would be ‘carrion evening’ or not. They were weighing the five tall men with their hard eyes.

“I was rolling stones with the devil,” Glaukos the Quevenes said. “I had a fine stone with six sides, all of them square, and the numbers on it were from one to six. But the devil (you can believe this or not, as you wish) had a stone with one-more-than-six sides to it, and on the extra side was the one-more-than-six number. As you know, we Quevenes have only the six regular numbers, and we have the saying that anything that cannot be counted with six numbers belongs to the devil. Well, that was all right for a saying, but now the devil was claiming that he had beat me at the stone rolling by rolling a number that I could not match, and that I owed him everything I owned, my fish-trap, my bow, my club, my shells and my colored stones, my life, and my death. ‘If I owe them then I will pay them,’ I said, ‘except the last two. I want to keep my life and my death away from you.’ We have more communication with Jube the devil than other tribes of people have because we are more evil than other people, more Jube's kind of people. ‘I will offer you a barter,’ the devil said. ‘Marry my sister who is the ugliest woman in the world, and I have not been able to find a husband for her anywhere. In barter for your marrying my sister I will wipe out all the debts you owe me and I will also give to you and your group the most favored land in all the world to live in.’ ‘I accept that barter,’ I said. So I married the sister of Jube the devil, and I and my group received this wonderful land, this bay, these islands, these long necks of land, the smaller bays and smaller islands. It's true that this is the most favored land in the world. We have it good here, and we starve only five moons of the year. What other tribe of people in all the world does not starve at least six or seven moons of the year? And for two moons every year, when the stinker fish are swarming, we become the fattest people in the world. And my wife being the ugliest woman anywhere doesn't bother me at all, since I am the ugliest man. I tell you that there is nobody who can get ahead of me on a barter, not even Jube, the devil. This is my own tall tongue. It is the life of myself and of all my group.”

“It is a good tall adventure,” Captain Castillo acknowledged. This, as it happened, was in the middle of the five-moon period in which the Quevenes people always starved, and their one black and two white slaves would starve with them. Besides it being the regular starvation season, there was a terrible drought in the area this year. The Matagorda Bay (the name meant ‘Fat Bush Bay’ or, ‘Fat Thicket Bay') was ‘Skinny Bush Bay’ this season.

Oh, there were sand fleas to catch and eat, but it takes 20,000 of them to make a good meal, and it takes five days to catch that many of them. The sand-mud shore of the Matagorda was very low, and it seemed as if they looked up at the hazy green water and its puny waves as they swished over the mud-sand. It was dry in that land and all of their sweet water holes had gone salt.

“I will tell you all an heroic adventure of my own,” Captain Dorantes said. “It happened in the year 1520. Esteban will tell you that it could not have happened, that he was with me every moment of that year. But Esteban is mistaken. He has a forgetfulness of ninety-nine days during which I left him with a pawn broker in the town of Florence, in Italy. ‘Let us step into this pawn shop and see if we can buy a good used falcon cheap,’ I said to Esteban on that day. I am sorry that I just used a Spanish word, but I don't believe that the Quevenes have such a word or thing as pawn broker.”

“We know what he is,” said the Quevenes called Melas. “He is one who barters in used property and used persons.”

“Yes,” Captain Dorantes said. “I came to the pawn shop in Florence because, whatever people say, one thing is not always as good as another. What I wanted must be of the City-of-Florence sort, and no other variety of it would serve. When I walked into the Florentine pawn shop with Esteban, I gave a secret sign to the pawn broker. He nodded to me. Then he took a needle with a leather bulb attached to it and jabbed it into the arm of Esteban. Esteban immediately became glazed-eyed and out of his wits. The pawn broker took the lid off a clay jar that was taller than a tall man. Then he jabbed Esteban in the buttock with a different sort of needle; and Esteban, still out of his wits, jumped three varas up in the air and came down inside the clay jar. ‘One hundred ducats for him for a hundred days,’ the pawn broker said as he put the lid back on the big jar with Esteban inside it. ‘I agree,’ I told him, and the pawn broker counted out one hundred gold ducats to me. One of the hundred, however, was a Spanish gold ducat, and I had him replace it to me so all of them would be Florentine ducats.

“ ‘I'll work him at night, of course,’ the pawn broker said. ‘I have a fulling mill for fulling cloth. It consists of a strong man with a hammer. He will be the strong man. I have a treadmill that squeezes honey out of the reed-canes from overseas that we begin to grow here. I have another treadmill that drives the grinders to mill wheat and barley and rye and millet. These slaves work very hard for me when they are in this mind-captured state, and they do not really suffer. They believe they are only dreaming that they are trudging on worse treadmills than those in hell and are suffering more hellishly.’ ”

“ ‘That is all right,’ I said. ‘He is very strong.’ I took my hundred gold Florentine ducats then and I went to Spain. There was a civil war going on in Spain at that time and certain cities had risen against the realm. I served as captain for our brave Emperor of Spain to put down this rebellion. But I also intended to locate and possess the greatest treasure in the world which was buried somewhere under the Alcázar Fortress.

“As captain of infantry forces, I broke the back of the rebellion of the cities against Spain. ‘Brave Captain Dorantes,’ the Emperor Charles told me, ‘For your services I will pay you almost any sum as reward. I'll give you twenty gold ducats for having saved Spain.’ ‘One hundred and twenty,’ I countered him. ‘Twenty-five,’ he came back at me. ‘One hundred and eighteen,’ I lowered my figure a little. But we finally fastened onto one hundred gold ducats of Spain as the reward for serving the country. I put them in my pocket along with the hundred gold ducats of Florence, and I went to the Alcázar Fortress and down into the cellar of it. Then I went down into the cellar under the first one, and then to a still lower cellar. I knew that the greatest treasure in the world was in the lowest cellar of the Alcázar. I also knew that the monster who guarded it could be bribed, though this was against the common belief that the monster was incorruptible. But he could only be bribed with the gold ducats of Florence. The father of the monster, a Florentine dragon who had been in the service of the Great Lorenzo, had taught that the only trusted specie in the world was the Florentine. So the monster would have nothing to do with the gold ducats of Spain or Naples or Venice or Constantinople.

“I gave the monster (he was of the genus Draco) the one hundred gold ducats of Florence that I had received from renting out Esteban, and the monster declared me to be the new owner and master of the fortune. I looked at it through the little peep hole into the iron room which contained it. As I had no other place to put it, and no way to carry it away with me, we decided to leave it where it was. The monster transferred the key to the treasure room from one to another of his pockets in token of the changed ownership. So now I am the richest man in the world and the owner of the world's greatest treasure.”

“What are ‘pockets’?” Glaukos asked. “How many of them did the monster have? Maybe that monster had a good thing going.”

“I went back to Florence,” Captain Dorantes said. “And I paid the pawn broker back with the one hundred Spanish ducats. He grumbled that he would rather have Florentine ducats, but he accepted the Spanish. The pawn broker wakened Esteban by jabbing him again with a needle in his buttock, and Esteban leaped three varas up in the air and came down outside the clay jar in which he had been living. I set the good used falcon into Esteban's hands as he woke up. ‘It is a perfect hunting bird, just what I wanted,’ he said. He did not know that ninety-nine days had passed since we had first entered the pawn shop. He thought it had only been an instant.

“The pawn broker gave me one of the motivating sort of needles just to show what a pleasure it was to do business with me. I have it yet. I can, but I will not, jab Esteban in the buttock with it and he will leap three varas into the air and land in a clay jar, though I don't know where the jar will have come from. This is the heroic account of how I became the owner of the greatest treasure in the world.”

“If you make me leap three varas into the air, you will be the clay jar that I will come down in the middle of,” Esteban told Captain Dorantes, “and I will come down hard.”

Matagorda Bay is not the hottest place in the world. It is no more than the third or fourth hottest ordinarily, though now it was a little bit hotter than that because of the long dry weather. It is not the most stinking place in the world. It is about the fifth most stinking. The mosquitoes there are not the largest in the world. They are only the eighth largest. But if the Matagorda was not the worst place in the world, neither was it the best. The official name of the place was Holy Ghost Bay, but the Holy Ghost had traded it off to Jube the devil.

“I'll tell you the tongue of how I became the greatest hunter in the world,” the Quevenes Indian named Melas said. “I had always been a great runner. I could run so far and so fast because I imitated the running animals: the wolf for the long hard run, and the mountain lion for the shorter bursts of steep speed. A man can sometimes run down a deer by himself, but he does it by running like the running animals. I ran so much like them that I became them. I ran down on four legs. I leaped. I pounced. I was the tireless wolf for most of the chase, and then I was the leaping mountain lion for the catch and the kill. Persons who saw me running in those ways thought that I was a wolf and a mountain lion. I felt myself to be them too. And so I was them. I would rise in front of the deer in my wolf form and send the deer running wildly across the prairie. And then I would circle around it and get ahead of it again. I was able to do this because when I tired myself out running as a wolf I would change, and then I would have the rested strength of the mountain lion still waiting for me to use. And then, when the myself-as-lion ran, the myself-as-wolf rested; but the itself-as-deer never got to rest. So I am able to drive most of the deer where I want them, and I kill most of them in my own area here. When I kill one, I bury it in the sand-mud for three days to rot a little and to become loose in the joints and easy to devour. And I did that with a deer just three days ago. I had forgotten about it, but now the smell of that deer comes to my nostrils. So we will dig it up and eat it when the sun has dropped one bow-length lower.

“But first I must tell you that all deer are not as they seem. Some of them are human people. Young women and girls like to run in the form of doe deers, and they cannot change back into their human form while they are being hunted and kept on the move. It is a sort of summer moon-madness that compels them, some of them quite young girls, to run across the grassy plains and on the edges of the salt marshes as doe deers. And some of the young men like to run in the form of buck deers. I believe it is persons blowing on little cottonwood flutes who set them onto this notion of turning into deers and running. Seven years ago, a young woman of this region gave birth to a little fawn deer. And I think it must have been that both herself and her young man were running and playing in the deer form when they mated.

“When you kill a human in the deer form, then it dies as a deer and you bury it as a deer. But when you dig it up to eat it three days later, you may find that it is the dead body of a human person. I myself have got several bleak surprises this way, once digging up the body of one of my daughters that I had buried as a killed deer, once digging up the body of one of my sons in the same kind of event. I have digged up five different human persons that I have buried as deers. They all have a whiff on them a little bit different from that of those who are both buried and dug up as deer. I think I catch that little-bit-different whiff now, from a mud mound only six paces from here. When the sun has dropped another half bow-length, we will dig it up and see which it is; but I will put another log on the fire now to be ready. And when we have dug it up and roasted it a little bit, we will eat it with either a sad or a happy stomach, whatever the case may be.”

Well, they were hungry. They needed big meat of some kind.

“I also have an heroic story-adventure to tell,” Captain Castillo said. “It is not that I myself am a hero either inside or outside of the story. It is that I have been in places that were themselves heroic, that I have washed in heroic sunshine and heroic water, and I have walked on heroic hills, aye, and in heroic skies. But what I am going to do now is live out a small heroic adventure rather than tell it.

“John writes in his Apocalypse ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no sea.’ I believe that this passage as we have it is somehow incomplete. A seaman once spoke to me of this very passage ‘If there is no sea there, then I won't go.’ But I believe there will be a new ocean, one of sheer crystal, and that John somehow forgot to mention it. I am a man who is in love with water, even such rotten water as surrounds us here.

“I have been called a dreamy man; and all my life I have dreamed (both sleeping and waking) of blessed and crystalline water of every form. When I became a doctor of medicine, this dream of sweet waters went through my healing. When I became a captain of soldiers, the oceanness of writhing waters ran through all my authority. I have walked on arching bridges of water; not of ice, but of water. I have climbed cliffs of water and lived in water castles. And I've gone down into watery caverns deeper than the dolphins can go.

“I believe that water is the same as grace when it falls as rain on the earth. I believe that an insufficiency of sweet water is meant to be a pang and a punishment, and that the present salt swamps of the Matagorda are the salt swamps of Purgatory itself. But I also maintain that every person and group can say when his sentence and punishment has gone on long enough. I am about to say it now.

“I myself have been given powers. I am able to lock up a sky so that neither rain nor grace may fall upon a region, though I have never done that. Now I believe that I have the power to open a clogged sky so that rain and grace may fall again.”

“Not quite yet,” said the Quevenes man named Glaukos. “Let us set the rocks above the fire first to make a roof over it.” They had two very large flat rocks, and it took all five of the powerful men to work together to lift each of them. They lifted them and set them on a frame of sticks and stones about the height of a man above the hearth stone. It would shed rain pretty well. It would protect the fire.

By the time the hearth was roofed, the armadillos had arrived. They stood and rattled their armor, and whimpered. There were five of these armadillos in a small tribe that had come for the last four days and rattled insistently. The men always knew what the little armored beasts wanted, that they should dig with their spade deeper into the sand-mud than the animals could dig. For four days, in response to their whimpering, Esteban had dug with the spade more than eight feet deep. Each day the animals had gone down to the water that seeped into the hole, and had found it salt, and had gone away sorrowful. If there was any sweet water at all it would ride on top of the heavier salt water. Today the armadillos came even less hopefully than before. If they did not find sweet water today they would die. So Esteban began to dig another deep hole. And Captain Dorantes and the Quevenes called Melas set out all their clay pots and bowls to catch the rain.

“There is a small cloud,” Captain Castillo was saying. “I command that it become a big cloud and that it come over us. I command it as a natural element, and I pray to the Holy Ghost that it may happen.”

“This man does not know how to command!” the Quevenes called Glaukos jeered. “It is I who command it! Tremble, cloud, and come.”

“Let us all command, exhort, pray, and cajole the cloud at the same time,” Esteban boomed reasonably enough from the hole he was digging. And the five of them, the Captains Dorantes and Castillo, the African Black Esteban, the two Quevenes Indians Glaukos and Melas, all commanded and reasoned and prayed and cajoled. Then something began to happen with a jolt, as if the machinery of the sky had made a mechanical shift.

“I can feel that the tide has turned in our favor,” Captain Castillo said.

“The tide is too slow and too sour,” Glaukos admonished. “Has the cloud turned in our favor?” He was watching it with his ugly face intently upraised.

Yes it had. The little white cloud that had intended to pass them to the north was now veering back towards them. It turned black and enlarged itself. It filled the sky over their heads and began to rain on them, softly and steadily.

“Men, do not just stand there!” the Quevenes called Melas cried. “When there is one good luck try for another one immediately before the first one grows cold. We may yet have meat that we will not have to shudder at when we eat. Help me dig out the buried deer. With our new running luck, it will still be deer when we dig it out and eat it.”

Esteban came out of his dug water hole with his spade. The armadillos tumbled down into it and howled with delight to find sweet water. Of course it was sweet. The rain water was pouring down into that hole in little torrents. Then Esteban with the spade, and others with rocks and sticks to dig with, uncovered the body of the buried deer. At first it seemed that they had uncovered the face of a human girl, but that was only the tricky afternoon light coming fractured through the rain into the burial hole. It was a doe deer of incomparably gentle expression. It was mildly rotten. It had become loose in the joints and would be easy to dismember and roast and devour. So they dug it out of the hole.

The deer skinned easily, the mild rot helping. It unjointed easily. Bigger pieces went directly into the flat fire in the hearth stone, and smaller pieces were spitted in the flame-fire for quicker charring and eating. The men divided the tongue of the deer into five parts, one for each of them, for they were all tongue men this day.

“Your tongue, your story was the strongest, water-master,” the Quevenes Glaukos told Captain Castillo. “It brought rain for our dying piece of land and good water for our sandy throats.”

“No, my tongue, my story was the strongest,” the Quevenes Melas contradicted. “It brought deer meat and saved us from starvation. My mind was confused with my hunger and I did not even remember that I had killed and buried a deer three days ago. Then my ‘tongue’ which I told recalled the happening to my mind, so we do not have to starve to death after all. And now our luck has changed to the good. The black buzzards are gone out of the sky, and the white gulls have come to bounce and holler in the rainy air. Gulls are good luck birds.”

Five heroic stories! Five heroic tongues! (The Quevenes Indians call a ‘story’ a ‘tongue’.) The five tongues hadn't resembled each other very much. They had only one thing in common: all of them had been true.

“I feel it,” Esteban said. “Something is flowing for us now. Howl, tongue, howl! Burned yourself, didn't you? You knew you'd get burned if you tried that piece of deer meat while it was still hot. But it's better than starving.”

“I also feel the power flowing in our favor,” Captain Dorantes said. “Oh, from this moment on, greatness has found us!”

“A wonderful tide and a wonderful favor,” Captain Castillo said. “We will not die in this miserable place. We will travel five hundred hard land leagues to get to other places, but then we will have our crystal day in the sun, in the new sun.”

The five armadillos waddled off, fat-stomached from the new water they had drunk. They were making satisfied and thankful grunts. They raised their tails in going-away salutes as they passed. Even their skinny tails had row after row of skinny armored scale plates.

Days of Grass, Days of Straw

1

Fog in the corner and fog in his head:

Gray day broken and bleeding red.

 — Henry Drumhead, Ballads

Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. No, it was a city road. It was really a city trail or path. He was walking in a fog, but the fog wasn't in the air or the ambient: it was in his head. Things were mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something wrong about things.

Oceans of grass for one instance. Should a large and busy city (and this was clearly that) have blue-green grass belly-high in its main street? Things hardly remembered: echoes and shadows, or were they the strong sounds and things themselves? Christopher felt as though his eyeballs had been cleaned with a magic cleaner, as though he were blessed with new sensing in ears and nose, as though he went with a restored body and was breathing a new sort of air. It was very pleasant, but it was puzzling. How had the world been pumped full of new juice?

Christopher couldn't recall what day it was; he certainly didn't know what hour it was. It was a gray day, but there was no dullness in that gray. It was shimmering pearl-gray, of a color bounced back by shimmering water and shimmering air. It was a crimson-edged day, like a gray squirrel shot and bleeding redly from the inside and around the edges. Yes, there was the pleasant touch of death on things, gushing death and gushing life.

Christopher's own name didn't sound right to him. He didn't know what town he was in. Indeed he'd never before seen a town with all the storefronts flapping in the wind like that. Ah, they'd curl and bend, but they wouldn't break. A town made of painted buckskin, and yet it was more real than towns made of stone and concrete.

He saw persons he almost knew. He started to speak and only sputtered. Well, he'd get a newspaper then; they sometimes gave information. He reached in his pocket for a coin, and discovered that he didn't have regular pockets. He found a little leather pouch stuck in his belt. What's this? What else was stuck in his belt? It was a breechclout with the ends fore and aft passing under his belt. Instead of pants he had a pair of leggings and a breechclout, three-piece pants. Oh, oh, what else?

Oh, he wore a shirt that seemed to be leather of some sort. He wore soft shoes that were softer than slippers. He was hatless, and his hair came forward over his shoulders in two tight long braids. He had dressed casually before, but he didn't remember ever dressing like this. How were the rest of the people dressed? No two alike, really, no two alike.

But he did bring a coin out of that leather pouch that was stuck in his belt. A strange coin. It wasn't metal: it was made of stone, and made roughly. On the face of it was the head and forequarters of a buffalo. On the reverse side was the rump of a buffalo. The words on the obverse of it read WORTH ONE BUFFALO, and on the reverse they read MAYBE A LITTLE BIT LESS.

“And where do I put a coin in this contraption?” Christopher asked himself angrily and loudly. A hand extended itself, and Christopher put the coin in the hand. The hand belonged to an old wrinkled brown man, swathed in robes and folds of blackened leather, and sitting in the dust.

The old man gave Christopher a newspaper, or gave him something anyhow. It was on leather that was almost board-stiff. It was illustrated, it was printed in a variety of hands; and here and there it had a little hair growing out of it as though its leather were imperfectly scraped.

“Wait, your change,” the old brown man said. He gave Christopher seven small coins. These were neither metal nor stone: they were clay baked in the sun. The obverse of each was the head and fore of a badger, puffed and bristled and hissing in high defense. And the reverse was the reared rump of the same badger in embattled clawed stance.

“Price go down a little but not a whole badger,” the old man said. “Take three puffs. It's close as I can get to even change.” Wondering at himself, Christopher took three strong rich smokey puffs from the old pipe of the old man. He felt that he had received full value then. It was about all that he felt satisfied with. But is it wrong to feel unsatisfied, which is unsated? Christopher thought about it.

He went over and sat on a bale of rags outside the shop with the sign HOT ROAST DOG FOR SALE OR GIVE. The bale of rags seemed somehow lively; it was as if there was no division between the animate and the inanimate this day. He tried to make something out of the strange newspaper or the strange day, or the newly strange man who was apparently himself.

Oh, the newspaper was interesting. It could be read one way or another: by picture, by stylized pictograph, by various writings and printings. Here were anecdotes; wooly, horny, bottomlessly funny anecdotes: and they were about people that Christopher knew, or almost knew. And all the people passing by (Christopher realized it with a chuckling gasp) were also people that he knew or almost knew. Well, what made them so different then? They looked like familiar people, they smelled like familiar people (which the familiar people erstwhile had not done), they had the familiar name that came almost to the edge of the tongue.

“But what town is this? What day is this? What is the context?” Christopher wailed out loud. “Why is everything so strange?”

“Kit-Fox, you call me?” Strange Buffalo boomed at him. Strange Buffalo was a big and boisterous man and he had always been a good friend of Christopher. He had? Then why did he look so different? And why was his real name, or his other name, now unremembered?

“Will the buffalo go to war, do you think, Kit-Fox?” Strange Buffalo asked him. “Do you believe that the two great herds of them will go to war? They come near to each other now and they swear that neither will give way.”

“No, there will be only the pushing and goring of a few thousand bulls, not much else,” Christopher said. “The buffalo simply haven't the basis for a real war.” He was surprised at his own knowledge of the subject.

“But the buffalo have human advisers now,” Strange Buffalo said. “It began with the betting, of course, but now we can see that there is real cause of conflict on both sides. I dabble in this myself and have some good ideas. We are tying spear-shafts to the horns of some of the big bulls and teaching them to use them. And we're setting up big bows and teaching them to bend them with their great strength, but they haven't any accuracy at all.”

“No, I don't believe they were meant to have a real war. It's a wonderful dust they raise, though, when they all come together. It makes you glad to be alive. And the thunder of their millions of hoofs!” (There was the distant sound of morning thunder.) “Or is that a thundering in the mountains?” Kit-Fox — ah, Christopher was asking.

“Well, there is quite a clatter in the mountains this morning, Kit,” Strange Buffalo was saying in happy admiration. “The deep days, the grass days like this one aren't come by easily. It's a wonder the mountains aren't knocked to pieces when the big prophets pray so noisily and wrestle so strong. But, as the good skin says, we must work out our salvation in fear and thundering.”

“Is it not ‘In fear and trembling’?” Christopher asked as he lounged on the lively bale of rags.

“No, Kit-Fox, no!” Strange Buffalo pealed at him. “That's the kind of thing they say during the straw days; not here, not now. In the Cahooche shadow-writing it says ‘In fear and chuckling,’ but the Cahooche words for thunder and chuckling are almost the same. On some of the Kiowa antelope-skin drawings, ‘In scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.’ I like that. I wish I could pray and wrestle as wooly and horny as the big ones do. Then I'd get to be a prophet on the mountain also, and I'd bring in more days of grass. Yes, and days of mesquite also.”

“The mountain is a funny one this morning, Strange Buffalo. It doesn't reach clear down to the ground,” Christopher said. “There's a great space between, and there are eagles flying underneath it.”

“Ah, it'll fall back after a while, Kit-Fox, when they have won or lost the wrestling for the day; after they have generated sufficient juice for this day, for I see that they have already won it and it will be a day of grass. Let's go have a rack of roast dog and a gourd of choc beer,” Strange Buffalo proposed.

“In a minute, Strange Buffalo. I am in the middle of a puzzle and I have this fog in my head. What day is this?”

“It's one of the days of grass, Kit-Fox. I just told you that.”

“But which one, Strange Buffalo? And what, really, are ‘days of grass’?”

“I believe that it is the second Monday of Indian Summer, Kit-Fox,” Strange Buffalo was saying as he gave the matter his thought and attention. “Or it may be the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn. We're not sure, though, that it is a Monday. It sounds and tastes more like a Thursday or an aleikaday.”

“It sure does,” Christopher — ah, Kit-Fox agreed.

A laughing, dying man was carried past by four hale men. This fortunate one had been smashed by bear or rolled on by horse or gored by buffalo, and the big red blood in him was all running out.

“It works,” the happy dying man cried out. “It works. I got a little too close to him and he ripped me to pieces, but it works. We are really teaching those big bulls to use the spears lashed to their horns. Others will carry on the work and the fun. I bet that I've had it.”

“A little blood to bless me!” Strange Buffalo cried out, and the dying man splashed him with the rich and rigorous blood.

“For me also,” Kit-Fox begged, and the dying man smeared him with blood on the brow and breast and shoulders and loins. Two other friends, Conquering Sharp-Leaf and Adoration on the Mountain, came and were blessed with the blood. Then the man died and was dead.

“There is nothing like the fine rich blood to make a grass day sing in your head and in your body,” Strange Buffalo exulted. “On the straw days they try to hide the blood or they bleed in a dark corner.”

(What was all this about the grass days and the straw days? There was now a sordid dull-dream quality, a day-of-straw quality that kept trying to push itself in. “For a little while,” it begged, “to reestablish rigor and rule and reason for just a little while.” “Go away,” said the day-of-grass quality, “The wrestle was won this morning, and this is a day out of the count.”)

Kit-Fox and Strange Buffalo went in, past the booths and work areas of the coin-makers, past the stands of the eagle-wing-bone-whistle makers, and into the shop which had roast dog for sale or give. Strange Buffalo had a shoulder of dog and Kit-Fox had a rack of ribs. There was fried bread also, and hominy and pumpkin. There was choc beer dipped with gourd dippers out of a huge crock. Thousands of people were there. It was crowded and it was supposed to be. The man named Mountain twinkled in the air. Why had they not noticed that about him before?

Folks rolled up the walls and tied them. Now the strong smoke and savor could visit all the places, and the folks in every shop could see into every other shop. It was full morning and beginning to get warm.

“But I still want to know the date,” Kit-Fox insisted, not quite converted to the day of grass, not quite clear of the head-fog that accompanies the sullen burning of the straw days. “What newspaper is this that doesn't have a date? I want a date!”

“Look at it. It tells,” said Strange Buffalo.

“You want a date, honey?” the top of the newspaper writhed in sudden flickering of day-fire print. “Phone 582-8316 and I give you a real date.” Then the day-fire print was gone.

“I hope I can remember that number,” Kit-Fox said anxiously. “Strange Buffalo, where is there a telephone exchange?”

“They are the same and single and right outside past the booths,” Strange Buffalo said. “You were sitting upon it when I came upon you. And you, you old straw-head, you thought it was a bale of rags.”

Kit-Fox went outside, past the booths of the stone-buffalo-coin makers and the clay-badger-coin makers, past the tents of the porcupine-quill dealers, to what he had thought was a bale of rags, a lively bale of rags as he now remembered it. Well, it was an ample lady in her glad rags and she was the telephone exchange lying there in the grass.

“I want to call number 582-8316,” Kit-Fox said uneasily.

“Here are a handful of dice,” the glad-rags lady told him. “Arrange them here in the short grass and make any number you want.”

“But proper dice have numbers only to six,” Kit-Fox protested, “and some of the numbers are higher.”

“Those are improper dice, they are crooked dice,” the lady said. “They have numbers more than six and numbers less than one. Number out your telephone number in the short grass with them.”

“Are you sure this is the way to dial a number?” Kit-Fox asked.

“Sure I'm not sure,” the lady said. “If you know a better way, do it that way. Worth a try kid, worth a try.”

Kit-Fox numbered out his numbers in the short grass.

“Now what do I do?” he asked.

“Oh, talk into the telephone here.”

“That buckskin bag is a telephone?”

“Try it, try it. Drop a badger coin in and try it.”

Kit-Fox dropped the coin into the telephone. “Hello, hello,” he said.

“Hello, hello,” the lady answered. “That's my number you called. You want a date, I wait for you awhile. Believe me, I get pretty tired of waiting pretty soon.”

“I don't think this is a telephone exchange at all,” Kit-Fox grumbled.

“How else I can get guys so easy to drop badger-coins in a buckskin bag,” the lady said. “Come along, lover man, we will have a grand time this day.”

The lady was full-bodied and jolly. Kit-Fox remembered her from somewhere.

“Who are you?” he asked her.

“I'm your wife in the straw days,” she said, “but this is a grass day. They're harder to find, but they're more fun when you find one. They have something to do with grandfather's brother and that wrestling of his.”

“Days of grass, days of straw,” Kit-Fox said as he embraced the lady passionately. “How about a hay day?”

“You mean a heyday? Those are special. We hope to make them more often, if only the wrestle is better. They're fuller of juice than the grass days even. We try to make one now.”

They made a heyday together (together with a whole nation of people); and it went on and on. Day-Torch (that was the lady in the glad rags, the lady who was Kit-Fox's wife during the straw days) bought an eagle-wing-bone whistle from a dealer, and she whistled happy haunting tunes on it. The people followed Kit-Fox and Day-Torch out of town, out to the oceans of buffalo grass and blue-stem grass. They torched everything that was dry and set the blue-black smoke to rolling. But the fundamental earth was too green to burn.

All mounted horses and took lances. They went out after buffalo. Word was brought to them that some of the newly-armed buffalo bulls wanted to schedule battle with them. And the battle was a good one, with gushing blood and broken-open bodies, and many on each side were killed.

Strange Buffalo was killed. That big boisterous man died with a happy whoop.

“Strange Buffalo, indeed,” one of the buffalo bulls said. “He looks like a man to me.”

When the ground there had become too soggy and mired in blood, they adjourned the battle till the next day of grass, or the one after that. Bloody battles are fine, but who wants to spend a whole day on one? There are other things. Kit-Fox and Day-Torch and a number of other folks went to higher ground.

There was a roaring river on the higher ground, the biggest river ever and the loudest.

“Oh be quiet,” Day-Torch said. “You've got the tune wrong.” The great river ceased to roar. Day-Torch whistled the right tune on the eagle-wing-bone whistle. Then the river resumed its roaring, but in this right tune now. This mightiest of all rivers was named Cottonwood Creek.

Henry Drumhead added his beat to the tune. Then the folks had a rain dance till the sharp rain came down and drenched them through. They had a sun dance then, till the sun dried up the mud and began to burn the hides of the people. They had a cloud dance then. They had an antelope dance till enough antelope came to provide a slaughter and a feast. They had a pit dance, a fire dance, a snake dance, and an ashes dance: the ashes from pecan wood and hickory wood are a better condiment than salt to go with roast antelope. They had a feast dance. Then (after a while) a shakedown dance. They had a thunder dance and a mountain dance.

Say, it is spooky to come to the foot of the mountain itself and see the great gap between it and the ground! Rocks and boulders fell off of the bottom of the mountain and killed many of the people below. And, from the mountain itself, a broken, bloody, and headless torso fell down to the earth.

Helen Hightower — ah, that is to say the glad-rag lady Day-Torch — set up a rakish screaming, “The head, the head, somebody forgot the head!”

There was a thunderous grumbling, a mountain-shaking irritation, but the bloody head did come down and smash itself like a bursting pumpkin on the earth.

“A lot of times they forget to throw the head down if you don't remind them,” Day-Torch said.

The meaning of the fallen torso and head was that there was now one less prophet or wrestler on the mountain; that there was now an opportunity for one more man to ascend to glory and death.

Several of the men attempted it by various devices, by piling cairns of stones to climb upon, by leaping into the air to try to grab one of the dangling roots of the mountain, by hurling lances with trailing lianas to fasten quivering in the bottom of the mountain. They played it out in the garish day there where all the colors were so bright that they ached. Many of the men fell to their deaths, but one ascended. There is always one who is able to ascend to the great wrestle when there is an empty place to receive him.

And the one who ascended was — no, no, you'll not have his name from us yet.

Something was mighty odd here. There was just a little bit of something right about things.

2

Draftsman, draftsman, what do you draw? Dog days, draggy days, days of straw.

 — Ballads, Henry Drumhead

3

Indian Summer. A period of warm or mild weather late in autumn or in early winter.

 — Webster's Collegiate

So Webster's Collegiate defines it, but Webster's hasn't the humility ever to admit that it doesn't know the meaning of a word or phrase. And it doesn't know the meaning of this one.

There are intervals, days, hours, minutes that are not remembered directly by anyone. They do not count in the totality of passing time. It is only by the most sophisticated methods that even the existence of these intervals may be shown.

There are whole seasons, in addition to the four regular seasons that are supposed to constitute the year. Nobody knows where they fit in, there being no room for them anywhere in the year; nobody has direct memory of being in them or living in them. Yet, somehow, they have names that have escaped these obliterations. The name of one of the misfit seasons is Indian Summer.

(“Why can't the Indians have their summer in the summertime like the rest of us?” comes a high voice with a trace of annoyance. Not a high-pitched voice: a high voice.)

But all that is neither here nor there. It is yonder, and we will come to it.

Christopher Foxx was walking down a city street. Things were mighty even here, mighty neat. There was just a little bit of something wrong about their rightness.

The world was rubbed, scrubbed, and tubbed; it was shaved, paved and saved; it was neat, sweet, and effete. Ah, the latter was possibly what was wrong with it, if anything could be wrong with perfection. The colors were all flat (flat colors had been deemed best for nerves and such), and the sounds were all muted. Christopher, for a moment, wished for a color that shrieked and for a sound that blazed. He put the thought resolutely out of his head. After all, he had for wife Helen Hightower, and he suffered much criticism because of her gaudiness and exuberance.

Christopher took a paper from the slot on the corner, noted that it was a day in May (he had a queer feeling that he had been uneasy about the date, and yet all that registered with him was that it fell within a familiar month). He entered the North Paragon Breakfast Club. It was there that the Symposium would begin (it would last the whole day and into the night, and be held at various sites) on the multiplex subject “Spatial and Temporal Underlays to the Integrated World, with Insights as to Their Possible Reality and Their Relationship to the World Unconscious and to the Therapeutic Amnesia; with Consideration of the Necessity of Belief in Stratified Worlds, and Explorations of the Orological Motif in Connection with the Apparent Occurrence of Simultaneous Days.” It would have been an exciting subject if Excitement had not become another of the muted things.

Buford Strange was already at the North Paragon, and with him were Adrian Montaigne and Vincent Rue.

“I have already ordered for ourselves and for yourself, Christopher,” Buford said. “It is sheldrake, and I hope that you like it. They will not prepare it for fewer than four persons. ‘We can't go around killing quarter ducks,’ they say.”

“That is all right,” Christopher said meekly. He glanced at the other three nervously. There was surely something familiar about them all.

Great blue mountain thunder! Why shouldn't there be! He had worked with these men daily for several years. But, no, no, his edgy mind told him that they were familiar in some other and more subtle way. He glanced at the paper which he had taken from the corner slot outside. Something like quick flame ran across the top of it and was gone too quickly to verify. But was it possible that the flame had said “You want a date, honey? You phone — ” Of course it was not possible. Clearly, at the top of the paper it was printed A DAY IN MAY. Clearly? Was that clear enough for a date?

“What date is this?” Christopher asked the three of them.

“May the eighth, of course,” Adrian answered him. “You've got today's Journal in your hand and still you ask?”

Well now it was printed clearly there, May 8, and there was no nonsense about “a day in May”; still less was there anything like “You want a date, honey?”

Some wild-looking children burst into the North Paragon Breakfast Club.

“Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” they cried at the four gentlemen there. “Straw-Men! Straw-Men!” The children buffeted the four men a bit, did other extravagant things that are since forgotten, and then they went out of the Breakfast Club again: or at least they disappeared; they were no longer there.

“Why should they have done that?” Adrian asked, puzzled. “Why should they have called us that, and done the other things?”

“Why should who have called us what?” Vincent asked, even more puzzled.

“I don't know,” Adrian said dryly. “It seemed that someone was here and said or did something.”

“You're witless, Adrian,” Vincent chided. “Nobody was here.”

“Straw-Man,” Christopher Foxx said softly. “I remember the word now and I couldn't remember it before. I woke up this morning trying to remember it. It seemed to be the key to a dream that was slipping away in spite of my trying to hang onto it. I have the key word now, but it fits nothing. The dream is gone forever.”

“We will come back to this subject later in our discussions,” Buford Strange said. “I believe that your word ‘Straw-Man,’ Christopher, is a part of the underlay, or perhaps of the overlay, that pertains to our world and our study. There is a good chance that certain children, or perhaps dwarfs or gnomes, entered here several moments ago. Did any of you notice them?”

“No,” said Vincent Rue.

“No one entered,” said Adrian Montaigne.

“No. I didn't see anyone,” said Christopher Foxx.

“Yet I believe that a group did come in,” Buford Strange continued suavely. “It was a group unusual enough to be noticed. Then why didn't we notice it? Or why did we forget, within a short moment, that we had seen it at all? I believe it was because the group was in a different sort of day. I am nearly sure that it is a group that lives in either St. Martin's Summer or in the Kingfisher Days. Ah, here is the sheldrake ready with all the trimmings! Drool and be happy. We shall never know such moment again.”

It was a momentous fowl, no question of that. It was good, it was rich, it was overflowing with juice. It was peer of the fowl that are found in the land named St. Succulentus's Springtime. (What? What? There is a land named that?)

The four noble men (they were ennobled by the circumstance) fell to eating with what, in days of another sort, might almost be called gusto. It was a royal bird and was basted with that concoction of burst fruits and crushed nuts and peppers and ciders and holy oils and reindeer butter that is called — (wait a bit) — 

“Do you know that the sheldrake is really a mysterious creature?” Buford Strange asked as he ate noisily (nobody eats such royal fare in quiet). Buford acted as if he knew a secret.

“It is not a mysterious creature at all,” Adrian countered (he knew it was, though). “It is only the common European duck.”

“It is not only the common European duck,” Buford said strongly. “In other days it may be quite uncommon.”

“What are you saying, Buford?” Vincent Rue asked him. “In what other days?”

“Oh, I believe, possibly, in what the Dutch call Kraanzomer, Crane-Summer. Are we agreed that the other days, the days out of count, are topic rather than temporal?”

“We are not even agreed that there are days out of count,” Christopher objected.

“Drakes' teeth, by the way, while rare, are not unknown,” Adrian Montaigne popped the statement out of his mouth as if in someone else's voice. He seemed startled at his own words.

“Drake is really the same word as Drakos, a dragon,” Christopher Foxx mumbled. “Ah, I was going to say something else but it is gone now.”

“Waiter, what is the name of the excellent stuff with which the drake is basted and to which it is wedded?” Vincent Rue asked in happy wonder.

“Dragons' sauce,” said the waiter.

“Well, just what is the mystery, the uncommonness of the sheldrake, Buford?” Christopher asked him.

“I don't seem to remember,” that man said. “Ah, let us start our discussion with my, our, failure to remember such things. Vincent, did you not have a short paper prepared on ‘Amnesia, the Holes in the Pockets of the Seamless Garment’?”

“I forget. Did I have such a paper prepared? I will look in my own pockets.”

Meanwhile, back on the mountain, back on the thundering mountain there were certain daring and comic persons rushing in and out and counting coup on the Wrath of God. It is a dangerous game. These were the big prophets who prayed so violently and sweat so bloodily and wrestled so strongly. It was they who fought for the salving or the salvation of the days, in fear and in chuckling, in scare-shaking and in laughter-shaking.

The thundering mountain was a funny one this morning. It didn't reach clear to the ground. There was a great space between, and there were eagles flying under it. And the day, the day, was it really the first Monday of Blue-Goose Autumn? Was it really a Monday at all? Or was it a Thursday or an aleikaday?

It was like another morning of not long before. The eagles remember it; the clouds remember it; the mountain wrestlers remember it dimly, though some of the memory has been taken away from them.

Remember how it is written on the holy skins: “If you have faith you shall say to the mountain ‘Remove from here and cast thyself into the sea’ and it will do it. Well, on that morning they had tried it. Several of the big prophets and wrestlers tried it, for they did have faith. They groaned with travail and joy, they strove mightily, and they did move the mountain and make it cast itself into the sea.

But the thunders made the waters back off. The waters refused to accept or to submerge the mountain. The prayer-men and wrestlers had sufficient faith, but the ocean did not. Whoever had the last laugh on that holy morning?

The strivers were timeless, of the prime age, but they were often called the “grandfathers' brothers” by the people. They were up there now, the great prophets and prayer-men and wrestlers. One of these intrepid men was an Indian and he was attempting to put the Indian Sign on God himself. God, however, was like a mist and would not be signed.

“We will wrestle,” the Indian said to God in the mist, “we will wrestle to see which of us shall be Lord for this day. I tell you it is not thick enough if only the regular days flow. I hesitate to instruct you in your own business, and yet someone must instruct you. There must be overflowing and special days apart from the regular days. You have such days, I am sure of that, but you keep them prisoned in a bag. It is necessary now that I wrest one of them from you.”

They wrestled, inasmuch as a man slick with his own sweat and blood may wrestle with a mist: and it seemed that the Indian won the lordship of a day from God. “It will be a day of grass,” the Indian said. “It will be none of your dry and juiceless days.” The Indian lay exhausted with his fingers entwined in the won day: and the strength came back to him. “You make a great thing about marking every sparrow's fall,” the Indian said then. “See that you forget not to mark this day.”

The thing that happened then was this: God marked the day for which they had wrestled, but he marked it on a different holy skin in a different place, not on the regular skin that lists the regular days. This act caused the wrested Day to be one of the Days out of Count.

Prophets, wrestlers, praying-men of other sorts were on the mountain also. There were black men who sometimes strove for kaffir-corn days or ivory-tree days. There were brown island men who wrestled for shellfish days or wild-pig days. There were pinkish north-wood men who walked on pine needles and balsam; there were gnarled men out of the swampy lands; there were town men from the great towns. All of these strove with the Lord in fear and in chuckling.

Some of these were beheaded and quartered, and the pieces of them were flung down violently to earth: it is believed that there were certain qualities lacking in these, or that their strength had finally come to an end. But the others, the most of them, won great days from the Lord, Heydays, Halcyon or Kingfisher Days, Mädchensommer Days, St. Garvais Days, Indian Summer Days. These were all rich days, full of joy and death, bubbling with ecstasy and blood. And yet all were marked on different of the holy skins and so they became the Days out of Count.

“Days out of the Count,” Buford Strange was saying. “It's an entrancing idea, and we have almost proved it. Seasons out of the count! It's striking that the word for putting a condiment on should be the same word as a division of the year. Well, the seasons out of the count are all well seasoned and spiced. There are whole multiplex layered eras out of the count. The ice ages are such. I do not say ‘were such’; I say ‘are such.’ ”

“But the ice ages are real, real, real,” Helen Hightower insisted. (Quite a few long hours had passed in the discussions, and now Helen Hightower, the wife of Christopher Foxx, was off her work at the telephone exchange and had put on her glad rags and joined the scholars.)

“Certainly they are real, Helen,” Buford Strange said. “If only I were so real! I believe that you remember them, or know them, more than most of us do. You have a dangerously incomplete amnesia on so many things that I wonder the thunder doesn't come and take you. But in the days and years and centuries and eras of the straight count there are no ice ages.”

“Well then, how, for instance, would local dwellers account for terminal moraines and glacial till generally?” asked Conquering Sharp-Leaf — ah, Vincent Rue.

(They were at the university, in that cozy room in the psychology department where Buford Strange usually held forth, the room that was just below the special effects room of Prof. Timacheff.)

“How did they account for such before the time of modern geology?” Buford asked. “They didn't. There would be a new boulder one morning that had not been there the day before. The sheep-herder of the place would say that the moon had drawn it out of the ground, or that it had fallen from the sky.”

“You're crazy, Buford,” Adrian Montaigne said with a certain affection. “Why the ice ages then? Why should they have happened, even in times out of count? Why should they have left their footprints in the times within the count?” Adrian had very huge and powerful hands. Why had they not noticed this before?

“I believe there was a dynasty of great and muscular prophets and ghost-wrestlers who wanted to call out the terrible days of Fimbul Winter,” Buford said in a hushed voice. “I don't know why they wanted such things, or why they sweated blood and wrestled prodigies to obtain them. They were men, but they are remembered as the frost giants.”

“Oh my grand, grand uncles!” Day-Torch — Helen Hightower, rather, cried out. “Days of snow! Days of ice! Millions of them!”

“You are saying that certain archetypes — ” Kit-Fox began.

“Shook the pillars of Heaven till the snow and ice fell down for a million days, for a million days out of the count,” Buford Strange finished.

“Strange Buffalo, ah, Buford, you are crazy,” Christopher Foxx chided much as Adrian had. Christopher was talking, but the queerly smiling Adrian had now become the presence in the room. Adrian had the curious, under-rutile of the skin of one who has sweat blood in prayer and buffoonery and passion. Why had they not noticed that of him before?

“I could almost believe that you were one of the great challengers yourself, Strange,” Christopher said to Buford, but he was looking at Adrian.

“You strike me as with a lance, Kit,” Buford said sadly. “You uncover my mortification. For I failed. I don't know when it was. It was on a day out of the count. I failed a year ago or ten thousand years ago. I could not make it among the great ones. I was not cast out to my death: I was never in. There was room for me, and an opportunity for the ascent, but I failed in nerve. And one who has aspired to be a champion or prophet cannot fall back to be an ordinary man. So I am less than that: I am short of manhood. But, sadly, I do remember and live in other sorts of days.”

“I believe that the aberrant days are simultaneous with the prosaic days,” Adrian Montaigne mused. Adrian was quite a large man. Why had they not noticed that before?

“No, no, they are not simultaneous,” Buford was correcting him. “There are the days out of the count and there are the days in the count. Those out of count are outside of time so they cannot be simultaneous with anything. You have to see it that way.”

“You see it your way and I'll see it mine.” Adrian was stubborn. “Consider some of the aberrant times or countries: St. Garvais' Springtime, St. Martin's Summer (the Saints in these names were mountain prophets and wrestlers, but some of them were not at all saintly in their violence), Midas March (the very rich need their special season also: it is said that, in their special month, they are superiorly endowed in all ways), Dog Days, Halcyon Days, Dragon Days, Harvest May (what in the world is harvested in May?), All-Hallow Summer, Days of Ivory, Days of Horn, Indian Summer, Wicklow Week, Apricot Autumn, Goose Summer, Giant-Stone Days, Day of the Crooked Mile, the season called Alcedonia by the Latins. I tell you that all these days are happening at the same time!” This man named Adoration on the Mountain, or rather Adrian Montaigne, had a reckless sort of transcendence about him now.

“No, they do not all happen at the same time,” Strange Buffalo was saying, “for the aberrant days of them are not in time. They are places and not times.”

“Are there no night-time hours in the times out of time?” Vincent Rue asked.

“No. Not in the same sense. They are in another province entirely,” Buford said.

There was thunder in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff on the floor just above them, cheerful, almost vulgar thunder. Timacheff taught some sensational (sense response and also melodramatic) courses up there. But how did he get such special effects anyhow?

“They do happen at the same time,” Adrian Mountain insisted, and he was laughing like boulders coming together. Quite a few things seemed to be happening to Adrian all at the same time. “They are all happening right now. I am sitting with you here this minute, but I am also on the mountain this minute. The thunder in the room above, it is real thunder, you know. And there is a deeper, more distant, more raffish thunder behind it which primitives call God's-Laughter Thunder.”

“This gets out of hand now,” Vincent Rue protested. “It is supposed to be a serious symposium on spatial and temporal underlays. Several of you have turned it into a silly place and a silly time. You are taking too anthropomorphic a view of all these things, including God. One does not really wrestle with God in a bush or a mist, or ride in wildly on a pony and count coup on God. Even as an atheist I find these ideas distasteful.”

“But we are anthropoi, men,” Adrian proclaimed. “What other view than an anthropomorphic view could we take? That we should play the God-game, that we should wrestle with a God-form and try to wrest lordship of days from him, that we should essay to count coup on God, I as a theist do not find at all distasteful.

“Why! One of them is failing now! It happens so seldom. I wonder if I have a chance.”

“Adrian, what are you talking about?” Vincent demanded.

“How could you do it, Adrian, when I could not?” Buford Strange asked.

“Remember me when you come to your place, Adrian,” Day-Torch cried. “Send me a day. Oh, send me a day-fire day.”

“And me also, Adrian,” Kit-Fox begged. “I would love to do it myself, but it isn't given to everyone.”

There was a strong shouting in the room above. There was the concussion of bodies, and the roaring of mountain winds.

“What in all the crooked days is Professor Timacheff doing up there this evening?” Vincent Sharp-Leaf asked angrily. “And what things are you doing here, Adrian? You look like a man set afire.”

“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian of the Mountain cried out in a voice that had its own crackling thunder. He was in the very transport of passion and he glistened red with his own bloody sweat. “One is failing, one is falling, why doesn't he fall then?”

“Help with it, Kit-Fox! And I help also,” Day-Torch yowled.

“I help!” Kit-Fox yelped. The room shuddered, the building shuddered, the whole afternoon shuddered. There was a rending of boulders, either on the prophet's mountain or in the special effects room of Professor Timacheff above them. There was a great breaking and entering, a place turning into a time.

There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room from a great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry.

“I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.

“Timacheff, you fool!” Vincent Rue bawled to the space above them. “Watch your damned special effects! You're wrecking the place!”

Unquestionably that Timacheff was good. He used his special effects in classes on phenomenology that he taught up there.

“The head, the head! Don't let them forget the head!” Day-Torch cried in a flaming voice.

“I just remembered that Timacheff is out of town and is holding no classes today,” Kit-Fox muttered in vulpine wonder.

“Make room for me! Oh, make room for me!” Adrian Mountain boomed. Then he was gone from the midst of them. He would be a factor, though, “in days to come.”

“The head, the head!” Day-Torch flamed and scorched.

Christopher and Vincent tried to straighten up the unconscious Buford Strange. They shook him, but he came apart and one arm came off him. He was revealed as a straw-man filled with bloody straw, and no more.

“Why, he's naught but a poorly made scarecrow,” Christopher Foxx said in wonder. “He was right that one who falls back from it cannot become an ordinary man again. He will be less than man.”

“That's funny. He always looked like a man to me,” Vincent Rue said.

“The head, the head! You forget the head. Let the head fall down!” Day-Torch cried.

And the head fell down.

It smashed itself like a bursting pumpkin on the broken floor.

4

Under the town is a woolier town,

And the blood splashed up and the head fell down.

 — Ballads, Henry Drumhead

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Manuel shouldn't have been employed as a census taker. He wasn't qualified. He couldn't read a map. He didn't know what a map was. And he only grinned when they told him that North was at the top. He knew better.

But he did write a nice round hand — like a boy's hand. He did know Spanish, and enough English. For the sector that was assigned to him, he would not need a map. He knew it better than anyone else, certainly better than any mapmaker.

Besides, he was poor and needed the work.

They instructed him and sent him out. Or they thought that they had instructed him. They couldn't be sure.

“Count everyone? All right. Fill them all in? I need more papers.”

“We will give you more papers if you need more, Manuel, but there aren't so many in your sector.”

“Lots of them, lobos, tejones, zorros, even people.”

“People only, Manuel. Do not take the animals. How would you write them up? They have no names.”

“Oh, yes. All have names. Might as well take them all.”

“Only people, Manuel.”

“Mulos?”

“No.”

“Conejos?”

“No, Manuel, no.”

“No trouble. Might as well take them all.”

“Only people — God give me strength! — only people, Manuel.”

“How about little people?”

“Children, yes, that has been explained to you.”

“Little people. Not children. Little people.”

“If they are people, take them.”

“How big they have to be?”

“It doesn't make any difference how big they are. If they are people, take them.”

Manuel took Mula and went. His sector was the Santa Magdalena — a scarp of baldheaded and desolate mountains, steep but not high, and so torrid in the afternoons that it was said that the old lava sometimes began to writhe and flow again from the sun's heat alone.

In the Center Valley, there were five thousand acres of slag and glassified rock from some forgotten old blast that had melted the hills and destroyed their mantle, reducing all to a terrible flatness. This was Sodom — strewn with low-lying ghosts as of people and objects, formed when the granite bubbled like water.

Away from the dead center, the ravines were body-deep in chaparral, and the mountains stood gray-green in old cactus. The stunted trees were lower than the giant bushes and yuccas.

Manuel went with Mula — a round easy man and a spare gaunt mule. Mula was a mule, but there were other inhabitants of the Santa Magdalena whose genus was less certain.

Yet even about Mula there was an ancestral oddity. Her paternal grandfather had been a goat. Manuel once told Mr. Marshal about this, but Marshal had not accepted it.

“She is a mule,” he said. “Therefore, her father was a jack. Therefore his father was also a jack, a donkey. It could not be any other way, Manuel.”

Manuel often wondered about this, for he had raised the whole strain of animals and he remembered who had been with whom.

“A donkey! A jack! Two feet tall, and with a beard and horns! I always thought he was a goat.”

Manuel and Mula stopped at noon on Lost Soul Creek. There would be no travel in the hot afternoon. But Manuel had a job to do and he did it. He took the forms from one of the packs that he had unslung from Mula and counted out nine of them. He wrote down all the data on nine people. He knew all there was to know about them — their nativities and their antecedents. He knew that there were only nine regular people in the nine hundred square miles of the Santa Magdalena.

But he was systematic, so he checked the list over again and again. There seemed to be somebody missing. Oh yes, himself. He got another form and filled out all the data on himself.

Now — in one way of looking at it — his part in the census was finished. If only he had looked at it that way, he would have saved worry and trouble for everyone, and also ten thousand lives. But the instructions they had given him were ambiguous, for all that they had tried to make them clear.

So very early the next morning, Manuel rose and cooked beans and said, “Might as well take them all.”

He called Mula from the thorn patch where she was grazing and gave her salt and loaded her again. Then they went to take the rest of the census — but in fear. There was a clear duty to get the job done, but there was also a dread of it that the superiors did not understand. There was reason also why Mula was loaded with packs of census forms till she could hardly walk.

Manuel prayed out loud as they climbed the purgatorial scarp above Lost Soul Creek “ — ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora” — the very gulches stood angry and stark in the hot early morning — “y en la hora de nuestra muerte.”

Three days later an incredible dwarf staggered into the outskirts of High Plains, Texas. He was followed by a dying wolf-sized animal that did not look like a wolf.

A lady called the police to save the pair from rock-throwing kids who would have killed them; and the two as yet unclassified things were taken to the station house.

The dwarf was three feet high — a skeleton stretched over with brown-burnt leather. The other was an uncanine looking dog-sized beast so full of burs and thorns that it might have been a porcupine. But it was more a nightmare replica of a shrunken mule.

The midget was mad. The animal had more presence of mind; she lay down quietly and died. That was all she could do considering the state she was in.

“Who is census chief now?” asked the mad midget. “Is Mr. Marshal's little boy the census chief?”

“Mr. Marshal is, yes. Who are you? How do you know of Marshal? And what is that which you are pulling out of your pants — if they are pants?”

“Census list. Names of everyone in town. I had to steal it.”

“It looks like microfilm — the writing is so small. And the roll goes on and on. There must be a million names here.”

“Little bit more, little bit more. I get two bits a name.”

They got Marshal there. He was very busy, but he came. He had been given a deadline by the mayor and the citizen's group. He had to produce a population of ten thousand persons for High Plains, Texas. This was difficult, for there weren't that many people in the town. He had been working hard on it, though. But he came when the police called him.

“You Marshal's little boy?” the mad midget asked him. “You look just like your father.”

“That voice — I should know that voice even if it's cracked to pieces,” said Marshall. “That has to be Manuel's voice.”

“Sure, I'm Manuel, just like when I left thirty-five years ago.”

“You can't be Manuel — shrunk three feet and two hundred pounds and aged a million.”

“You look here at my census slip, Mr. Marshal. It says I'm Manuel. And here are nine more of the regular people, and one million of the little people. I couldn't get the little ones on the regular forms. I had to steal their list.”

“You can't be Manuel,” said Marshal.

“He can't be Manuel,” said the big policeman and the little policeman.

“Maybe not then. I thought I was. Who am I then? Let's look at the other papers to see which one I am.”

“No, you can't be any of them either, Manuel. And you surely can't be Manuel.”

“Give him a name anyhow and get him counted,” said the head of the citizens group. “We got to get to that ten thousand mark.”

“Tell us what happened, Manuel — if you are — which you aren't — but tell us.”

“After I counted the regular people, I went to count the little people. I took a spade and spaded the top off their town to get in. But they put an encanto on me and made me and Mula run a treadmill for thirty-five years.”

“Where was this, Manuel?”

“At the Little People Town — Nuevo Danae. But after thirty-five years, the encanto wore off, and Mula and I stole the list of names and ran away.”

“But where did you really get this list of so many names written so small, Manuel?”

“Suffering saddle sores, Marshal, don't ask the little bug so many questions! You got a million names in your hand. Certify them! Send them in! There's enough of us right here to pass a resolution. We declare that place annexed forthwith. This will make High Plains the biggest town in Texas.”

So Marshal certified the names and sent them in to Washington. This gave High Plains the largest percent increase of any city in the nation — but it was challenged. There were some soreheads in Houston who said that it wasn't possible — that High Plains had nowhere near that many people and that there must have been a miscount.

In the days that the argument was going on, they cleaned up and fed Manuel — if it were he — and tried to get from him a cogent story.

“How do you know it was thirty-five years, Manuel?”

“On the treadmill, it seemed like thirty-five years.”

“It could have been only about three days.”

“How come I'm so old then?”

“We don't know that Manuel. We sure don't know that. How big were these people?”

“Who knows. A finger long, maybe two.”

“And what is their town?”

“It's an old prairie dog town that they fixed up. You have to dig down with a spade to get to the streets.”

“Maybe they really were prairie dogs, Manuel. Maybe the heat got you and you only dreamed that they were little people.”

“Prairie dogs can't write as good as on that list,” said Manuel. “Prairie dogs can't write hardly at all.”

“That's true. The list is hard to explain. And such odd names on it, too.”

“Where is Mula? I don't see Mula since I came back.”

“Mula just lay down and died, Manuel.”

“Gave me the slip. Why didn't I think of that? I'll do it too. I'm too worn out for anything else.”

“Before you do, Manuel, just a couple of last questions.”

“Make them real fast then. I'm on my way.”

“Did you know the little people were there before?”

“Oh sure. Everybody in the Santa Magdalena see them. Eight, nine people know they are there. ‘Who wants to be laughed at?’ they say. They never talked about it.”

“And, Manuel, how do we get to the place? Can you show us on a map?”

Manuel made a grimace and died quietly. He didn't understand those maps, and he took the easy way out. They buried him — not knowing for sure whether he was Manuel or not. There wasn't much of him to bury.

It was the same night — very late, and after he had been asleep — that Marshal was awakened by the ring of an authoritative voice. He was being harangued by a four-inch-tall man on his bedside table — a man of dominating presence and acid voice.

“Come out of that cot, you clown! Give me your name and station!”

“I'm Marshal, and I suspect that you're a late pig sandwich. I shouldn't eat so late.”

“Say ‘Sir’ when you reply to me! I am no pig sandwich and I do not commonly call on fools. Get on your feet, you clod!” Wondering, Marshal did.

“I want the list that was stolen. Don't gape. Get it! Don't stall, don't stutter. Get me that tax list! It isn't words I want from you.”

“Listen, you cicada,” said Marshal with his last bravery, “I'll take you and — ”

“You will not! You will notice that you are now paralyzed from the neck down. I suspect that you were always so from there up. Where is it?”

“S — sent it to Washington.”

“You bug-eyed behemoth! Do you realize what a trip that will be? You grandfather of inanities, it will be a pleasure to destroy you.”

“I don't know what you are,” said Marshal. “I don't believe you even belong on the world.”

“Not belong on the world? We own the world. We can show written title to the world. Can you?”

“I doubt it. Where did you get the title?”

“We got it from a promoter of sorts, a con man really. I have to admit that we were taken, but we were in a spot and needed a world. He said that the larger bifurcates were too stupid to be a nuisance. We should have known that the stupider the creature the more of a nuisance it is.”

“I have decided the same thing about the smaller the creature. We may have to fumigate that old mountain mess.”

“Oh, you can't harm us. We're too powerful. But we can obliterate you in an instant.”

“Hah!” exploded Marshal.

“Say ‘hah, sir’ when you address me. Do you know the place in the mountains that is called Sodom?”

“I know the place. It was caused by a large meteor.”

“It was caused by one of these,” said the small creature, and what he held up was the size of a grain of sand. “There was another city of you bug-eyed beasts there,” continued the small martinet. “You wouldn't know about it. It's been a few hundred years. We decided it was too close. Now I have decided that you are too close.”

“A thing that size couldn't crack a walnut,” said Marshal.

“You floundering fop, it will blast this town flat.”

“And if it does, what will happen to you?”

“Nothing. I don't even blink for things like that. I haven't time to explain it to you, you gaping goof. I have to get to Washington.”

It may be that Marshal did not believe himself quite awake. He certainly didn't take the threat seriously enough. For, in a manner still not understood, the little man did trigger it off.

When the final count was in, High Plains did not have the highest percentage gain in the Nation. Actually it showed the sharpest decline of any town — from 7313 to nothing. It is believed that High Plains was destroyed by a giant meteor. But there are eight, nine people in the Santa Magdalena who know what really happened, and they won't tell.

They were going to make a forest preserve out of the place, except that it has no trees worthy of the name. Now it is proposed to make it the Sodom and Gomorrah State Park from the two mysterious scenes of desolation there just seven miles apart.

It is an interesting place, as wild a region as you will ever find, and is recommended for the man who has seen everything.

Thieving Bear Planet

“Deliver me from carks and cares,

Deliver me from Thieving Bears.”

 — John Chancel, Logs and Epilogs of Sector 24

A simple explanation was needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”

Every decade or so, somebody with a passion for regularity takes over the administration of the Directory and Delineation of Planets, that massive cataloging operation, and makes a new survey of the anomalies. And there was not any way that such a survey could miss Thieving Bear Planet.

“It offers no threat to human life or activity, no danger to bodily health, and only slight danger to mental health,” the great John Chancel had written about it a century before this. “It has almost uniformly ideal climate, though it is not a place to generate sudden wealth. It is serene in environment and in ecological balance, and it is absolutely caressing in its natural beauty. But it does have a strange effect on some of its visitors. It forces them to write things that are untrue, as it is forcing me to do at this moment.” That was an odd thing to write in a ship's log.

And, as one later old hand put it, “There is nothing to conquer here. It is a poorly endowed and counterproductive world. And everything goes wrong here. I will say this for it: things go wrong here in the most pleasant way possible. But they do go wrong.”

Now another expedition consisting of six explorers — George Mahoon (he was wrestler-big, and with a groping, grappling, leverage-seeking wrestler-mind); Elton Fad (he was long on information and short on personal incandescence); Benedict Crix-Crannon (buff and charming, and he knew all the jobs of the expedition); Luke Fronsa (he was a “comer,” as they said in the department, but wasn't he a little bit over-age in grade as a “comer” now?); Selma Last-Rose (what can you say after you say that somebody has everything?); Gladys Marclair (pleasant, capable, but she wasn't a genius, and genius was really required for an explorer); and Dixie Late-Lark (sheer Spirit, she!) — had set down on Thieving Bear Planet. These were not the most experienced explorers in the Service, but they were among the newest and freshest. And they had already demonstrated that they were top people at clearing up anomalies.

“It's a pleasant place, but not good for much,” George Mahoon said before they had been there ten minutes. “Why didn't the earlier explorers simply say that it was ‘Only marginally or submarginally productive, indicated by fast scans to be poor in both radioactive and base metals and also in rare earths and fossil fuels, not recommended for development in the present century when so many better places are available,’ or some such thing as that? Why did they put so much stuttering gibberish in their reports? I'm going to like it here, though. It's nice for a brief vacation.”

“Oh, I'm going to like it too,” Selma Last-Rose spoke in her curious rat-a-tat-tat voice. “There must be a puzzle here, and I like puzzles. And there's a minor mystery in this ‘Plain of the Old Spaceships.’ I may as well solve that.”

They had landed in a clear place on the Plain of the Old Spaceships. Here there were remarkable full-scale drawings or schematics of old spaceships, twelve of them in two-thirds of a circle, from the earliest to the latest, going clockwise on the ground. What medium these schematics were done in was not certain, but the lush grass refrained from growing on the lines of them and so marked them off. The “drawings” showed the circle-spheres of the spaceships and their fore and aft bulges. They gave accurate indication of the interior bulkheads. This was really a life-sized museum of ships that lacked only substance and the dimension of height.

“I recall two passages in the log of the ship Sorcerer about this plain or meadow,” Elton Fad said. “The first of them stated, ‘Some of our party believe that the plain of the ships was actually done by the Thieving Bears in a historical marker sort of response, but I myself do not credit the little beasties with that much intelligence.’ And there was a later entry in another hand, ‘The Thieving Bears really did make those schematics-in-the-grass memorials of all the spaceships that had been here, but they didn't do it in any way that we had imagined.’ But that latter log entry, like latter entries of several of the explorers, had been written in something other than ink.

“Well, I'll imagine a few ways that the little buggers could have done it, and I'll test it somehow. I'll ask them how they did it. If the tittering little obscenities have any intelligence at all, I'll find a way to ask them.”

The “tittering little obscenities,” the Thieving Bears, were not much like bears. They were more like large flying squirrels, and they did glide on the winds, apparently for sport. They were more like pack rats (the Neotoma cinerea of Earth) both in appearance and in their thieving ways, but larger. It was old John Chancel who had named the species “Ursus furtificus, the Thieving Bears.” Oh, the explorers had their introduction to the thieving of the little animals within five minutes of planet-landing. The creatures came into the ship itself and got into places that should have been impossible to them. They stole Selma's candy and Dixie's snuff. They stole (by drinking it on the spot) George Mahoon's “He-Man Scent — Cinnamon,” thirteen bottles of it, but they did not drink any of the other scents. They went wild over mustard, emptying whole containers of it and then wheezing in delicious agony from the effect. Elton Fad tried to drive them away with heavy sticks. They fastened onto the sticks while he swung them and ate them right up to his hands. They were funny, but they could become infuriating. They stole six of Dixie Late-Lark's French horror story novels.

That wouldn't be fatal to her. She had lots of them.

“They're going to sample them,” Dixie said. (She herself looked a little bit like one of those Thieving Bears.) “They'll be the test. If they do read them and appreciate them, it'll prove that they're intelligent creatures and have better reading tastes than my crewmates. That will be a start in analyzing them, something to put into the electronic notebooks.”

Could the Thieving Bears talk? That was not determined for sure within the first ten or even twenty minutes.

“Say ‘Good morning,’ fuzzy head,” Selma rattled at one of the creatures.

“Say good morning, fuzzy head,” it bear-barked back at her. Well, it had the right number of syllables, and the right rhythm and stress. And the bear-barks did resemble Selma's rattling words. And whenever the bears answered one of the persons, it answered in that person's own timbre. The bears began to imitate the people quickly, and there was never any doubt as to which person was being imitated.

The tittering that went with the imitations, though! Ooooh, that could become tiresome after a little while. “Tittering little obscenities,” yes.

Could the Thieving Bears read? 'Twould be known in a bit, maybe. The bears had gotten into those big lockers that were full of comic books and had stolen big bunches of them. These comic books from the Trader Planets were now collectors items on Old Earth, and they generated quite a profit. The wonderful things should be collectors items everywhere.

Some of the big Thieving Bears were “reading” those comic books to some of the little Thieving Bears, reading them in the Thieving Bears' own barking talk. And some of the little bears would bark their excitement and incredulity at parts of the narration and would come and look at the pictures and the worded balloons themselves. And then there would be that damned tittering!

It was clear that the big bears believed that they were reading, and that the little bears believed they were understanding. But the wording in the comic book balloons was in the Gno-Pidgin dialect of the Trader Planets, and people from the Traders had never been to Thieving Bear Planet. It was almost too much to believe that “Sangster's Syndrome Intuitive Translation” was being practiced by animals below the level of conceptual thinking. Then some of the little bears were clearly acting out episodes from the comic books (very subtle episodes, according to Benedict Crix-Crannon, who had total knowledge of the content of all the comic books from the lockers.) Well, there was no easy explanation for that.

The explorers treated themselves to a bonus meal within an hour of their arrival, after things were pretty well settled down. On a new world, they did this only when they had complete confidence that everything was under control. It was a traditional Earth-hearty meal, though it was from a packet of such bonus meals that had been packaged on Trader Planet Number Four. There were ten-centimeter-thick Cape buffalo steaks, mountains of Midland mushrooms, Camiroi currants and Astrobe apples, Elton eels, Wrack World rye bread, “Galaxy” brand goat butter, Rain Mountain coffee, Rumboat cordials, and Ganymede cigars (“They have an aroma that outlasts the Everlasting Hills,” a testimonial said of those perfectos).

“Logs of earlier explorers say that there is no real enjoyment in eating on Thieving Bear Planet because of the harassment of the bears,” Benny Crix-Crannon gloated. “Well, I'm enjoying this meal (another bumper of Rumboat cordial, Luke, please), and I'd like to see anybody take that enjoyment away from me.” And yet the enjoyment and savor of that grand meal began to disappear almost at that moment. How? Oh, it was just that all the items of their enjoyment were being mysteriously stolen away from them.

“All the rest of Dixie's snuff has been stolen by the bears now,” Gladys said. “That's too bad. She loves it so much. If all her idiosyncrasies are stolen away, it's as if she is stolen away too.”

“And another thirty or so of Dixie's French horror story novels have been stolen by the bears,” Elton Fad grumbled. “She's bound to be frustrated by that. We should insist on fair play from the bears.”

“Her gold snuffboxes have been stolen, too,” Selma Last-Rose lamented. “How mean of the bears! The snuffboxes were valuable, even for the gold.”

“And her hookah pipe is gone,” Luke Fronsa complained. “What will the bears steal next?”

“l don't know,” George Mahoon wondered, “but Dixie Late-Lark has herself been stolen now, or at least she's gone. She could not have gone out unrecorded, for the ship is on full security. And yet the ship itself registers that she is no longer on board. She was sitting between you and Selma, was she not, Gladys?”

“She was, yes, just a moment ago, on the chair between the two of us. But there isn't any chair between us now, and there couldn't have been; there isn't any room for one. She must have been sitting on something else. Oh, that damned tittering! I wonder how they stole her and what they did with her.”

“Be rational, Gladys,” Luke said. “There's no way the little bears could have stolen Dixie Late-Lark.”

“Then where did she go? And how?”

“I don't know,” Mahoon admitted, “and I don't believe that any of us know. All at once, it doesn't seem very important. Ah, I'm queasy. Yes, and I'm hungry. After a perfect bonus meal, I shouldn't be either. Fortunately, I had plugged myself into the ship's monitor, because of early reports of anomalies on Thieving Bear Planet, reports of the well-feeling and the wits of the explorers being stolen away. All right, monitor, what has gone wrong with me?”

The ship's monitor spilled it all out. It was in coded chatter. “But we all understand the coded chatter just like our mother's milk,” as Dixie had once said. All of them were completely tuned to the code of their own ship. And each of them put it into words automatically.

“Essential food value suddenly stolen from your ingested food,” the monitor chattered. “Pepsin stolen from your stomach, thalmatite stolen from your thalamus, thyroxine stolen from your pharynx, Cape buffalo essence stolen from your esophagus and stomach, mushrooms and currants and apples stolen from your lower stomach and small intestine, rum alcohol stolen from your stomach and ileum and bloodstream, and normal blood alcohol and blood sugar stolen as part of the same theft. Slurry of rye bread and butter and coffee stolen from your paunch and antrum stomach. Essence of Elton eels stolen from some saltwater swamp of you. And at the same time, insulin and glucagon are stolen from your pancreas, hepatocytes and bile salts from your bile duct and duodenum; and words, ideas, and inklings have been swiped from several parts of your brain. No wonder you're queasy and hungry at the same time.”

“Thank you, ship's monitor,” George Mahoon said. “Well, it seems that I've been infected by some microbe or germ or virus. I'll take a few of the anti-anti pills to quell the infection.”

“Forget the anti-anti pills, George!” Elton Fad cried angrily. “I think we should take a couple of steel bars and teach the Thieving Bears a lesson. There are microbes and germs and viruses infecting me too, but they are about half my own size and are known as the Thieving Bears. Damn those tittering little idiots! They're beginning to intrude too intimately with their thefts and their eatings; but I don't know how they're doing these things so interiorly. Sometimes I wish I'd gone into the family business and never become an explorer at all.” Elton Fad's family was in eels: they were big and rich people in eels.

A little doll made out of wax and rags, with thorns and pins and needles sticking clear through it, and with its throat cut horribly, came sailing through the air and landed on the table where all the explorers had just finished their fine meal that had lost its power just after passing its climax. The tortured little doll had Dixie Late-Lark's face on it. Its mouth was wide open and it was screaming silently and horribly.

“At least we know that the bears can read and absorb world-French,” Gladys Marclair laughed. And they all laughed. “They couldn't have learned about the poupées-fetiches, the fetish dolls, anywhere except from Dixie's French horror stories. Why, it's Stridente Mimi, Screaming Mimi herself. That's really Dixie's theme story. Oh, I wish that Dixie would come back so she could see this comical takeoff of herself. Shut your mouth, doll-Dixie!”

Gladys pushed her forefinger against the mouth of the little fetish doll to close it, but the doll bit her finger suddenly, viciously, terribly, and set the blood gushing from it. When Gladys got her finger loose again, the doll opened its mouth wide once more and continued to scream silently and horribly from a now blood-dribbling mouth. It has long been noted that fetish dolls seem to have a life of their own.

That little comic interlude cheered them all a bit, and they left the table in a happier state. And they went out from the ship.

Oh, the Thieving Bears wanted to play games, did they! Well, the explorers would beat them at their games, and they would solve all the mysteries about them at the same time. But the explorers had now come to regard the bears as more complex and as more nearly intelligent than they had previously seemed. They were still tittering little stinkers, though. The Thieving Bears were bigger than police dogs and a little bit smaller than Great Danes. They were toothless and clawless and apparently harmless. How can you worry about such tittering and giggling things?

“Quick! Come quick!” Selma Last-Rose was calling, in a queer voice on the edge of panic. “Come quick! I've found Dixie.”

The Thieving Bears, however large they seemed, gave the impression of being nearly weightless. They had to be nearly weightless to glide on the wind the way they did. They seemed to be mostly — well, it wasn't hair and it wasn't feathers — they seemed to be mostly made out of a fluffy and deep-piled covering with not much body inside it.

“Come, come, somebody come!” Selma was still calling in her rattling voice. “Dixie is dead.”

The bears had to be ninety percent fluffy covering and no more than ten percent body. Otherwise, big as they seemed, they couldn't have gotten through some of the holes that they did go through.

“Horribly, horribly dead,” Selma was chanting in a little-girl singsong voice. “Horribly, horribly dead. Oh please, somebody come and help me look at her. I can hardly manage to look at her all by myself.”

Dead Dixie Late-Lark was an exact life-sized replica of her own many times-transfixed fetish doll. Her throat was just as flamboyantly and terribly cut as the doll's had been. The same thorns and pins and needles ran through her, but now they were meter-long thorns and two-meter-long needles. And her mouth was very wide open, as had been that of the doll; and Dixie was likewise screaming horribly and silently.

And a tittering, a giggling in the Thieving Bears' fashion, was coming from her silently screaming mouth and also from her laid-open throat. How ghastly!

The horror was broken a bit, or diverted into a wondering exasperation, by Benny Crix-Crannon's voice booming, “Here's another one of them. This one's better done. It's good!”

Yes, it was another horribly dead Dixie Late-Lark, with her throat cut even more savagely, with her poor body transfixed with even longer thorns and needles, with the tittering and giggling from her wide-open and silently screaming mouth even more disconcerting.

In all, they found seven life-sized versions of Dixie Late-Lark horribly and ritually murdered. Then all seven of them jumped up, turned into rather young Thieving Bears, and ran away tittering. And the very stones of that planet seemed to join in that tittering and giggling.

But where was Dixie Late-Lark herself? Was that not a pertinent question? More pertinent questions may have been: why did all the explorers stop wondering what had happened to their colleague Dixie Late-Lark? And why did they now feel that her disappearance was unimportant?

“I have lost my judgment,” George Mahoon lamented. “I've still got most of the pieces of things in my mind, but I can no longer put them together. Putting things together is what judgment is. One of you others will have to take over the captaincy of this expedition.”

“Oh, bother the captaincy!” Gladys Marclair rejected it. “Expeditions would be better without captains anyhow. And you can't lose something that you never had, George. Let's play ‘Ask the Question’ with this situation. And let's wonder why no bunch, coming here, has played it before. This is an Earth-sized planet and remarkably monotonous. On its look-alike continents, there are hundreds and thousands of little low plains or meadows comparable to this Plain of the Old Spaceships. Why have all the expeditions to this world, from that of John Chancel to our own, landed here within one thousand meters of each other? Instructions for exploration landing sites have always been ‘Random selection, tempered with intelligence.’ And another instruction has been ‘Examine new ground wherever possible.’ For whose convenience have we all landed in this one place? Oh, your diminished judgment, George! Probably somebody has been eating the hippo out of your hippocampus (I've always believed that the ‘little hype’ is the center of the judgment as well as of the memory), so now you're not as well hyped as you were. What if hardly any of the area of this planet has been checked out?”

“Oh, we made sixteen scanning circuits of Thieving Bear Planet before we landed,” George Mahoon said. “Sixteen circuits will give a very good recorded sample. And some of the previous expeditions made the full sixty-four scanning circuits, and the full scan doesn't miss much.”

“Do we believe that the Thieving Bears are to be found in all parts of this planet, George?” Selma Last-Rose asked.

“I don't know. Do we believe it, Benny?”

“Oh no. The Thieving Bears are strictly small-species and small-area creatures. Their crankinesses as well as their brilliancies indicate that they have far too small a gene-pool. They have to stay close together in a small area to ‘keep warm’ in the special (of a species) identity-survival sense.”

“As to myself, I've lost more than my judgment,” Luke Fronsa mourned. “I've lost all my ideas, and all that I have left now are notions. Somebody is eating all my ideas right out of my head and leaving only the hulls of them. Did you know that notions are only the shells or hulls of ideas after the meat is eaten out of them?”

The bears were toothless, and they were playful. Sometimes they came gliding in on the air, and they might be practically invisible when the light was in their favor. They came gliding in or ambling in, and they tagged the people gently as a breath. But whenever they touched the people, however briefly or lightly, they left what seemed to be very small entering marks. And they also left a redness, like the stings of nettles. One of the explorers (no matter which one; they had begun to run together, even in their own regard) said that the Thieving Bears were really a species of giant insects, insects with strange appetites and always hungry.

Seven days and nights went by very rapidly. It was a giddy world in this respect, fast-spinning: for seven days and nights on Thieving Bear Planet were the equivalent of only about eighteen hours on Old Earth or sixteen hours on Astrobe. And the fast-spin did make a difference on Thieving Bear. It was because of the fast-spin that there were no large treelike plants, not even any very large bushes. There were small bushes, and there was the non-gramineous grass.

2.

“People without an accompaniment of ghosts are a deprived people. They will descend to almost any depth of ‘oriental’ cultishness or modish superstition or silliness or astrological depravity to hide the fact that they have lost their ghosts.

“Ghosts without an accompaniment or ‘neighborness’ of people are similarly deprived, and they will cast themselves into the most bizarre roles or forms to try to create a company for themselves.

“Both of these conditions are unhealthy.”

 — Terrance Taibhse, Introduction to Ghost Stories of Sector 24

The storminess of Thieving Bear Planet wouldn't have permitted any botanical constructs taller than small bushes. And the fast-spin of Thieving Bear compelled certain surface conditions for that world. On most worlds, the hills go up. On Thieving Bear Planet, the hills went down.

The upper levels of all the continents of Thieving Bear were flat and lush, and sometimes they were swept by violent winds. And down from them, the hills ran to the sheltered plains or meadows or circle-valleys (such as was the Plain of the Old Spaceships), and on these lower levels the winds were less violent.

Two of the seven short nights just past had been “electric nights,” and the ghosts walked on electric nights. The electric nights were highlighted (literally) by massive thunderstorms and plasmal displays. (The odds are that these storms are more violent than the storms where you come from.) The lightning piled up on the high places, roaring like lazarus-lions. Then it rolled down the hills like waterfalls and formed hot and spitting pools on the lower plains and meadows.

The ghosts were always there, but some of them were ordinarily like empty balloons. On the electric nights, they filled up with lightning and manifested themselves. But others of the ghosts were always low-key, living out their endless nights and days till they would finally fade away after a long era. One of the ghosts was that of John Chancel, one of the earlier visitors to Thieving Bear Planet, usually called the “discoverer” of Thieving Bear, but now he said that this wasn't true. During the second of the electric nights, Chancel's ghost sat in the cockpit room of the ship with the explorers and lovingly handled the eight hundred knobs, wheels, levers, push buttons, keyboards, and voice boxes that commanded the ship. The ships hadn't been so sophisticated in his day.

“I catch onto all the new and enjoyable advances in ship control quicker than ‘he’ would,” Chancel's ghost spoke softly. “Oh, he has the physical brains with him, most of them; but I have the intuition. And he, we, were never very good on brains anyhow. We had the mystique and the personality, we had the intuition, we guessed a lot, and we faked a lot. But we were never a well-linked personality.”

“Just how does one become a ghost?” Gladys Marclair asked. “Besides dying, I mean, is there any way to bring it about?”

“It happens, in many cases, long before death. I was his ghost here for twenty years (Earth years) before Chancel died elsewhere. He left his (my) ghost here on his second landing. He came back here for me several times after that, but I wouldn't rejoin him or go away with him. He had become quite cranky in his ways, and I in mine. There would have been everlasting conflict if we had joined. But it was also psychic disaster (more for him than for me) for us to be separated.

“It's not at all rare for a living person to be separated from his ghost. I see that two of you six have become separated from your own ghosts, and none of you can guess which two of you it is. On Thieving Bear, the conditions seem to be favorable for these split-ups. It leaves a great hunger (yes, a physical hunger) in the ghosts who are left behind. But each planet has its own ghostliness that is different from that of other places. Even Old Earth has remnants and tatters of ghostliness, and it isn't a hungry world. As a prophet said, ‘Happy the world that has iron meadows and rich essences on which the spirits may feed, and then go to sleep.’ But we spirits are most often sleepless here.”

“What happened to Dixie Late-Lark?” Gladys Marclair asked this pleasant ghost.

“Oh, she's a ghost of a different sort. There never was any Dixie Late-Lark as a person. There were only the six of you who arrived here. Dixie was your esprit de group, your group effigy, and also a manifestation of your ‘goofiness syndrome.’ But we made her visible to you for the first time. And you recognized her and accepted her in your unthinking way. This ‘unthinking way’ has become part of the environment of Thieving Bear Planet. She was the toothsome imaginative essence of all of you, the capriciousness or coltishness of you, and that made her very appetizing. We love essence. It's so concentrated.”

“Why did you make her visible?” Selma asked.

“Because we like to see what we're eating.”

“Who or what are the Thieving Bears?” Luke Fronsa asked Chancel's ghost.

“Oh, they're a sort of tumbleweed, a sort of nettle. Ghosts use them to get around in some of the time; so I myself am often a Thieving Bear. It is only on the electric nights that we can inflate ourselves with enough plasm to look like ourselves. We walk here a lot because we are always hungry and restless. Ghosts in places that are richer in organics and metals and minerals stay well fed by a sort of osmosis, so they walk and stir very little. They sleep their decades and centuries away. Notice it sometimes that active ghosts are only to be found in deprived regions. One of my counterparts has hardly stirred in a hundred years. I can feel my counterparts, but there's not much of them to feel.”

“Where do the little Thieving Bears come from?”

“From a very early landing, perhaps the earliest, for they were here when I arrived. It was an ill-advised settlement expedition of men, women, and children. Then all died of starvation, not knowing how to turn the lush grass into food. They were the first of the hungry ghosts. It was their crying hunger that has drawn all the ships to land in this one place. ‘Come let us eat you’ is their cry, and it is still a most passionate cry.”

“You spoke of your ‘counterparts’ a moment ago,” George Mahoon said. “Did John Chancel generate more ghosts than one? Is he himself restless and hungry?”

“Oh, I myself (the central John Chancel) have gone to my glory. But all of us great ones leave multiple ghosts behind us. He (I) left at least two others besides myself. We have a sort of awareness of each other, a loose feeling. He had real greatness (unlikely as it seems), and I didn't. And yet this is the paradox: he saw himself entirely from the outside, and he loved what he saw; I saw us from the inside, and I wasn't impressed. And we were not the first man on as many planets as is claimed for us. We were not the first man here. There were already Thieving Bears here when we came, ghosts of earlier explorers. But John Chancel had the greatness; and the earlier explorers had it not. So Chancel was credited with many first landings.

“Good luck to you, ladies and gentlemen, when you lift off in your capsule this electric morning. There are several entries that you must make in your log immediately after lift-off, or you will forget them and never make them at all. And you will have to make these entries in something other than ink.”

“Why should we lift off in our capsule?” Elton Fad asked. “We use the capsule only when the ship is inoperative.”

“It's inoperative now and forever,” the ghost of John Chancel said. “Well, it's a good ship and it eased the hunger of a lot of us. You'd better lift off in the capsule as soon as possible now. We try to play fair, but we'll be feeding on it very soon if it's still here.”

That John Chancel was a nice fellow, even in his fading ghost form.

But a much more violent ghost (right at that electric dawn after the second electric night) was the ghost of Manbreaker Crag. After the second of the electric nights had ended, Manbreaker decided to remain apparent out of sheer stubbornness. They had all been feeling the powerful presence of this Manbreaker Crag for some time.

“I'm the only one here of any moment or weight,” Manbreaker's ghost spoke in a rough sort of roar. “I'm not a person to crawl into pieces of nettle or tumbleweed or any weeds except my own mortal weeds. I'm not one to take on the form of a cutie giggling bear or other toy. I am not a ghost, nor any part of a ghost story. Ghost stories are for children and cutie bears. I am a simple dead man who is restless and hungry on this mineral-poor world. On electric nights, I go get my own body where I keep it. I enter it and I inflate it with the crackling lightning and the electricity that has gathered here. I'm a hungry dead man with a dead man's temper. Don't mess with me!”

“Don't mess with us, fellow,” George Mahoon spoke sharply. “Our ship seems to be in a very weakened condition and we have to be getting out of here quickly. Stay out of the way, grave-rot oaf, and be quiet. Elton, go sharpen this, and then bring it back to me along with a heavy sledgehammer. I think I know how to deal with hungry dead men.”

George Mahoon handed a thick and heavy hardwood dowel pin to Elton Fad. It was about the length and heft of a baseball bat.

“The other ones, the real ghosts, which is to say the real unreal ones, have their little self-saving fables that they recite when they feed on people and the possessions of people,” the hungry, long-dead man, Manbreaker Crag, roared. The only speaking voice he possessed was this sort of dogged roar. “They say, ‘We do not steal important things out of your minds. We steal only funny-shaped, trifling things. Serious people like you are better off without them. Our gain is your gain.’ That is what they are telling you, but they lie. What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things that your minds are capable of holding. What we steal and eat out of your bodies are the tastiest things in your bodies. We come to table on you, and we feast on you. What we eat out of your ships and your stores are the most nourishing and sophisticated things you have brought, wotto metal, data gelatin, electronic reta, codified memories and processes. We eat these things because we are hungry. And I eat them more ravenously than do any of the others. I eat the essence of minds and leave gibbering idiocy in its place. I eat the bodies of whole people where they stand.”

“Is everything possible transferred from the ship to the capsule?” big George Mahoon asked his party.

“It is,” several of them answered.

“I will eat the essence of your capsule-boat just as all of us on Thieving Bear have eaten the essence of your ship,” dead Manbreaker Crag roared.

“Is it sharpened?” Mahoon asked as he took the thick hardwood dowel from the returning Elton Fad.

“It is sharpened,” Elton said, “but something has gone wrong with it. It loses weight as I stand here. They feed across short distances.”

“Scrawny ship captain, I think I'll eat you as you stand there,” dead Manbreaker roared at Captain Mahoon. “You'd make a big bite, but I'll eat you.”

Big George Mahoon felled bigger dead-man Manbreaker Crag with a powerful blow to his dead face. Then he put the point of the sharpened dowel pin (“Yes, Elton, I believe that he ate the heart out of it, but how could it have been prevented?” Mahoon asked) to the region of the heart of Manbreaker and struck the pin a heavy blow with the big sledgehammer. But the wooden pin or stake came apart into weak splinters and pieces of worm-eaten (or zombie-eaten) wood.

“Ah well, we'll have to leave him as he is,” Mahoon said. “I don't know any other way to kill a man who's already dead.”

The six explorers got into the capsule-boat then and lifted off. They looked down on the ship they had left behind them then, and it crumbled down and became a part of its own outline and schematic. It became one more of the token spaceships that formed that part-circle that gave the name Plain of the Old Spaceships to that curious site. Those drawn outlines of the old space ships, they were the old space ships. There must have been a lot of good eating in each of them, though.

“To the log!” George Mahoon howled. “I feel it all slipping out of my memory so fast! Each one of us take a long log page and write as rapidly as possible. Get it down, before we lose it as earlier explorers lost it.”

“No use lamenting that there is no ‘ink’ in any stylus or pen or log pencil laid out or still boxed,” Selma Last-Rose rattled. “No use lamenting that even the electronic ink is eaten out of every recorder and that the remembering jelly is eaten out of every memory pot. The hungers of the Thieving Bears are unaccountable. All the earlier logs had a few words written in something other than ink. If we all write as fast as we can, we may get more than a few words down. We may even get the explanation down onto the log sheets before it fades completely from our minds.”

They all opened their veins and wrote on the long log sheets in their own blood. It was sticky going. So many free-flowing things had been eaten out of their blood that it was now viscous and thick. But they made it do. They got the explanation all down, even though (when it was shown to them later) they hardly remembered writing it.

A simple explanation had been needed for the conditions on Thieving Bear Planet. It was needed because, as the great Reginald Hot had once phrased it, “Anomalies are messy.”

And that simple explanation is herewith given, more or less as it was written in thick blood in the log book.

What's The Name Of That Town?

“Epiktistes tells me that you are onto something big, Mr. Smirnov,” Valery said, turning to her companion.

“Epikt has the loudest mouth of any machine I was ever associated with,” Gregory Smirnov growled. “I never saw one that could keep a secret. But this one goes to extremes. Actually, we don't have a thing. We're just fiddling around with an unborn idea.”

“How about it, Epikt?” Valery asked.

“Big, real big,” the machine issued.

“What are you doing now, Epikt?” Valery wanted to know.

“Talk to me, dammit! I'm the man, he's the machine,” Smirnov cut in. “He's chewing encyclopedias and other references. It's all he ever does.”

“I thought he went through them all long ago.”

“Certainly, dozens of times. He has all the data that can be fed into a machine, and every day we shovel in bales of new stuff. But he's chewing it now for a very different purpose.”

“What different purpose, Mr. Smirnov?”

“It's difficult to say because I haven't as yet been able to state it to him. We're trying to set a problem where it seems there ought to be one — ironically. I doubt that he's sincere now. He can be quite a clown, as you should well know.”

“I know that you two are onto something good,” Valery said. “The more you deny it, the more I'm sure of it. Tell me the truth, Epikt.”

“Big, real big,” Epiktistes issued to Valery.

“Valery,” said Smirnov. “You're a woman and you might be inclined to say something about this to other Institute people. Please don't. We don't have anything yet and it makes me nervous to have hot little people breathing down my neck.”

“I won't say a word,” Valery swore with grave insincerity. She winked at the machine, and Epikt winked back at her with three tiers of eyes. Valery Mok and Epiktistes had a thing going with each other.

Valery was nearly as bad as a machine at not being able to keep a secret. She had the whole Institute staff excited about what Smirnov and Epiktistes were working on. The staff consisted of Charles Cogsworth, her own over-shadowed husband; Glasser, the stiff-necked inventor; and Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius.

They were all after Smirnov and his machine the next day.

“We've been together on every project,” Glasser said. “Valery tells us that the problem hasn't been properly formulated, and that Epikt has only accepted it ironically. We're pretty good at formulating problems, Gregory, and a little sterner than you when it comes to dealing with clownish machines.”

“All right, this is the way it is, Glasser,” Smirnov said reluctantly. “My first statement was, we should seek to discover something not known to exist, by a close study of the absence of evidence. When I put the problem to Epiktistes in this generalized form he just laughed at me.”

“That would have been my first impulse too, Smirnov,” said Shiplap. “Don't you have a better idea of what you're looking for?”

“Shiplap, I had the feeling of trying to remember something that I'd been compelled to forget. My second statement wasn't much better. ‘Let us see,’ I said to Epikt, ‘if we cannot reconstruct something of which even the idea has been completely eradicated; let's see if we can't find it by considering the excessive evidence that it was never there.’ In this form, Epikt accepted it. Or else he decided to go along with me for the gag. I'm never quite sure how this clanking machine takes things.”

“Well, no hole can be filled up perfectly,” said Cogsworth. “There will either be too much or too little of whatever is being used as the filler, or it will be of a different texture. The difficulty is that you didn't give Epikt any clues. There will be a million things forgotten or repressed that will show an irregularity of fill. How will Epikt know which of them is the one that you are somehow trying to remember?”

“Item. The buried thing will have a buried tie with my boss man Smirnov,” Epiktistes, the machine, issued.

“Yes, of course,” said Glasser. “Has Epikt turned up anything?”

“Only a bushelful of things that seem to mean nothing,” said Smirnov sadly.

“Item. Why, in Hungarian dictionary-encyclopedias of a certain period, is there padding between the words Sik and Sikamlós?” Epiktistes asked.

“I follow your thought, Epikt,” Glasser agreed. “That could be a clue to something. If the idea and the name of something were expunged from every reference, then, in all original editions, other subjects on the same page would have to be padded slightly or another subject set in. This filling might be hurried, and therefore of an inferior quality. So, who knows a word that is no longer used and that comes between Sik and Sikamlós? If we knew the word would we know what it meant? And would it help us if we did?”

“Item. Why is the young of a bear now referred to as a pup when once it may have been known as a cube?” Epikt issued.

“I've never heard the young of a bear referred to as a cube,” Shiplap protested.

“Epikt has come on that by our omission-appraisal method,” Smirnov explained. “There is probably an imperfect erasure working. I believe that cube is a distortion of a word that has somehow been forced out of folk memory. Epikt has this clue from a ballad which I believe is far removed from the main suppression or it would not have survived in even this distorted form.”

“Item. Why is the awkward word coronal used for the simple doubling or return of a rope? Why is not a simpler word used?” Epikt asked.  

“Has Epikt considered that seamen have always used odd terms and that landsmen often adopt them?” Cogsworth asked.

“Naturally — Epikt always considers everything,” Smirnov answered. “He has thousands of items now, and he believes that he will be able to put them into a pattern.”

“Item. Why is there a great hiatus in period jazz? It's as though a great hunk of it had been yanked out by the roots, in the words of one Benny B-Flat.”

“Smirnov, I know that your machine has unusual talents,” said Glasser, “but if he can tie these things together he's a concatenated genius.”

“Or a cantankerous clown,” Smirnov said. “I know that he has to have some emotional release from the stress of his work, but he often overdoes it with humor and drollery.”

“Item. Why is reference to the Amerindian peace pipe avoided as though some obscenity were attached to it, and none is discoverable?”

“That's a new one while we're standing here,” said Smirnov. “He's accumulating quite a few of them.”

“Item. Why is — ” Epikt started.

“Oh, shut up and get back to work,” Smirnov ordered his machine. “Let's leave him with it until tomorrow, folks. It may begin to pull together by then,” said Smirnov, stalking off.

“Going to be real big,” Epiktistes issued to them after his boss man had left. “Boys and girls, it's going to be real big.”

The next day they combined the meeting around the machine with a party for Shiplap. Aloysius Shiplap had grown — for the first time ever, anywhere — left-handed grass. It was not called that because it whorled to the left, but because the organic constituents of it were reversed in their construction. Left-handed minerals had been constructed long since, and perhaps they also occurred in nature. Left-handed bacteria and broths were long known, but nobody else had ever grown anything as complex as left-handed grass.

“In everything, its effect is reversed,” Shiplap explained. “Cattle pastured on this would lose rather than gain weight. If there ever develops a market for really skinny cattle I'll be waiting for it.”

They tossed off a good bit of Tosher's Gin as they got into the celebration. Tosher's is the only drink that will buzz up both humans and Ktistec machines. There is a flavoring used in Tosher's that gets machines high. The alcohol in it sometimes has a similar effect on humans.

Epiktistes got as mellow as a Pottawattamie County pumpkin. Ktistec machines are like the Irish and the Indians. They start unwinding when the gin begins to flow. Their behavior could become quite wild unless carefully watched.

And the Institute people were also having a good time.

“I wouldn't have him any other way,” said Smirnov. “When he relaxes, he relaxes all over the place. Hawkins' machine literally bites people when it's frustrated by a difficult problem. Drexel's smaller machine comes all apart throwing arc snuffers and solenoids and is mighty dangerous to be around. There are worse sorts than this clown of a machine I have — though he does get pretty slushy when he's in his cups.”

Valery Mok had gathered up a bunch of Epiktistes' utterances and slipped them into cocktail cookies. Glasser, eating one, chewed on a bit of the metallic tape. He pulled it slithering, off his tongue, and read — 

“Item. What was the mysterious name written by a deaf moron on the wall of the men's room in an institution in Vinita, Oklahoma?”

Epiktistes giggled, though the item may have been serious when he issued it.

Cogsworth pulled one out of his mouth, stripping the crumbs from it with his tongue as it came.

“Item. Why does Petit Larousse take five lines too many to say almost nothing about the ancient Chibcha Indians of Columbia?”

At this point Valery went into her high laugh that would even make the alphabet sound funny.

Shiplap pulled one out of his grinning mouth, and it seemed an extension of his grin as it came.

“Item,” he read. “What is there about the Great Blue Island Swamp that puzzles geologists? Or — in the old bylining manner — how recent is recent?”

Tosher's is giggle juice. Glasser's laughter sounded like a string of firecrackers going off.

Smirnov extracted the utterance from his cookie in the lordly manner. He read the utterance as though it were of extreme importance — and it was.

“Item. What peculiarity is almost revealed by the faded paint of old Rock Island and Pacific Railroad boxcars?”

“Oh, stop giggling, Epikt, it isn't as funny as that!”

“It is, it is,” bubbled Valery. Then she nearly choked bringing out from her own cookie a very long tape, and she read it with a very gay voice:

“Item. Why, when the gruesome Little Willy verses were revived among sub-teenagers in the early nineteen-eighties, were they concerned almost entirely with chewing gum? In their Australian and British homelands six decades before, they were concerned with everything. But here we have gruesome verses about forty-nine different flavors of gum. As for instance,

Little Willy mixed his gum

with bits of Baby's cerebrum

and Papa's blood for Juicy

Fruit.

Mother said, “Oh Will, don't

 duit.”

“I'd think it would give too high a flavor to the gum,” said Glasser.

It's a lot of fun to open cocktail cookies and read out utterances of a Ktistec machine. The Institute staff generated a bunch of what we can only call merriment. But they were busy people, and the party had to come to an end. Epiktistes issued a verse as they prepared to leave.

When the world's last Tosher's

 is drunken,

and the world's last item has

 flewn,

and the Institute people are

 stunken,

and Epikt is high as the — 

And there he stuck! Eight million billion billion memory contacts he had in him, and he couldn't come up with a rhyme for flewn.

“How many items have you really gathered, Epikt?” Glasser asked as they began to break up.

“Millions of them, bub, millions of them.”

“No. Actually, he has about three-quarters of a million that he believes he can tie together,” Smirnov explained. “I feel that he'll bring them into a pattern, but I'm afraid it will be a facetious one.”

“Epikt, you cute cubicle, will you be able to give us any idea of what to look for by tomorrow?” Valery asked.

“Boys and girls, I'll have it all wrapped up and on display for you tomorrow,” Epiktistes issued. “I'll even be able to tell you what the thing smelled like.”

Expectation ran high among the people of the Institute. Epiktistes wanted to have the reporters in, but Smirnov said no. He didn't trust his machine. Epikt was a cube twenty meters on one side; and of his thousands of eyes, some of them always seemed to be laughing at his master.

“It won't be a hoax?” Smirnov asked his machine apprehensively.

“Boss, did I ever hoax you?” Epikt issued.

“Yes.”

“Boss, some things are best presented in the guise of a hoax, but underneath this won't be one.”

It was a crooked-tongued machine sometimes, and Smirnov was more apprehensive than ever.

The next day everyone gathered early to hear what Epikt had to say. They pulled up chairs and recording canisters and waited for the machine to begin.

“Ladies, gentlemen, associates,” said Epikt solemnly, “we are gathered together to hear of an important matter. I will present it as well as I am able. There will be disbelief, I know, but I am sure of my facts. Make yourselves comfortable.” He paused and then as an afterthought added, “You may smoke.”

“You clanking cubicle, don't tell us what we may do,” Smirnov screamed. “You're only a machine that I made.”

“You and three thousand other workers,” issued Epikt, without blinking an eye, “and in the final stages, the important stages, I directed my own assembly. I could not have happened otherwise. Only I know what is in me. As to my own abilities — ”

“Get on with it, Epikt,” Smirnov ordered, “and try to avoid the didactic manner.”

“Then to get to the point, in the year 1980, the largest city of the American Midland was destroyed by an unnatural disaster.”

“That was only twenty years ago,” Glasser cut in. “It seems that someone would have heard of it.”

“I wonder if St. Louis knew that she was destroyed,” Valery ventured. “She acts as though she thought that she were still there.”

“St. Louis was not the city,” issued Epikt. “This destruction of a metropolitan area of seven million persons in much less than seven seconds was a great horror from the human viewpoint — come to think of it I now recall being a little disturbed by it myself. The thing was so fearful that it was decided to suppress the whole business and blissfully forget about it.”

“Wouldn't that be a little difficult?” said Aloysius Shiplap sarcastically.

“It was very difficult to do,” issued Epikt, “and yet it was done, completely, within twenty hours. And from that moment until this, nobody has remembered or thought about it at all.”

“And if Your Whimsical Highness will just explain how this was done?” Smirnov challenged the machine.

“I'll explain as well as I can, good master. The project was put in charge of a master scientist who shall be nameless — but only for a few minutes.”

“How were the written references of a metropolis of seven million persons obliterated?” asked Cogsworth.

“By a device then newly invented by our master scientist,” Epikt answered. “It was known as the Tele-Pantographic Distorter. Even I, from this distance of time and through the cloud of induced amnesia, cannot understand how it worked. But it did work, and it simultaneously destroyed all printed references to our subject. This left holes in the references, and the flow of matter to fill those holes was sometimes of inferior texture, as I have noted. Holographic — that is handwritten, for you, Valery — references were more difficult. Most were simply destroyed. In more important documents, the text was flowed in automatic writing to fill the hole, and in close imitation of the original handwriting. But these imitations were often imperfect. I have a few thousand instances of this. But the Tele-Pantographic Distorter was a truly remarkable machine, and I regret it is now out of use.”

“Kindly explain what happened to this remarkable machine,” said Smirnov.

“Oh, it's still here in the Institute. You stumble into it a dozen times a day, good master, and you curse it as ‘That Damnable Pile of Junk,’ ” issued Epikt. “But you have a block that will not allow you to remember what it is.”

“I believe that I have been stumbling into such a pile of junk for many years,” mused Smirnov. “Several times I have almost permitted myself to wonder what it was.”

“And you invented it. The master scientist of the memory-obliteration was yourself, Gregory Smirnov.”

“Hog hang it, Epikt! Your jug will leak!” protested Shiplap. “How of the human memories? The seven million inhabitants of the city would have had relatives of at least an equal number elsewhere. Didn't they wonder about their mothers or children or brothers or sisters?”

“They sorrowed, but they didn't wonder,” issued Epikt. “It was a sorrow to which they could give no name. Examine the period and see how many really sad songs were popular in the years 1980 and 1981. But broadcast euphoria soon masked it over. The human memory of the thing was blocked by induced world amnesia. This was done hypnotically over the broadcast waves, and over more subtle waves. Few escaped it. The deaf moron mentioned in one of my items was one of those few. He scrawled the name of the town on a wall once, but it meant nothing to anyone.”

“But there would be a hundred million loose ends to clean up,” Glasser protested.

“Raise that number several powers,” issued Epikt. “There were very many loose ends, and most of them were taken care of. I gathered a million or so that remained in the process of this study, but they could not break through the induced amnesia. The door was bolted on the whole subject. Then it was double-locked. It was necessary to destroy not only the memory, but also the memory of that memory. Mr. Smirnov, in what was perhaps his greatest feat, put himself under the final hypnosis against it. It was his job to pull in the hole after them all. But it bothered him more than others because he was more involved in it. After this temporary explanation it will bother him no more. This time he will forget it with a clear conscience.

“He does not recognize or remember it even now. It was his intent and triumph that he never should. The city and its destruction are forgotten forever, but the method of that memory-obliteration has only been forced to a subliminal level. It will be resurrected and used again whenever there is a great unnatural disaster.”

“And where in tarnation or the American Midlands was this city?” Cogsworth hollered.

“Its site is now known as the Great Blue Island Swamp,” issued Epikt.

“Finish it, you goggle-eyed gadget,” Shiplap shrilled. “What's the name of that town?”

“Chicago,” issued Epikt.

That broke it! That tore it clear up! It was a hoax after all. That clattering clown of a cubicle had led them into it with all eyes open. Valery went into her high laughter, and her good husband Cogsworth chortled like a gooney bird with the hiccups.

“Chicago! It sounds like a little zoo beaver sliding down a mud slide and hitting the water. Chicago!” It was the funniest word Valery had ever heard.

“Nobody but a machine gone comic could coin a name like that,” laughed Glasser with his fire-cracker laugh. “Chicago!”

“I take my hat off to you, Epiktistes,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “You are a cog-footed, tongue-in-cheek tall tale teller. People, this machine is ripe!”

“I'm a little disappointed,” said Smirnov. “So the mountain labored and produced a mouse. But did it have to be a wall-eyed mouse in a clown suit, Epikt? It's too tall even for a tale. That a great city could be completely destroyed only twenty years ago and we know nothing about it — that's tall enough. But that it should have the impossible name of Chicago tops it all. If you weighed all possible sounds — and I'm sure that you did, Epikt — you could not come up with a more ridiculous sounding name than that.”

“Good people, it is meant to be this way,” issued Epiktistes. “You cannot remember it. You cannot recognize it. And when you leave this room you will not even be able to recall the funny name. You will have only the dim impression that the clownish machine played a clownish trick on you. The disasters — for I suspect that there were several such — are well forgotten. The world would lie down and die if it remembered them too well.

“And yet there really was a large city named Chicago. As Sikagó it left a hole in one Hungarian dictionary-encyclopedia; and the Petit Larousse had to flow French froth about the Chibcha Indians into the place where Chicago had stood. Something, for which I find the tentative name Chicago Hot, was pulled out of the jazz complex by the roots. The Calumet River had flowed about the city somewhere, so there came a reluctance to use that name of the old Indian peace pipe. Chicago was a great city. The heart of her downtown was known as the Loop, and one of her baseball teams was named the Cubs. For that reason those two words were forced out of use. They might be evocative.”

“Loop? Cubs?” giggled Valery. “Those words are almost as funny as Chicago. How do you make them up, Epikt?”

“In popular capsule impression Chicago was the chewing-gum capital of the world. The leader in this manufacture was a man named — as well as I can reconstruct it — Wiggly. Children somehow found the echoes of the gruesome destruction of Chicago and tied it in with this capsule impression to produce the bloody Little Willy verses about chewing gum.”

“Epikt, you top yourself,” said Shiplap, “if anything could top an invention as funny as Chicago.”

“Good people, it comes down over you like a curtain,” issued Epiktistes. “You forget again — even my joke, even the funny name of the town. And, more to the point, I forget also.

“It's gone. Gone. All gone. How peculiar! It is a long blank tape you all stare at as though you were under hypnosis. I must have suffered a blackout. I never issued a blank tape before. Smirnov, I have the taste in my terminals of an experiment that didn't quite come off. Feed me another. I don't fail often.”

“That is enough for today, Epiktistes. We are all sleepy for some reason. No, it didn't work out — whatever it was. I forget what it was that we were working on. It doesn't matter. Our failures are well forgotten. We'll hit on something else. We're working on a lot of things.”

Then they all shuffled out sleepily and went back to their work. Smirnov's machine had busted on something or other, but it was a good machine and would hit the next time, of that they were sure.

In the corridor, Smirnov stumbled into his old Tele-Pantographic Distorter. He had been stumbling unseeing into it every day for twenty years.

The machine rolled nine banks of eyes at Smirnov and smiled willingly. Was it another of those disasters? Was there any deep work to be done? Tele-Pan was ready. But no. Smirnov passed on. The machine smiled again and went peacefully back to sleep.

“That damnable piece of junk,” Smirnov growled, walking along and petting his sore shin. “I feel almost as if I were on the verge of wondering what it is.”

Old Foot Forgot

“Dookh-Doctor, it is a sphairikos patient,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. cried happily. “It is a genuine spherical alien patient. You've never had one before, not in good faith. I believe it is what you need to distract you from the — ah — happy news about yourself. It is good for a Dookh-Doctor to have a different patient sometimes.”

“Thank you, lay sister. Let it, him, her, fourth case, fifth case or whatever come in. No, I've never had a sphairikos in good faith. I doubt if this one is, but I will enjoy the encounter.”

The sphairikos rolled or pushed itself in. It was a big one, either a blubbery kid or a full-grown one. It rolled itself along by extruding and withdrawing pseudopods. And it came to rest grinning, a large translucent rubbery ball of fleeting colors.

“Hello, Dookh-Doctor,” it said pleasantly. “First I wish to extend my own sympathy and that of my friends who do not know how to speak to you for the happy news about yourself. And secondly I have an illness of which you may cure me.”

“But the sphairikoi are never ill,” Dookh-Doctor Drague said dutifully.

How did he know that the round creature was grinning at him? By the colors, of course; by the fleeting colors of it. They were grinning colors.

“My illness is not of the body but of the head,” said the sphairikos.

“But the sphairikoi have no heads, my friend.”

“Then it is of another place and another name, Dookh-Doctor. There is a thing in me suffering. I come to you as a Dookh-Doctor. I have an illness in my Dookh.”

“That is unlikely in a sphairikos. You are all perfectly balanced, each a cosmos unto yourself. And you have a central solution that solves everything. What is your name?”

“Krug Sixteen, which is to say that I am the sixteenth son of Krug; the sixteen fifth case son, of course. Dookh-Doc, the pain is not in me entirely; it is in an old forgotten part of me.”

“But you sphairikoi have no parts, Krug Sixteen. You are total and indiscriminate entities. How would you have parts?”

“It is one of my pseudopods, extended and then withdrawn in much less than a second long ago when I was a little boy. It protests, it cries, it wants to come back. It has always bothered me, but now it bothers me intolerably. It screams and moans constantly now.”

“Do not the same ones ever come back?”

“No. Never. Never exactly the same ones. Will exactly the same water ever run past one point in a brook? No. We push them out and we draw them back. And we push them out again, millions of times. But the same one can never come back. There is no identity. But this one cries to come back, and now it becomes more urgent. Dookh-Doc, how can it be? There is not one same molecule in it as when I was a boy. There is nothing of that pseudopod that is left; but parts of it have come out as parts of other pseudopods, and now there can be no parts left. There is nothing remaining of that foot; it has all been absorbed a million times. But it cries out! And I have compassion on it.”

“Krug Sixteen, it may possibly be a physical or mechanical difficulty, a pseudopod imperfectly withdrawn, a sort of rupture whose effects you interpret wrongly. In that case it would be better if you went to your own doctors, or doctor: I understand that there is one.”

“That old fogey cannot help me, Dookh-Doc. And our pseudopods are always perfectly withdrawn. We are covered with the twinkling salve; it is one-third of our bulk. And if we need more of it we can make more of it ourselves; or we can beg some of it from a class four who make it prodigiously. It is the solvent for everything. It eases every possible wound; it makes us round as balls; you should use it yourself, Dookh-Doc. But there is one small foot in me, dissolved long ago, that protests and protests. Oh, the shrieking! The horrible dreams!”

“But the sphairikoi do not sleep and do not dream.”

“Right enough, Dookh-Doc. But there's an old dead foot of mine that sure does dream loud and wooly.”

The sphairikos was not grinning now. He rolled about softly in apprehension. How did the Dookh-Doctor know that it was apprehension? By the fleeting colors. They were apprehension colors now.

“Krug Sixteen, I will have to study your case,” said the Dookh-Doctor. “I will see if there are any references to it in the literature, though I don't believe that there are. I will seek for analogy. I will probe every possibility. Can you come back at the same hour tomorrow?”

“I will come back, Dookh-Doc,” Krug Sixteen sighed. “I hate to feel that small vanished thing crying and trembling.”

It rolled or pushed itself out of the clinic by extruding and then withdrawing pseudopods. The little pushers came out of the goopy surface of the sphairikos and then were withdrawn into it completely. A raindrop falling in a pond makes a much more lasting mark than does the disappearing pseudopod of a sphairikos.

But long ago, in his boyhood, one of the pseudopods of Krug Sixteen had not disappeared completely in every respect.

“There are several jokers waiting,” Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. announced a little later, “and perhaps some valid patients among them. It's hard to tell.”

“Not another sphairikos?” the Dookh-Doctor asked in sudden anxiety.

“Of course not. The one this morning is the only sphairikos who has ever come. How could there be anything wrong with him? There is never anything wrong with a sphairikos. No, these are all of the other species. Just a regular morning bunch.”

So, except for the visitation of the sphairikos, it was a regular morning at the clinic. There were about a dozen waiting, of the several species; and at least half of them would be jokers. It was always so.

There was a lean and giddy subula. One cannot tell the age or sex of them. But there was a tittering. In all human or inhuman expression, whether of sound, color, radioray or osmerhetor, the titter suggests itself. It is just around the corner, it is just outside, it is subliminal, but it is there somewhere.

“It is that my teeth hurt so terrible,” the subula shrilled so high that the Dookh-Doctor had to go on instruments to hear it. “They are tromping pain. They are agony. I think I will cut my head off. Have you a head-off cutter, Dookh-Doctor?”

“Let me see your teeth,” Dookh-Doctor Drague asked with the beginnings of irritation.

“There is one tooth jump up and down with spike boot,” the subula shrilled. “There is one jag like poisoned needle. There is one cuts like coarse rough saw. There is one burns like little hot fires.”

“Let me see your teeth,” the Dookh-Doctor growled evenly.

“There is one drills holes and sets little blasting powder in them,” the subula shrilled still more highly. “Then he sets them off. Ow! Good night!”

“Let me see your teeth!!”

“Peeef!” the subula shrilled. The teeth cascaded out, half a bushel of them, ten thousand of them, all over the floor of the clinic.

“Peeef,” the subula screeched again, and ran out of the clinic.

Tittering? (But he should have remembered that the subula have no teeth.) Tittering? It was the laughing of demented horses. It was the jackhammer braying of the dolcus, it was the hysterical giggling of the ophis (they were a half a bushel of shells of the little stink conchs and they were already beginning to rot), it was the clown laughter of the arktos (the clinic would never be habitable again; never mind, he would burn it down and build another one tonight).

The jokers, the jokers, they did have their fun with him, and perhaps it did them some good.

“I have this trouble with me,” said a young dolcus, “but it make me so nervous to tell it. Oh, it do make me nervous to tell it to the Dookh-Doc.”

“Do not be nervous,” said the Dookh-Doctor, fearing the worst. “Tell me your trouble in whatever way you can. I am here to serve every creature that is in any trouble or pain whatsoever. Tell it.”

“Oh but it make me so nervous. I perish. I shrivel. I will have accident I am so nervous.”

“Tell me your trouble, my friend. I am here to help.”

“Whoops, whoops, I already have accident! I tell you I am nervous.”

The dolcus urinated largely on the clinic floor. Then it ran out laughing.

The laughing, the shrilling, the braying, the shrill giggling that seemed to scrape the flesh from his bones. (He should have remembered that the dolcus do not urinate; everything comes from them hard and solid.) The hooting, the laughing! It was a bag of green water from the kolmula swamp. Even the aliens gagged at it, and their laughter was of a pungent green sort.

Oh well, there were several of the patients with real, though small, ailments, and there were more jokers. There was the arktos who —  (Wait, wait, that particular jokerie cannot be told with human persons present; even the subula and the ophis blushed lavender at the rawness of it. A thing like that can only be told to arktos themselves.) And there was another dolcus who — 

Jokers, jokers, it was a typical morning at the clinic.

One does whatever one can for the oneness that is greater than self. In the case of Dookh-Doctor Drague it meant considerable sacrifice. One who works with the strange species here must give up all hope of material reward or material sophistication in his surroundings. But the Dookh-Doctor was a dedicated man.

Oh, the Dookh-Doctor lived pleasantly and with a sort of artful simplicity and dynamic involvement in the small articles of life. He had an excited devotion and balanced intensity for corporate life.

He lived in small houses of giolach-weed, woven with careful double-rappel. He lived in each one for seven days only, and then burned it and scattered the ashes, taking always one bitter glob of them on his tongue for reminder of the fleetingness of temporal things and the wonderfulness of the returning. To live in one house for more than seven days is to become dull and habitual; but the giolach-weed will not burn well till it has been cut and plaited for seven days, so the houses set their own terms. One half day to build, seven days to inhabit, one half day to burn ritually and scatter, one renewal night under the speir-sky.

The Dookh-Doctor ate raibe, or he ate innuin or ull or piorra when they were in season. And for the nine days of each year when none of these were in season, he ate nothing at all.

His clothing he made himself of colg. His paper was of the pailme plant. His printer used buaf ink and shaved slinn stone. Everything that he needed he made for himself from things found wild in the hedgerows. He took nothing from the cultivated land or from the alien peoples. He was a poor and dedicated servant.

Now he stacked some of the needful things from the clinic, and Lay Sister Moira P. T. de C. took others of them to her own giolach house to keep till the next day. Then the Dookh-Doctor ritually set his clinic on fire, and a few moments later his house. This was all symbol of the great nostos, the returning. He recited the great rhapsodies, and other persons of the human kind came by and recited with him.

“That no least fiber of giolach die,” he recited, “that all enter immediately the more glorious and undivided life. That the ashes are the doorway, and every ash is holy. That all become a part of the oneness that is greater than self.

“That no splinter of the giuis floorboards die, that no glob of the chinking clay die, that no mite or louse in the plaiting die. That all become a part of the oneness that is greater than self.”

He burned, he scattered, he recited, he took one glob of bitter ash on his tongue. He experienced vicariously the great synthesis. He ate holy innuin and holy ull. And when it was finished, both of the house and the clinic, when it had come on night and he was homeless, he slept that renewal night under the speir-sky.

And in the morning he began to build again, the clinic first, and then the house.

“It is the last of either that I shall ever build,” he said. The happy news about himself was that he was a dying man and that he would be allowed to take the short way out. So he built most carefully with the Last Building Rites. He chinked both the buildings with special uir clay that would give a special bitterness to the ashes at the time of final burning.

Krug Sixteen rolled along while the Dookh-Doctor still built his final clinic, and the sphairikos helped him in the building while they consulted on the case of the screaming foot. Krug Sixteen could weave and plait and rappel amazingly with his pseudopods; he could bring out a dozen of them, a hundred, thick or thin, whatever was needed, and all of a wonderful dexterity. That globe could weave.

“Does the forgotten foot still suffer, Krug Sixteen?” Dookh-Doctor Drague asked it.

“It suffers, it's hysterical, it's in absolute terror. I don't know where it is; it does not know; and how I know about it at all is a mystery. Have you found any way to help me, to help it?”

“No. I am sorry, but I have not.”

“There is nothing in the literature on this subject?”

“No. Nothing that I can identify as such.”

“And you have not found analogy to it?”

“Yes, Krug Sixteen, ah — in a way I have discovered analogy. But it does not help you. Or me.”

“That is too bad, Dookh-Doc. Well, I will live with it; and the little foot will finally die with it. Do I guess that your case is somewhat the same as mine?”

“No. My case is more similar to that of your lost foot than to you.”

“Well, I will do what I can for myself, and for it. It's back to the old remedy then. But I am already covered deep with the twinkling salve.”

“So am I, Krug Sixteen, in a like way.”

“I was ashamed of my affliction before and did not mention it. Now, however, since I have spoken of it to you, I have spoken of it to others also. There is some slight help, I find. I should have shot off my big bazoo before.”

“The sphairikoi have no bazoos.”

“Folk-joke, Dookh-Doc. There is a special form of the twinkling salve. My own is insufficient, so I will try the other.”

“A special form of it, Krug Sixteen? I am interested in this. My own salve seems to have lost its effect.”

“There is a girlfriend, Dookh-Doc, or a boyfriend person. How shall I say it? It is a case four person to my case five. This person, though promiscuous, is expert. And this person exudes the special stuff in abundance.”

“Not quite my pot of ointment I'm afraid, Krug Sixteen; but it may be the answer for you. It is special? And it dissolves everything, including objections?”

“It is the most special of all the twinkling salves, Dookh-Doc, and it solves and dissolves everything. I believe it will reach my forgotten foot, wherever it is, and send it into kind and everlasting slumber. It will know that it is itself that slumbers, and that will be bearable.”

“If I were not — ah — going out of business, Krug Sixteen, I'd get a bit of it and try to analyze it. What is the name of this special case four person?”

“Torchy Twelve is its name.”

“Yes. I have heard of her.”

Everybody now knew that it was the last week in the life of the Dookh-Doctor, and everyone tried to make his happiness still more happy. The morning jokers outdid themselves, especially the arktos. After all, he was dying of an arktos disease, one never fatal to the arktos themselves. They did have some merry and outrageous times around the clinic, and the Dookh-Doctor got the sneaky feeling that he would rather live than die.

He hadn't, it was plain to see, the right attitude. So Lay Priest Migma P. T. de C. tried to inculcate the right attitude in him.

“It is the great synthesis you go to, Dookh-Doctor,” he said. “It is the happy oneness that is greater than self.”

“Oh I know that, but you put it on a little too thick. I've been taught it from my babyhood. I'm resigned to it.”

“Resigned to it? You should be ecstatic over it! The self must perish, of course, but it will live on as an integral atom of the evolving oneness, just as a drop lives on in the ocean.”

“Aye, Migma, but the drop may hang onto the memory of the time when it was cloud, of the time when it was falling drop, indeed, of the time when it was brook. It may say ‘There's too damned much salt in this ocean. I'm lost here.’ ”

“Oh, but the drop will want to be lost, Dookh-Doctor. The only purpose of existence is to cease to exist. And there cannot be too much of salt in the evolving oneness. There cannot be too much of anything. All must be one in it. Salt and sulphur must be one, undifferentiated. Offal and soul must become one. Blessed be oblivion in the oneness that collapses on itself.”

“Stuff it, lay priest. I'm weary of it.”

“Stuff it, you say? I don't understand your phrase, but I'm sure it's apt. Yes, yes, Dookh-Doctor, stuff it all in: animals, people, rocks, grass, worlds and wasps. Stuff it all in. That all may be obliterated into the great — may I not coin a word even as the master coined them? — into the great stuffiness!”

“I'm afraid your word is all too apt.”

“It is the great quintessence, it is the happy death of all individuality and memory, it is the synthesis of all living and dead things into the great amorphism. It is the — ”

“It is the old old salve, and it's lost its twinkle,” the Dookh-Doctor said sadly. “How goes the old quotation? When the salve becomes sticky, how then will you come unstuck?”

No, the Dookh-Doctor did not have the right attitude, so it was necessary that many persons should harass him into it. Time was short. His death was due. And there was the general fear that the Dookh-Doctor might not be properly lost.

He surely came to his time of happiness in grumpy fashion.

The week was gone by. The last evening for him was come. The Dookh-Doctor ritually set his clinic on fire, and a few minutes later his house.

He burned, he scattered, he recited the special last-time recital. He ate holy innuin and holy ull. He took one glob of most bitter ash on his tongue: and he lay down to sleep his last night under the speir-sky.

He wasn't afraid to die.

“I will cross that bridge gladly, but I want there to be another side to that bridge,” he talked to himself. “And if there is no other side of it, I want it to be me who knows that there is not. They say ‘Pray that you be happily lost forever. Pray for blessed obliteration.’ I will not pray that I be happily lost forever. I would rather burn in a hell forever than suffer happy obliteration! I'll burn if it be me that burns. I want me to be me. I will refuse forever to surrender myself.”

It was a restless night for him. Well, perhaps he could die easier if he were wearied and sleepless at dawn.

“Other men don't make such a fuss about it,” he told himself (the self he refused to give up). “Other men are truly happy in obliteration. Why am I suddenly different? Other men desire to be lost, lost, lost. How have I lost the faith of my childhood and manhood? What is unique about me?”

There was no answer to that.

“Whatever is unique about me, I refuse to give it up. I will howl and moan against that extinction for billions of centuries. Ah, I will go sly! I will devise a sign so I will know me if I meet me again.”

About an hour before dawn the Lay Priest Migma P. T. de C. came to Dookh-Doctor Drague. The dolcus and the arktos had reported that the man was resting badly and was not properly disposed.

“I have an analogy that may ease your mind, Dookh-Doctor,” the Lay Priest whispered softly, “ — ease it into great easiness, salve it into great salving — ”

“Begone, fellow, your salve has lost its twinkle.”

“Consider that we have never lived, that we have only seemed to live. Consider that we do not die, but are only absorbed into great selfless self. Consider the odd sphairikoi of this world — ”

“What about the sphairikoi? I consider them often.”

“I believe that they are set here for our instruction. A sphairikos is a total globe, the type of the great oneness. Then consider that it sometimes ruffles its surface, extrudes a little false-foot from its soft surface. Would it not be odd if that false-foot, for its brief second, considered itself a person? Would you not laugh at that?”

“No, no. I do not laugh.” And the Dookh-Doctor was on his feet.

“And in much less than a second, that pseudopod is withdrawn back into the sphere of the sphairikoi. So it is with our lives. Nothing dies. It is only a ripple on the surface of the oneness. Can you entertain so droll an idea as that the pseudopod should remember, or wish to remember?”

“Yes. I'll remember it a billion years for the billion who forget.”

The Dookh-Doctor was running uphill in the dark. He crashed into trees and boles as though he wished to remember the crashing forever.

“I'll burn before I forget, but I must have something that says it's me who burns!”

Up, up by the spherical hills of the sphairikoi, bawling and stumbling in the dark. Up to a hut that had a certain fame he could never place, to the hut that had its own identity, that sparkled with identity.

“Open, open, help me!” the Dookh-Doctor cried out at the last hut on the hill.

“Go away, man!” the last voice protested. “All my clients are gone, and the night is almost over with. What has this person to do with a human man anyhow?”

It was a round twinkling voice out of the roweled dark. But there was enduring identity there. The twinkling, enduring-identity colors, coming from the chinks of the hut, had not reached the level of vision. There was even the flicker of the I-will-know-me-if-I-meet-me-again color.

“Torchy Twelve, help me. I am told that you have the special salve that solves the last problem, and makes it know that it is always itself that is solved.”

“Why, it is the Dookh-Doc! Why have you come to Torchy?”

“I want something to send me into kind and everlasting slumber,” he moaned. “But I want it to be me who slumbers. Cannot you help me in any way?”

“Come you in, the Dookh-Doc. This person, though promiscuous, is expert. I help you — ”

The Man Who Lost His Magic

The people of Magic Meadows called Jacob Grim ‘The Man with the Hatchet Face’. Yes, he had a hatchet face, and a bladed brain that would cut through every sort of nonsense. That was why he was sent from the Commonwealth to regularize the irregular people of the Meadows, and also to find what had happened to all the other investigators who had been sent to the Meadows on the same mission. Among the investigators who had disappeared was Jacob's own brother. Jacob, however, was a kind and considerate man. It was only an accident of mismatching that he had a hatchet face.

Jacob was the best-dressed man in Magic Meadows, except during moments when he lost his pants. And he was the richest man in the Meadows, except that every householder there had five hundred gold doubloons hidden in a bucket under a stone of the floor of his hovel. And Jacob's wealth was nowhere near that.

Jacob went out early one morning, and the first person he saw was a nine-year-old girl named Täuschung or Illusion. And she sang:

“Old Grim Jacob, hear my chants

Notice, Grim, you've lost your pants.”

And Jacob Grim felt the cold wind strike him in his skinny shanks and in his heart. He knew that he hadn't really lost his pants, that it was only a local silliness, a regional illusion. And if one believed that these childish tricks of these benighted people were real, how was one superior to them?

And the five hundred gold ducats or doubloons that every household in the Meadows possessed weren't real either. The people were always glad to show Jacob their gold, but they always said a rhyme before they lifted the stone in their kitchen floor:

“Keeper of the golden pile,

Bring it here a little while.”

And there would be a golden ringing and chiming under their floor that was the gold arriving. Jacob Grim had examined this revealed gold carefully. It was all Empress Maria Theresa Doubloons of the year 1763. And once when Jacob had been handling such gold it disappeared completely. That meant that some other householder had rhymed the gold to come to him. There was only one such cache of gold in the Meadows, and the householders shared it casually. No, in truth there was not even one cache of gold. It was only a local glob of magic, which is another word for silliness or superstition.

The next person Jacob met that morning was the mother of the nine-year-old girl. With a quick smile and an outpouring of kindness, the mother chanted a counter-rhyme:

“Be my fellow, now, anon

See, your pants have come back on.”

And of course Jacob's pants were back on. But it wasn't magic; it was only the bursting of an illusion. The young mother was named Zauberei or Enchantment. Both the mother and the daughter said that they were the same person. And no one had ever seen them together. On this morning, the daughter had gone behind a Rowan tree, and the mother had emerged from the other side of it.

“Tonight is Fly-Night,” said Zauberei the mother. “When it comes on Tuesday, as it does tonight, the flying is exceptionally good. Funny Jacob, what are you really trying to find out in the Meadows?”

“I want to find out what happened to the other men who were sent here from the Commonwealth, especially my brother.”

“I'll show you what's left of them when you fly with me tonight.”

“Do you really believe that you can fly, Zauberei?”

“I do believe it, and my believing makes it so. And I'll trick you into believing and you'll fly also. Great blathering bot-flies! — you've seen me fly more than once!”

“No. I've experienced the illusion of seeming to see it.”

Another interesting person in the Meadows was Schwarzkünstler who was a necromancer and magician.

“Good Jacob Grim,” this magic-man said this day. “The World of the Commonwealth that you think you come from does not exist on the same plane as the Magic Meadows here. One is only a metaphor of the other. Which?”

“Wizard, our great world of Science and Technology is the great and real world,” Jacob maintained solidly. “And the Meadows must become more than a metaphor. It must give up its superstitions and it must tell its secrets, especially its secret of what happened to my brother.”

“Oh, I can take you to your brother's bones, Good Jacob. They don't look very vital, but they're conscious and they talk very entertainingly.”

“My brother, is he alive or dead?” Jacob demanded.

“ ‘Dead’ and ‘Alive’ are not such opposites as you might think, Jacob. According to my arts — ”

“Oh damn you and your black arts! My brother's blood cries out to me from a jagged and murderous place.”

“Oh, the Valley may seem a bit jagged and murderous to those who take your world of the Commonwealth to be fact. But, Good Jacob, there is not any such world of Great Science and Technology as you believe in. There is only a dank conspiracy to dream such a world. We don't accept it.”

Jacob Grim was at a disadvantage against the Magician, but he had a mission to fulfill.

“I'm having trouble with the unsubstantiality of your Meadows and of yourself, twinkling man,” Jacob stated. “You people must now take on the responsibility of substantiality and of anxiety so as to become of some good to the Commonwealth.”

“Good Jacob, the collecting of tales was once the hobby of your now living-dead brother. It was a recreation away from your learned untwisting of twisted tongues. Think how much better it would have been if the tales had been the central thing to you, and if the philological games had seemed the recreation. It's almost into the heat of the day now. Come sit in the shade with me while I unwind my own tongue.”

“I'll listen a while,” said Jacob. They sat in the noontime shade, and the Sorcerer unwound his own tongue and began:

“Out of curiosity, I spent three days on the Ark with Noah. When I got there, the Giant Gog was sitting astride the bean-pole of the ark and he intended to ride out the flood that way. But he was already very seasick. Giants get seasick very easily. On the ark, I learned the answer to a question that wan-wits still ask: how could Noah have carried enough fodder to feed all the beasts on his ark? The answer is that he did not feed them. He cast an ocean-sleep over all the creatures, and they hibernated without eating for the entire voyage. This was no great trick for Noah. He was a Magician even as I am. Is that scrap of a tale in the folk tales you've examined?”

“Yes, Sorcerer, but it doesn't deserve to be.”

“Let's try another tale and see whether it will fly. Methuselah, the longest-lived man ever, was on the Ark for a while. ‘Noah and all his household’ got on the ark according to scripture, and those getting off the ark according to the same scripture were Noah and his wife, and his three sons and their wives. Methuselah was Noah's grandfather, and was a member of his household. He got on, but he didn't officially get off. ‘I always wanted to be buried at sea,’ that old man said, ‘me, who had never seen a sea. I wondered how God would fulfill this wish of mine, but who would have thought of doing it this way?’ Oh yes, we buried him at sea. I was an eyewitness.”

“Sorcerer, that tale is even older than Methuselah,” Jacob said. “But it doesn't turn up in any of the better collections because it isn't good enough.”

“Jacob, why is it necessary for the Commonwealth to regularize such pleasantly irregular people as ourselves here in the Meadows?”

“Because the Commonwealth is on the verge of becoming a Greater Commonwealth, and for that we will need all resources possible.”

“Is your brother so much to you, Jacob? In all ways you seem to have been much the greater man.”

“Then ‘all ways’ is mistaken. I was the hatchet-faced man, young and old. He was always pleasant and handsome. As proof that he was the better man, Dorothy Wild jilted me and married him. She was from back home, you know, from our own three towns, Hanau and Stenau and Kassel. I believe that she returned to the towns, and that she is dead now.”

“Jacob, why aren't my tales good enough for the collections?”

“There's no enemy and no problems in them, Sorcerer. So there's no tales either. As to my own life-tale, you people are providing enemies and problems here. As to the tales that my brother and I collected, the last of them was published forty-one years ago. They were the products of our elongated boyhoods. I'd disown them now and withdraw them, except that they still pay me very well. But in our adult decades, we fought the battle for rationality in all things, and we did very significant scientific work. And we served the Commonwealth. Nobody ever served the Commonwealth better than we did, and no Commonwealth has ever been more regularized.”

“Jacob, doesn't Magic Meadows remind you a little bit of the little town where you were born, Hanau in the little state of Hessen-Kassel, which has since been swallowed by a bigger state?”

“They remind me of each other a little bit, Sorcerer.”

“Happy flying tonight, Jacob. But you have lost your Magic. That means that it will be a bumpy flight for you. You lost your Magic.”

“But I found a Commonwealth that will engulf the whole world.”

Later in the afternoon, there was a pleasant and musical hammering going on, and there was a sparkling as from a forge.

“It is only Schwarzkünstler the Sorcerer repairing wings for persons who will fly tonight,” an old crone told Jacob Grim.

“You people really believe that you fly,” Jacob said with wonder.

“For the good of his soul, every person should fly at least once in life, even if it is at the hour of his death,” said the cheerful and ugly crone. “And the Sorcerer is a making a new set of wings for somebody.”

“I've been here a week and I don't seem to have made much progress,” Jacob mused. “But in another week, my influence for rationalism and against magic and superstition will be apparent.”

“You haven't another week,” the crone told him. “You must die today — tonight.”

“Not so,” Jacob contradicted. “I am the hero of this my own tale; and the hero never dies today but always tomorrow.”

“This is tomorrow, Jacob,” the crone said. “I thought you knew that. You are daydreaming of a woman. Who is she?”

“Dorothy Wild, the wife of my brother William, she whom I've always loved.”

“Dorothy was here in the Meadows today. She has a house only half a mile from here. She arrived in the neighborhood a week ago, the same day you arrived.”

“You are wrong, crone. Dorothy died several years ago.”

“In her case, that only gives her greater mobility.”

Then it was twilit evening. Jacob was walking with the little girl Täuschung or Illusion.

“You are my favorite ugly old man,” Täuschung said. “I like you.”

Jacob was pleased by this. “Will you also be flying tonight?” he asked.

“No, I'm not old enough. Next year I'll fly.”

They came to a Rowan tree. Täuschung walked behind it, but it was her mother Zauberei who came out the other side.

“What did happen to the men from the Commonwealth who came here?” he asked her.

“Most of them skipped to Paris or London or Vienna,” she said. “They found the Commonwealth, and especially the Greater Commonwealth that is in the offing, too much to swallow.”

“Oh they of little faith,” Jacob said sorrowfully.

“But your brother fell into the Valley. It's quite near.”

“Then I'll find him there. His blood cries to me from that bleak place.”

“But he doesn't sound bleak. I've heard him laughing there several times. He has such a pleasant laugh. It's also called The Valley of the Talking Bones. The bones of the dead people there talk to each other. Sometimes they sing. They have a good time.”

There was an earth-shaking jolt. “What was that?” Jacob cried.

“Oh, that was ‘The Fall of Night’. It was a sort of pun or joke with us at first. But now we've fleshed the pun to the point where the jolt is severe.”

“Zauberei, why can't I walk over this hill and into the Valley now?”

“The Valley is entirely surrounded by infernal quicksand. It can be entered only from above, from the high air.”

They were at the crest of the hill now, and the darkness was everywhere enlivened by the playful lightning. Persons were already flying aloft.

“It's time for you and I to fly together now, Jacob,” Zauberei said.

“Never!” Jacob cried with animation. “I am a rationalist, and every sort of superstition, such as flying, makes me froth at the mouth.”

“You are frothing now, Jacob, and you do have problems. But I'll grant you a wish now, and it'll obliterate your problems.”

“What are you, a fairy godmother, to grant wishes?”

“Oh, Jacob, it's now known that any good person can grant a wish to any other good person. What is your wish?”

“My only wish is that I might rise above such superstitious clatter.”

“Granted, granted. I grant your wish, Jacob.”

“What, what is this? What sort of shackles are these things on me?”

“You made a wish and I granted it,” chortled Zauberei. “These things that are suddenly upon you aren't shackles. They are the new wings that the Sorcerer made for you this afternoon. With them you may rise above every clatter and clutter. Come fly with me! If your heart is merry and true you will fly to a merry place. But if your heart is bleak, you will fall down, down, down, and burst upon the jagged ground. You have a choice.”

Swearing and fuming, Jacob Grim fought against the grotesque things that now had him in their coils. But, grotesque or not, the more he struggled with them the higher he rose into the air. With a banging and rattle of wings he was flying, much against his will.

“But what if I still don't believe I'm flying?” he croaked.

“You'd better believe it,” jibed the chimney swift that was flying circles around him in the air, “or you'll fall, and it's a thousand feet down.”

“What's that dingy white stuff scattered in the Valley below?” Jacob cried in a voice that was a little bit out of control.

“Just the bones of unbelievers who fell from the great height,” the chimney swift laughed.

“What's that river twinkling in the lightning, quite near?”

“The River Fulda,” the swift said.

“How could it be?” Jacob argued. “I lived near the River Fulda.”

Then the chimney swift, out of pure malice, chanted a verse:

“Old Grim Jacob, hear my chants.

Notice, Grim, you've lost your pants.”

No pants, high in the air, and the lightning played on him like spotlights, and even the thunder was laughing at him. But Jacob would not be intimidated.

“An unbeliever has got to believe in his unbelief,” he cried out.

“You were told you'd have a choice,” croaked a night-black rook that was coasting around his head, “but you must take it now.”

 “I do take it,” Jacob howled in his anger. “I abjure the whole idea that I am flying high in the air. I refuse the whole double-damned superstitious illusion!”

He took his choice, and his wings fell clear off him. He fell down and down, faster and faster, to crash — 

“Not if I don't believe it!” he roared in his stubborn voice.

“Especially if you don't believe it!” roared a voice even more stubborn than his own.

 — to crash so hard that he splattered and scattered his bones and his viscera and one of his eyeballs all across the floor of the Valley. Oh, and he was still pantless when he crashed! That hurt him the most.

But there was still a piece of his head that hung together, with his hatchet face still as sharp as before, with his stubborn and jutting chin still a-jut, and with one eye still in the remnant of its socket, baleful as the eye of a basilisk.

The scattered pieces of Jacob were strewn very close to those of his brother William who had crashed there four years earlier. William had also lost his magic, and he also had rejected the illusion that he was flying. And one doesn't regain his magic all at once.

“How long?” a piece of Jacob called out miserably.

“Oh, not too long, Jacob,” a piece of his brother William called out in a happier tone. “Oh, I am glad to have you here with me! It'll be about a thousand years before we regain it, but we have plenty of time here.”

Officially Wilhelm Grimm was buried in 1859 and his brother Jacob was buried in 1863 in St. Matthews Churchyard in West Berlin of the growing Commonwealth of Prussia, whose growing they had both served so faithfully. But Dorothy Wild, the wife of Wilhelm, the romance of Jacob, was not buried with them. She was buried, according to written instructions that she left, back in her hometown of Kassel.

But strange and spooky stories began after the burial of the second brother Jacob in West Berlin. So, about two years after the second burial, both graves were opened. And both bodies were in them, quite inert, and giving no evidence that they ever rose and walked, as superstitious people had reported. The bodies were like old parchment, brown and ragged looking, and curiously caved in. But nobody thought to check whether the bones were still in those shrunken bodies.

They weren't.

Their bones were half of Germany away from there, in a queer place sometimes called the Valley of the Unbelievers and sometimes the Valley of the Talking Bones. The two dead brothers talked to each other and to other boney people there. And they taught the other boney people folk-songs and led them in the singing. And Dorothy Wild, the wife of William, the romance of Jacob, came to visit them every day. She brought a pair of pants so Jacob could cover some of his boney parts and suffer less embarrassment.

But wait a minute. Wasn't she dead too?

Sure she was, and that gave her greater mobility. And Kassel, one of the towns where they had all lived, was only half a mile from the Valley.

Sometimes the Brothers coaxed other boney folks to remember and tell old stories, and they did so.

“They're not very good tales,” one pile-of-bones said, “but we like them, and they're better than nothing.”

The most massive pile of bones in the Valley of the Talking Bones were those of the Giant Gog. “I am the biggest and oldest of all of you,” he told the other boney people, “and I had the longest and slowest fall of any of you down into this cursed valley, down through the ancient water. I was riding on the ridge-pole of the Ark, and the Ark bucked me off. So I drowned and ended up here. I'm the most massive of you all.”

The tales told by Gog's bones were also the most massive of all. It takes his bones at least three days to tell the shortest of his tales. But in some ways they are the best. They haven't the shortcomings of which Jacob complains in most of the tales there.

There are enemies in Gog's bones' tales. There are problems and conflicts in them. A giant who has been rubbing people and bones the wrong way for five thousand years will have plenty of enemies, plenty of troubles, plenty of conflicts.

The boney people in the Valley have whittled chess pieces out of their own bones and they play chess with them. Some of them are among the best chess players in all the Germanies.

And the thousand years that it takes for the two brothers to regain their lost magic isn't really such a long time. A hundred years of it has already elapsed, and it only took a hundred years to do it.

The Story of Little Briar-Rose

A Scholarly Study

Thorny-Rose Dreamer, you sleep as though dead:

Worlds within worlds within worlds in your head.

 — Heinrich Kleinwolf, Steep Dreams

The Dreamer is fifteen years old, and she has been fifteen years old for nearly a thousand years.

 — Alesandro Leija, Fairy Tales of Aragon

We are investigating the story of Sleeping Beauty to see whether there are not hidden in it the seeds of fuller happenings than those that are usually narrated.

Yes, there are indeed unused, hidden and explosive story riches in the Sleeping Beauty Story. But these riches must remain hidden and unused, if not forever, at least for a thousand years. For there would be world-wide turmoil if the hidden parts of it were made known.

“World-wide turmoil?”

“Yes, even wider than the world. There would be turmoil in one entire mind from one end of it to the other.”

But first, there are a couple of loose ends that must be dealt with. Have you ever noticed that most loose ends are found at the beginning?

We quote:

“In the tenth-century Europe and Near East, there was a general feeling that the world would end in either the year 999 or 1000.

The popular prophets finally settled on the date of April 1 of the year 1000. (April First was at that time the first day of the year, so it was the first All Fools' Day.) Many people, as the day approached, gave away all that they owned to whomever wanted it. They sang a lot of and laughed a lot and repented of their sins. Ninety-five percent of the people believed that the End of the World was nigh, and they were glad to see that great day coming. And five percent of the people believed that the world was not about to end, and they acquired land titles and property titles from all the True Believers. ‘What monumental fools they are!’ the skeptical five percent cried. ‘Oh, how the laugh is going to be on those fools!’

“But who was the laugh really on? For the world really did end at dawn of April 1 of the year 1000.”

 — Arpad Arutinov, The Back Door of History

We quote again:

“In the year 410 of Restored Salvation, a Camel swallowed the entire world and retained it in its maw for a period of thirty-nine seconds. The beast then regurgitated the world again, and things went on as before. People had the feeling that something odd had happened, but they could not quite identify the feeling.

“In the year 785 bc a huge fish swallowed the entire Universe and retained it (not in its belly, but in a small space behind the pineal gland, the dreamer's gland, in its brain) for sixty-nine hours. A peculiarity of this manifestation was that each person in the world believed that he alone had been swallowed by the big fish, which became known as the Jonah-Fish in legend.

“Again, in the year 209 bc the pagan god Indra captured the entire Universe in his brain. As the Jonah-Fish had done, Indra set it in the small space behind his dreamer's gland (his pineal gland). The effect of this was that the Universe was existing only in the dreams of Indra and did not have an independent existence. But the experience gave Indra a headache, so after nine minutes he ejected the Universe again. Then the Universe teetered between an existence that was slightly more tenuous than its previous existence.

“These things really happened. They were not observational malfunctions. So what does the human community do when such massive and impossible things happen? It gives them a name and consigns them to being a footnote in the most obscure history it can find. The name given to these phenomena was ‘Universal Inversion’ or ‘Topological Inversion’, and mine was the most obscure history it could find.”

 — Atrox Fabulinus

That takes care of the loose ends. They may not belong here, but it is a topological imperative that everything should be somewhere. Now we proceed to the story of Little Briar-Rose who came to be known as Sleeping Beauty.

The story presently is found in several different versions and forms. One of them is named THE SLEEPING BEAUTY IN THE WOODS, by Charles Perrault who lived from 1628 to 1703. The story appears in 1697 in a book titled “Accounts and Tales of Times Past by My Mother the Goose.” In France of that day, ‘Mother Goose Tales’ had the same meaning as ‘Old Wives Tales’ had in England. But the “Mother Goose Nursery Rymes” published in London in 1760 owed nothing to Charles Perrault except the borrowed name ‘Mother Goose.’

A second more modern version of the story was written by the Brothers Grimm (Jacob who lived 1785-1863 and Wilhelm who lived 1786-1859). The story was in the Household Tales of the Grimms' that appeared between 1812 and 1822. It was named Little Briar-Rose (Dorn-Röschen). Though written more than a hundred years after the Perrault story, Little Briar-Rose is of an earlier recension. Using the technique of diffusion and parallelism, the tireless Brothers Grimm, sometimes employing as many as one hundred oral versions of a story from all Europe and the Near East, were able to reconstruct and to date approximately (so they believed) the original stories. They set the date-of-origin of Little Briar-Rose (its most popular name), or Sleeping Beauty (its second most popular name) as being close to, but not before, the year 1000.

The Brothers Grimm believed that the Story of Little Briar-Rose had a sort of predecessor in folklore named Noah and his Wonderful Ark.

What connection could there be between Noah and his Ark and the story of Sleeping Beauty? Oh, Noah was an enchanter, so he put all the birds and beasts on the Ark to sleep, and his wife and sons and his sons' wives too. “It's the easiest way to handle it,” he said, “the hay bill for the beasts alone would break me.” After he had put them all to sleep, Noah went up to the caboose (the little room with the window in the top of the Ark) and sat in the Captain's chair with his left eye open and his right eye closed in sleep. And he slept from the seventeenth day of the second month till the seventeenth day of the seventh month of what has been called ‘The Year of The Big Flood.’

“Was the phenomena of Topological Inversion involved in either the Noah story or the Sleeper story?”

“How would we know if it was?”

A minor version of the Sleeping Beauty story is Tchaikovsky's ‘Sleeping Beauty’ Ballet. The story is expressed more in the music and dance sequences than in its words and glosses.

Another minor version of the story is found in two songs by Stephen Foster: ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ and ‘Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming’. The story is found entirely in the music and not at all in the words of these two songs.

And then there are several paintings which show the Sleeper's Castle surrounded by its bramble-bushes which merge into clouds, for the whole thing is free-floating in the sky — well now, it is really free-floating in nothing at all, it is entirely outside space.

In the Perrault version there are eight fairies (seven good ones and one bad one). In the Grimm version there are no fairies at all. The two brothers, the crown princes of the fairy-tale industry, seldom used fairies. Instead of fairies, there were thirteen wise women, twelve good ones and one bad one.

The waking of the Sleeping Beauty Princess is contrived and artificial in all versions. Indeed, Jacob Grimm, in his old age and after the death of his brother Wilhelm, gave the opinion that the sleeping princess had not really wakened at all, that she was still sleeping after her ‘century’ had gone nine or ten times over. Jacob was even heard to mutter, “She must not wake, she must not wake. If she wakes up, then everything is finished.” But Jacob Grimm had gone a bit dotty in his old age, and nobody inquired too closely as to what he meant.

Little Briar-Rose was an incomparably intricate and spacious and wise person. Since she had no speaking parts in any of the versions of her own story, it is something of a mystery how we know that she was so intricate and wise and spacious, but it's always been known about her. She became ‘The Earthen Vessel Holding Treasure,’ one selected out of many billions for the role.

Was there something mysterious about Briar Castle, the home of Little Briar-Rose? There is something mysterious about every castle; that's one of the requirements of being a castle. Was Briar Castle unusually large or in any way impressive?

“Not too large to fit behind the pineal gland (the dreamer's gland) in the human brain,” says one peculiar voice.

“Be quiet, peculiar voice,” we say. What evidence have we.

It impressed one poet who wrote:

“It's an older place than Eden

And a taller town than Rome.”

Was Sleeping Beauty really as beautiful as has been made out? Yes, she was quite beautiful in form and face. However, though quite beautiful, there was more strength and intensity and scope in her fifteen-year-old face than there was softness and gentleness. Or, as Belloc has it in one of his poems:

“Her face was like a King's Command

When all the swords are drawn.”

Even in her strange sleep, Little Briar-Rose was in command. This is especially evident in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty Ballet, in its music and dance sequences, more than in its glosses and words.

She must not wake, she must not wake!

“Hey, old Arpad Arutinov, if the world ended on April 1, of the year 1000, on the first April Fools Day, as you say it did, how come we are still here?”

“You are not here, not quite here, not as you mean it. You are only here in a much more tenuous way, in a much more tenuous ‘here.’ ”

“Why would the Lord of Eternity leave us in a tenuous state for near a thousand years?”

“For fun, perhaps, since a thousand years is less than one eyeblink to the Lord of Eternity.”

“Hey, old Atrox Fabulinus, how much space is there behind the pineal gland in the human brain?”

“Not much space behind the pineal gland (the dreamer's gland) in the human brain, not much space at all. Barely enough space to contain the Universe.”

Yes, of course the world ended at dawn of April 1 of the year 1000. That is proved by all sorts of evidence. No, there is nothing of the World remaining anywhere. There's a catch to that, however. To be completely inaccurate about the matter, we must state that one person has survived ‘nowhere’, outside of space. She is in a deep sleep, and has been in deep sleep in her ‘nowhere place’ for nigh on to a thousand years. But she has deep dreams in her deep sleep, and all of us are items in her dreams.

Oh, don't carry on like that, folks. This isn't that bad at all. Consider the things that could have been.

What if the Camel that swallowed the entire World in the year 410 of Restored Salvation and retained it in his stomach for thirty-nine seconds, had retained it until the present time? What if all of us had been born and lived, and would die, in the crowded space of a camel's stomach! Anybody who has been in a camel's stomach for only thirty-nine seconds knows that it is a damnable place to be. The present circumstance is better.

What if, when in the year 785 bc a huge fish had swallowed the entire Universe and retained it for sixty-nine hours, the fish had retained it all until the present time? The circumstance for all of us would long since have become a situation of delirious insanity. The present circumstance is better.

What if, when in the year 209 bc the pagan god Indra captured the entire Universe in his brain, he had retained it there until the present time instead of rejecting it after nine minutes? Oh, the awkward, misshapen, totally hideous dreams of Indra that we would then inhabit! The present circumstance is much better.

As it is, we are being dreamed by a pleasant, variegated mind, by a person of quiet sanity and balance and, yes, sweetness.

If we had been able to select, out of all the persons ever, the person we would most like to be dreamed by, could we have made a better selection than Little Briar-Rose?

End of Scholarly Study

Been a Long Long Time

It doesn't end with one — it Begins with a whimper.

It was a sundering Dawn — Incandescence to which all later lights are less than candles — Heat to which the heat of all later suns is but a burnt-out match — the Polarities that set up the tension forever.

And in the middle was a whimper, just as was felt the first jerk that indicated that time had begun.

The two Challenges stood taller than the radius of the space that was being born; and one weak creature, Boshel, stood in the middle, too craven to accept either challenge.

“Uh, how long you fellows going to be gone?” Boshel snuffled.

The Creative Event was the Revolt rending the Void in two. The two sides formed, opposing Nations of Lightning split above the steep chasm. Two Champions had it out with a bitterness that has never passed — Michael wrapped in white fire — and Helel swollen with black and purple blaze. And their followers with them. It has been put into allegory as Acceptance and Rejection, and as Good and Evil; but in the Beginning there was the Polarity by which the universes are sustained.

Between them, like a pygmy, stood Boshel alone in whimpering hesitation.

“Get the primordial metal out of it if you're coming with us,” Helel growled like cracked thunder as he led his followers off in a fury to form a new settlement.

“Uh, you guys going to be back before night?” Boshel whimpered.

“Oh, get the Hell out of here!” Michael roared.

“Keep the little oaf!” Helel snorted. “He hasn't enough brimstone in him to set fire to an outhouse.”

The two great hosts separated, and Boshel was left alone in the void. He was still standing there when there was a second little jerk and time began in earnest, bursting the pod into a shower of sparks that traveled and grew. He was still standing there when the sparks acquired form and spin; and he stood there yet when life began to appear on the soot specks thrown off from the sparks. He stood there quite a long long time.

“What are we going to do with the little bugger?” an underling asked Michael. “We can't have him fouling up the landscape forever.”

“I'll go ask,” said Mike, and he did.

But Michael was told that the responsibility was his; that Boshel would have to be punished for his hesitancy; and that it was up to Michael to select the suitable punishment and see that it was carried out.

“You know, he made time itself stutter at the start,” Mike told the underling. “He set up a random that affected everything. It's got to be a punishment with something to do with time.”

“You got any ideas?” the underling asked.

“I'll think of something,” Michael said.

Quite a while after this, Michael was thumbing through a book one afternoon at a newsstand in Los Angeles.

“It says here,” Michael intoned, “that if six monkeys were set down to six typewriters and typed for a long enough time, they would type all the works of Shakespeare exactly. Time is something we've got plenty of. Let's try it, Kitabel, and see how long it takes.”

“What's a monkey, Michael?”

“I don't know.”

“What's a typewriter?”

“I don't know.”

“What's a Shakespeare, Mike?”

“Anybody can ask questions, Kitabel. Get the things together and let's get the project started.”

“It sounds like a lengthy project. Who will oversee it?”

“Boshel. It's a natural for him. It will teach him patience and a sense of order, and impress on him the majesty of time. It's exactly the punishment I've been looking for.”

They got the things together and turned them over to Boshel.

“As soon as the project is finished, Bosh, your period of waiting will be over. Then you join the group and enjoy yourself with the rest of us.”

“Well, it's better than standing here doing nothing,” Boshel said. “It'd go faster if I could educate the monkeys and let them copy it.”

“No, the typing has to be random, Bosh. It was you who introduced the random factor into the universes. So suffer for it.”

“Any particular edition the copy has to correspond to?”

“The ‘Blackstone Reader's Edition Thirty-Seven-and-a-Half Volumes in One’ that I have here in my hand will do fine,” Michael said. “I've had a talk with the monkeys, and they're willing to stick with it. It took me eighty thousand years just to get them where they could talk, but that's nothing when we're talking about time.”

“Man, are we ever talking about Time!” Boshel moaned.

“I made a deal with the monkeys. They will be immune to fatigue and boredom. I cannot promise the same for you.”

“Uh, Michael, since it may be quite a while, I wonder if I could have some sort of clock to keep track of how fast things are going.”

So Michael made him a clock. It was a cube of dressed stone measuring a parsec on each edge.

“You don't have to wind it, you don't have to do a thing to it, Bosh,” Michael explained. “A small bird will come every millennium and sharpen its beak on this stone. You can tell the passing of time by the diminishing of the stone. It's a good clock, and it has only one moving part, the bird. I will not guarantee that your project will be finished by the time the entire stone is worn away, but you will be able to tell that time has passed.”

“It's better than nothing,” Boshel said, “but it's going to be a drag. I think this concept of time is a little medieval, though.”

“So do I,” Michael said. “I tell you what I can do, though, Bosh. I can chain you to that stone and have another larger bird dive-bomb you and gouge out hunks of your liver. That was in a story in another book on that newsstand.”

“You slay me, Mike. That won't be necessary. I'll pass the time somehow.”

Boshel set the monkeys to work. They were conditioned to punch the typewriters at random. Within a short period of time (as the Larger Creatures count time) the monkeys had produced whole Shakespearian words: “let,” which is found in Scene Two of Act One of Richard III; “go,” which is in Scene Two of Act Two of Julius Caesar; and “be,” which occurs in the very first scene and act of The Tempest. Boshel was greatly encouraged.

Some time after this, one of the monkeys produced two Shakespearian words in succession. By this time, the home world of Shakespeare (which was also the home world of the newsstand in Los Angeles where was born a great idea) was long out of business.

After another while, the monkeys had done whole phrases. By then quite a bit of time had run out.

The trouble with that little bird is that its beak did not seem to need much sharpening when it did come once every thousand years. Boshel discovered that Michael had played a dirty seraphic trick on him and had been feeding the bird entirely on bland custard. The bird would take two or three light swipes at the stone, and then be off for another thousand years. Yet, after no more than a thousand visitations, there was an unmistakable scratch on the stone. It was a hopeful sign.

Boshel began to see that the thing could be done. A monkey — and not the most brilliant of them — finally produced a whole sentence: “What say'st thou, bully rook?” And at that very moment another thing happened. It was surprising to Boshel, for it was the first time he had ever seen it. But he would see it milliards of times before it was finished.

A speck of cosmic dust, on the far outreaches of space, met another speck. This should not have been unusual; specks were always meeting specks. But this case was different. Each speck — in the opposite direction — had been the outmost in the whole cosmos. You can't get farther apart than that. The speck (a teeming conglomerate of peopled worlds) looked at the other speck with eyes and instruments and saw its own eyes and instruments looking back at it. What the speck saw was itself. The cosmic tetra-dimensionate sphere had been completed. The first speck had met itself coming from the other direction, and space had been traversed.

Then it all collapsed.

The stars went out, one by one, and billion by billion. Nightmares of falling!! All the darkened orbs and oblates fell down into the void that was all bottom. There was nothing left but one tight pod in the void, and a few out-of-context things like Michael and his associates, and Boshel and his monkeys.

Boshel had a moment of unease: he had become used to the appearance of the expanding universe. But he need not have been uneasy. It began all over again.

A few billion centuries ticked by silently. Once more, the pod burst into a shower of sparks that traveled and grew. They acquired form and spin, and life appeared again on the soot specks thrown off from those sparks.

This happened again and again. Each cycle seemed damnably long while it was happening; but in retrospect, the cycles were only like a light blinking on and off. And in the Longer Retrospect, they were like a high-frequency alternator, producing a dizzy number of such cycles every over-second and continuing for tumbling ages. Yet Boshel was becoming bored. There was just no other word for it.

When only a few billion cosmic cycles had been completed, there was a gash in the clock-rock that you could hide a horse in. The little bird made very many journeys back to sharpen its beak. And Pithekos Pete, the most rapid of the monkeys, had now random-written The Tempest, complete and perfect. They shook hands all around, monkeys and angel. It was something of a moment.

The moment did not last. Pete, instead of pecking at furious random to produce the rest of the plays, wrote his own improved version of The Tempest. Boshel was furious.

“But it's better, Bosh,” Pete protested. “And I have some ideas about stagecraft that will really set this thing up.”

“Of course it's better! We don't want them better. We want them just the same. Can't you monkeys realize that we are working out a problem of random probabilities? Oh, you clunkerheads!”

“Let me have that damned book for a month, Bosh, and I'll copy the plagued things off and we'll be finished,” Pithekos Pete suggested.

“Rules, you lunkheads, rules!” Boshel grated out. “We have to abide by the rules. You know that isn't allowed, and besides, it would be found out. I have reason to suspect, and it cuts me to say this, that one of my own monkeys and associates here present is an informer. We'd never get by with it.”

After the brief misunderstanding things went better. The monkeys stayed with their task. And after a number of cycles expressed by nine followed by zeros in pica type sufficient to stretch around the universe at a period just prior to its collapse (the radius and the circumference of the ultimate sphere are, of course, the same), the first complete version was ready.

It was faulty, of course, and it had to be rejected. But there were less than thirty thousand errors in it; it presaged great things to come and ultimate triumph.

Later (people, was it ever later!!) they had it quite close. By the time that the gash in the clock-rock would hold a medium-size solar system, they had a version with only five errors.

“It will come,” Boshel said. “It will come in time. And time is the one thing we have plenty of.”

Later — much, much later — they seemed to have it perfect; and by this time, the bird had worn away nearly a fifth of the bulk of the great stone with its millennial visits.

Michael himself read the version and could find no error. This was not conclusive, of course, for Michael was an impatient and hurried reader. Three readings were required for verification, but never was hope so high.

It passed the second reading, by a much more careful angel, and was pronounced letter-perfect. But it was late at night when that reader had finished it, and he may have got a little careless at the end.

And it passed the third reading, through all the thirty-seven plays of it, and into the poems at the end. This was Kitabel, the scribing angel himself, who was appointed to that third reading. He was just about to sign the certification when he paused.

“There is something sticking in my mind,” he said, and he shook his head to clear it. “There is something like an echo that is not quite right. I wouldn't want to make a mistake.”

He had written Kitab but he had not finished his signature.

“I won't be able to sleep tonight if I don't think of it,” he complained. “It wasn't in the plays; I know that they were perfect. It was something in the poems — quite near the end — some dissonance. Either the bard wrote a remarkably malapropos line, or there was an error in the transcript that my eye overlooked but my ear remembered. I acknowledge that I was sleepy near the end.”

“Oh, by all the worlds that were ever made, sign!” pleaded Boshel.

“You have waited this long, a moment more won't kill you, Bosh.”

“Don't bet on it, Kit. I'm about to blow, I tell you.”

But Kitabel went back and he found it — a verse in “The Phoenix and the Turtle”:

From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feather'd king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.

That is what the book itself said. And what Pithekos Pete had written was nearly, but not quite, the same thing:

From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wingg,
Save the eagle, feather'd kingg:
Damn machine the g is sticked.

And if you never saw an angel cry, words cannot describe to you the show that Boshel put on then.

They are still at it tonight, typing away at random, for that last and near-victory was less than a million billion cycles ago. And only a moment ago — halfway back in the present cycle — one of the monkeys put together no less than nine Shakespearean words in a row.

There is still hope. And the bird has now worn the rock down to about half its bulk.