THE ELLIPTICAL GRAVE

Chapter One

The next great mutating of mankind is a little bit like the next massive earthquaking along the San Andreas fault: it is overdue, and it may happen at any time.

Damocles Lectures. S. S. Eddington

The ‘In The Beginning’ lecture of Professor Pioneer J. Reventlo was always given near the end of the first semester. It was one of those floating lectures that students of a variety of sciences catch about once a week. These were intended to give breadth and interchange and mutuality to the views of the students of the various disciplines. And most of the floating lectures were quite interesting. It was true that breadth and interchange and mutuality, were now perhaps too much emphasized, to the weakening of the intensity of specialization. It was true that the floating lectures were now fossil forms and no longer innovations at all. But each of them was attended by seventy or eighty of the more intelligent science students of the community; and Reventlo's ‘In The Beginning’ lecture was always attended by more than one hundred. That's a lot for a non-required and no-credit lecture.

It was the Prometheus Club (‘Oh one more torch, and one still taller fire!’) that put on the floating lectures, and they were social events also. The richer of the professors and doctors, those who had in their homes club-rooms that would accommodate eighty to one hundred and twenty persons in uncrowded ease, gave their lectures in informal and gracious fashion in their homes. Less rich instructors gave them in one of the regular lecture rooms or in one of the lounges. Pioneer J. Reventlo used floating sites for his floating lectures, and this one was in the West Science Students’ Lounge. All of the Prometheans were ‘passionate learning people’, but they also practiced graciousness and ease.

There was open bar and open side-board, racks of ribs and wheels of cheese, beer taps and wine decanters. There was instant pneumatic connection to the twelve million books and tapes in the main library, which was not the case with the East Science Students Lounge. The lounge was a continuation of the botanical gardens outside, and the trees growing in the lounge were as tall as the exterior trees. Up the circular stairways, one came to the Astronomical Dome with its roll-back to the sky, and with its light suppression scope. Inside dome and its scope there was no exterior light at all; it was straight uninhibited sky-and-star view as good as that on the far side of the moon. But outside of the building, a viewer could see the ambient light washing over everything and piling up in layers ten thousand meters thick.

It was the unusual number of repeaters and fellow instructors and invited outsiders who ran up the numbers attending the ‘In The Beginning’ lecture every year. A certain number of persons always walked out of the lecture in planned disgust (this was the case with most of the floating lectures). But this very great number of repeaters was not the case with other lectures in the series.

And yet it wasn't that either the lectures or Professor Reventlo came on very strong. Pioneer himself was a man who, though imposing, was very easy to forget. To one who had not seen him for a while he seemed a very large and strong man with powerful hands and a powerful voice. But the impression of largeness and strength always faded away within minutes. Pioneer became almost an invisible and forgotten man then.

This evening, Pioneer had a large and beautiful skull in his hands. There are people who do not understand the primordial beauty and consonance of a good skull, who can hardly relate it to a living head. And then there are those who find an unfleshed skull as pertinent and expressive as an undraped body, and equally awkward at times. All of those present, having the holy vision of scientists, viewed the magnificent skull as pertinent and expressive. But Pioneer Reventlo handled it very carelessly and once seemed about to bounce it like a basketball. This skull had been presented to him by a girl named Catherine January.

As is often the case with meetings of intellectually active poor, there was the feeling of pacing panthers about the assembly even though many of them weren't panther types. This strong man Pioneer Reventlo did not come on very strong, and he did not speak well. Oh, he spoke too slowly for one thing. Joseph Abramswell, a repeater at Reventlo's lectures and a professor of analytical projections, said that it was as if Pioneer was engraving all his words on stone as he went along with it. Pioneer's words did have the style to be graven on stone, yes, but did they have the content? There was an amnestic quality about the old stone-dust that settled out when the man talked.

Pioneer Reventlo never began to speak. He had in every case been speaking for some time before people became aware of his words, before they began to give him attention. And that was the case of his speaking now —

“— of our almost universally accepted idea concerning the early state and the gradual development of mankind as going from the basic and the simple to the intricate and compounded. But this idea of mankind beginning sparsely and with only a small number of gifts, and developing them into a copious and interlocking culture-mass, this idea is backed up by a total absence of facts. Or rather, the facts are presently held in almost totally reversed fashion.

“If I were able to do deep and extensive time-excavations (and I am on the verge of being able to do such right now) I would prove this without any doubt at all, the fact of the stunning complexity in the beginning. Now, it cannot quite be proved. I can throw fact after fact into the bog of unreason and faulty presupposition, and they will all sink into that quicksand without giving it a firm bottom. But I am convinced that man really did make his appearance in high-styled and richly-gifted complexity, and that he fell from there, not to simplicity (there isn't any simplicity in the picture anywhere), but to chaos, and to low-styled and bereft confusion. We began in golden wealth, and we have come down to bare poverty.”

“What have these old things to do with the new kindling of the Promethean Flame?” a young science student named Raddigan Shrike called out loudly.

“The Promethean Flame was a very old and sudden thing,” Professor Reventlo maintained. “It was dashed down and broken, and only a small part of it has been recovered. The road to our bright birthright is along the road to yesterday. Ah, let's see, what do I treat of next?”

“You begin with the case of language complexity, Pioneer,” a learned man named Jeffery Wind said with that smile that people use only when talking to Pioneer Reventlo. (His name ‘Wind’ was pronounced as in ‘the wind that blows’, not as in ‘the helix that winds’.) “You always begin with the subject of language, language that was complex from its absolute beginning, so you say, and that now has been worn bare and has lost most of its expression.”

Jeffery Wind was a ‘devices identifier’. He was a classifier of artifacts, ancient and modern. He could tell, out of extensive knowledge and sudden intuition, what anything at all was meant to be used for. He could inform you that those little bone toruses were the fingering keys to prehistoric bag-pipes whose deer-skin bags had long since rotted away. He could tell you that what looked like a shoe-horn for an elf was really a sort of easy-wrench (not made by Ford) for easier clipping of the isinglass side-curtains onto Model T Ford touring cars when sudden rains came. He could tell you that this other device was not an apple press at all, that it was an elderberry press. Device identifying was a hobby of his, as was all else. He did not have to have a straight vocation, he said. “The world itself is just a sort of hobby of mine,” he liked to say as he trailed his tongue around on the inside of his mouth, furrowing his cheeks, “and I may drop it at any time. I don't have to be here. I could be ‘home’, and I should be. I could live in wealth there, as the prince that I am. But I'd rather live in greater wealth here. Besides, I am only the second-born and will not inherit. I'm kidded alot in the family for slumming around on this world and spending time here. Well, others in the family have silly hobbies also.”

Jeffery Wind played second cornet in the faculty symphony. He was long and lean and freckled and pleasant. He looked like a young southpaw pitcher in an old Class E league. They don't have such low rated leagues any more, and they have few such pleasant southpaws.

“Ah yes,” Pioneer Reventlo had said. “Let us begin with the Chinese language. Three years ago when I said that, somebody asked me ‘Do you know the Chinese language?’, and I admitted that I did not, so I had a bad beginning. At great labor I have remedied this situation, but now nobody asks it when I am primed with the answer. Chinese now is reduced to one-syllable words of unvarying form, and to a grammar that is so basic and eroded that it no longer has the right to be called a grammar. But once(more and more as we go backwards in time), Chinese had long and segmented words that changed forms and endings like snap-tail salamanders. It had cases by the dozens, tenses by the score, and numbers almost without limit. And it had an extensive vocabulary. Now I would suppose that it would be possible to say ‘the daughter of the man’. But it would not be possible to say, in a single and intricate root word, ‘the seventh daughter of that man of medium stature and sparse hair’. But modern Chinese retains, as whispers of something older, even though in misunderstood and fossil form, remnants of the post-alphabetical form that was in the beginning.”

That flying couple, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, had made a sudden appearance. Vivian and Curtis were acrobats, and they also had acrobatic minds. They usually went into tumbling skits whenever they appeared, and their suddenly-voiced ideas came in posed intervals of their acts.

“You are right, Mr. Reventlo,” Vivian chided, “but we may be the only ones here who see it. We see things faster than other people do. That's why we understand you.” And Vivian went off in a series of Arabian Cartwheels.

“We think in post-alphabetical forms ourselves, Vivian and I,” Curtis Bald barked as he popped a long ringmaster's whip. “We understand each other perfectly, but nobody else is fast enough to understand us. You are right, you are right.” And Curtis swung Vivian around and around by her hair.

“It is hard to believe that they are flesh and blood,” Creighton had once said of Vivian and Curtis, “the tricks they do that defy momentum. I rather doubt that they are flesh and blood.”

“Several of the languages of the West have come out of complex pasts bearing in their hands small and disjointed pieces from the wrecked complexity that had been in the beginning,” Reventlo continued. “Thus Russian has ‘aspects’ of verbs, as well as voice and mood and tense. Portuguese has conjugated personal infinitives. Icelandic has number, as well as singular and plural, as had Old English and Old Greek. Greek had a middle voice as well as the active and passive. It had the optative mood, and where is it today? I'm rather in an optative mood myself this evening. Besides the Present, Past, Future, Perfect, Imperfect, and Pluperfect, there were such tenses as the First Aorist and Second Aorist, and the Historical Optative. And there are detached fossils of twelve further tenses drifting down the time stream. Certain Greek verbs had more than eight hundred different endings, but I maintain that these were only the pinnacles of old massive buildings that are now submerged.

“Well,‘what do I mean to prove by this?’ someone seems to wish to ask. I mean to prove everything by this. I am saying that the day that talking man appeared in the world, he was not talking in grunts or simple sounds or with gesture-symbols. He was talking in a highly sophisticated language, with more than a dozen pronoun and verb numbers (with a root word for ‘the twelve of us’, for instance), with twenty moods and twelve aspects to his verbs, with two score of tenses, with six or seven voices, with more than fifty parts of speech, with a common and popular vocabulary of several million words. He used these complex forms because he had complex thoughts to express in them, fine ideas and distinctions that could not be expressed in more simple form. It is the broken shards of that great primordial language that we all speak today.

“There is every evidence of this, evidence found imbedded in more than a hundred different language families, all of it indicating an intricate and universal high development as one comes nearer the earlier times. There is no evidence at all that any people anywhere ever began with a simple and basic speech (much less than a series of grunts) and then developed that speech in the direction of greater complexity and flexibility and expressiveness. It is always stated (in the face of all evidence to the contrary) that the trend was from poverty to riches in language. It wasn't. All the real evidence tells us that the trend was from incredible richness and development in the beginning to the present skimpiness and poor-boy stereotyping that is on the road to final verbal poverty. Why am I the only one who sees this?”

“Oh, possibly because it isn't quite true,” Lucille Creighton said. After all, she was a full professor of Historical Philology, and Pioneer Reventlo wasn't. Lucille Creighton was stylish and French and thirty-one-year-old pretty. She taught languages and chic, and she wrote books on phonology-with-whimsy. She authored such statements as ‘Americans speak from the front of their mouths, for which reason they seldom can manage the sounds of other languages. And they kiss from the front of their mouths, for which reason they give the impression of shallowness. They must learn to speak and kiss from the roofs of their mouths as the French do, from the backs of their palates as the Germans do, from their glottis as the Russians do. To kiss a poor linguist is seldom worthwhile. There will be no strength or variety or resonance in such a kiss.’ Lucille also played the piano with a lively, French-resonant, roof-of-the-mouth tone.

“It only seems that way to you, Mr. Reventlo, because you are using selected instances,” Lucille said. “But I begin to swing around to your view a little bit even so. I still insist that they are selected instances that you use, but I must admit that they are the only instances to be found on this subject. I must agree that all the real evidence points to your thesis, and that there is not a scrimp of it that points to the correct and accepted thesis. So I say that we must be practical about this and throw your ideas clear out of the store lest we be convinced. At the same time I know that ‘practical’ does not have any meaning at all now. But we have to maintain the belief that it was ‘three grunts and a gesture’ in the beginning, because we live in the three grunts and a gesture tradition. Besides, reason demands it.”

There was a distraction from the skull that Professor Reventlo still held in his hands. A snake had appeared in the skull, quite a large snake that poked its head out of the eye-sockets and out of an open trepann cut in the top of the skull. ‘Practical’ here meant practical joker. This was real ‘fly-catching’, upstaging the speaker with monkey-shines that everybody sees except himself. There were several students of projection psychology present, and snakes (being strong in the undermind) are among the easiest of all things to project. But which of them was doing it? Pioneer Reventlo, who was liked by almost everyone on the evening roster (except for the few who had already made their planned walk-out) didn't seem a likely target for such clownishness.

“The only sort of reason that demands ‘three grunts and a gesture’ is the present skimpy and poor-boy stereotyped reason on the way to the bankruptcy of all reason,” Pioneer said, “the type of reason that is an indication of how far we have fallen. We began our existence on this world, I think, with an excellent sort of reason that shone like the sun, now we are down to reason of only one-half-glow-worm power.”

“Mr. Reventlo,” said a female student named Adriana Thistle, “if it is true of language, that it was immeasurably complex in the beginning, why is it not true of other things? Why is it not true of artifacts, for instance? And it isn't true of artifacts or of other things. A lance head is not as intricate or as sophisticated as a hydrogen bomb. Really it isn't. A cave, even a nicely appointed cave with its rocks hewn down to greater convenience than their original form, is not as developed as this building that we are in. Really it isn't. Swinging on vines or lianas was a form of air transportation, perhaps, but it wasn't as advanced a form as our present jet transports. Really it wasn't. Smoke signals or ram's-horn signals were neither as instantaneous nor as informative as our present electronic communications. Really they weren't. Rush-lights, or even wax candles or tallow lamp, didn't illuminate as well as our present lighting. Really they didn't. Mnemotic notched sticks could not store information as well as can our present libraries. Truly they couldn't. Sophisticated stone tools designed for skull trepanning could not equal modern medical tools or modern surgical techniques. Verily they could not.”

It was suspected that this girl Adriana Thistle was a little bit loose. “Come up to my place and have some Swedish pancakes,” she used to say to the fellows. “You haven't lived till you have tried my Swedish pancakes.” She laughed a lot. She cheated at cards. She had a wind-blown look like a tumbleweed or her name-sake thistle. She didn't want to be a scientist. She wanted to be a Science Feature Writer. “After all,” she would say, “science will be what we Science Feature Writers say it will be. Scientists are a bunch of cartoon characters, but we are the cartoonists.”

“I suspect that you are wrong on every point, Miss Thistle,” Pioneer Reventlo said now, “but you are attacking points I haven't made yet.”

“Never mind, you have made those points in other offerings of this lecture in other years,” said a male student named Stephen Jasper. Stephen Jasper was an organized young man with a passion for acquiring knowledge. He got by, he said, on four hours sleep a night. “And the other twenty hours are strictly accounted for,” he would say, “and most of them go into reading and study. I always have one book clamped open at my shaving mirror and another in my shower bath. I cut myself a lot shaving, and I wash myself ineptly, but the time gained makes it worth it. The earphones that I put on while I'm eating have reception from a different channel to each ear. I run three miles every morning in fifteen minutes. Who can spare the time to jog three miles? I catch Father Riordan's mass at the Newman Center every morning. He's the fastest on campus, eighteen minutes, and by coming in two minutes late and leaving one minute early I can do it in fifteen minutes carrying four majors. And I take Mathematics in Russian, Chemistry in German, Physics in French, and Logic in Japanese. A person who sharpening up on less than two things at a time is wasting time. I give eight minutes a day to my girl. She says that this is enough and I say that it's probably too much. I may have to get a different girl. Once a week I absolutely waste one hour just to keep my sense of proportion. This week I am wasting that hour at the Pioneer lecture.”

Then, in the present sequence, Stephen Jasper was continuing: “For tape-recorded memory of your past lectures, there is no equivalent in the stone culture that you love to hark back to, Mr. Reventlo. But, yes, you must open your other main front before you come to the points that Adriana Thistle was refuting. You haven't made them yet to but you are about to make them.”

“Ah, what is my other main point?” Professor Reventlo asked. “At the moment I forget what it is.”

“Your other main point is ‘Noble Cro-Magnon Man, standing in the beginning, superior in brain and body to any man since,” Jeffery Wind prompted.

“Yes, yes, I have it now,” Reventlo said as he raised his proud head. “Cro-Magnon and his cousins were the beginning. And his effect on all nature marked the beginning of the new era. It was as if this ‘First and Special Man’ was an intrusion (and he was a benevolent intrusion,I believe). I speak especially of his effect on the land and sea animals. It was at the time of his appearance that many of them (particularly some of the land mammals) became extinct. It was as though, when he named them, he said to many of them ‘Your name is death.’ ”

Several of the listeners winced at what seemed to them the phoniness of this touch of Reventlo. The snake in the skull reacted with lowering anger at this suggestion. Whoever was projecting the snake was doing so with considerable anger.

“Yes, proud Cro-Magnon was in the beginning, with the fullest mind and the fullest speech of any man ever,” Pioneer Reventlo was continuing. “He appeared with the most noble intelligence and ethics and vision, with the intuition and the piercing transcendence that has now been lost to us. He was the king of the golden age that we have fallen from. He was taller than any man since, you know. He was of more noble configuration. He had a bigger brain than have subsequent or modern men. He was created complete and fully adult, and there are no full adults nowadays. Now there are only gawks and gooks of various chronological ages, but there are no full adults. How we have fallen!”

“How we have risen since that no-happen time!” a male student named F. Cyclone Boniface cried. “Mr. Reventlo, how long have you been giving this ‘in the beginning’ lecture?”

F. Cyclone Boniface had his own problem, even though it was only a minor one. “Cyclone,” a friendly professor had said to him one day, “do I guess that you are a little bit unhappy with your name?” “Yes, I am,” Cyclone said, “but I suppose that there's nothing that I can do about it.” “Why don't you shift it around a bit?” the professor asked. “Instead of F. Cyclone Boniface, why don't you call yourself Frank C. Boniface, or Frederick C. Boniface, or Felix or Ferdinand or Floyd C. Boniface, or whatever your first name is?” “It isn't any of those,” F. Cyclone had said. “If you knew what the F did stand for, you'd know why I'd rather have it F. Cyclone Boniface even though I'm a little bit unhappy with that.” But F. Cyclone wasn't a bad name for him. He might in any case have been given a nickname something like Cyclone from the way he blew through all his classes and his lab assignments. He was fast and he was competent. He made rapid and clear sweeps of everything in his courses.

“I have no idea how long I have been giving this ‘In the Beginning’ lecture,” Pioneer Reventlo said. “Possibly three years, possibly twenty.”

“Mr. Reventlo, you say have been barely and technically correct on part of your Cro-Magnon statements when you began to make them, but you are not even technically correct in them now,” Cyclone advised Pioneer. “It was almost twenty years ago that modern man surpassed Cro-Magnon man in average height and also in average cranial capacity. Today the superiority of modern man in both of these things is beyond all dispute. You haven't really been paying that much attention to the happenings of the last twenty years, have you? There has been a spectacular leap forward in brain and body size, and in much else. Now we are all much larger than our fathers were, and we are also larger than Cro-Magnon man was. Mr. Reventlo, was Cro-Magnon man really ‘in the beginning’? Or was he only a sudden and temporary appearance and instance of hybrid vigor and size? I believe that he was this latter, the hybrid-freak of very short season. And hybrids are never ‘in the beginning’, or at least I don't believe that they are. They have to come late enough for several streams to have diverged, for a capacitance to be built up between the streams, or how else could they rejoin each other, and with such sparkiness? I hope that our present surge is more than a short-lived hybrid manifestation, but in any case we have surged far beyond the Cro-Magnons or any of the other comparatively modern freakishnesses.”

“Where is it coming from?” the girl Catherine January asked her companion.

“Where is what coming from, Cat?” asked a young man named Stephen Tall who was with her.

“The bright light of which Mr. Reventlo is seeing the reflection. From what direction is it coming. Where is it?”

“You don't have enough nails in your board, Mr. Reventlo,” said a female science student named Anabella Hilary. “You don't have enough nails to keep it up if a strong wind starts to blow. And I can count a lot of gusts around here that would just as well start as not. But there are other nails, Mr. Reventlo. There are other nails to nail it up solid. I know some of them. I'm a partisan of yours now. I'll find some of those nails and bring them to you.”

“Whether there are enough nails to nail your thesis up with or not, what you are saying, Mr. Reventlo, is that a superior kind of mankind arrived on this world in the historically recent past,” a young man named Raddigan Shrike said. “You are saying that he appeared complete with high technology and intricate thought patterns, and perhaps with literacy. Were these appearing superior men ‘ancient astronauts’? They would just about have to be, wouldn't they?”

“As to that, I say ‘no, no’ strongly, or else I say ‘possibly possibly’ very weakly,” Pioneer came back with it. “How very gross it is is, how very unscientific it is to speculate at all before we have more facts. We cannot prove anything about this unless we excavate. And I have not quite worked out the technique for that kind of excavation yet.”

“Excavate what?” Rosa Caprobianco asked. Rosa herself was an excavator of very many old, people-bearing strata. “Of the excavating of the earth there is no end. Or do you mean another sort of excavation than digging in the earth itself?”

“Possibly an excavation of a little different sort, Rosa. And yet we must ultimately excavate the earth and the other concentric spheres around the earth. There is nothing else that we can excavate. We will have to excavate out of the ground, out of the air, out of the aether, or the noosphere. We have here at the University a man who has dabbled in ‘haunted air excavation’ a little bit and perhaps he can help us. Ah yes, he's present. I mean Joseph Abramswell. And you are a spade-woman, Rosa. Can you dig in the ‘haunted air medium’?”

“I think I can. I have done it before, mostly accidentally,” Rosa said.

“But to get back to Miss Thistle, I believe that she is wrong at every point, and I would refute her at every point if I could remember what they were,” Pioneer came back to that sequence. “In the period which we must call the ‘Historical Yesterday’, the recent period that I believe marks the human beginning, there are artificial craters that are much larger than the artificial craters of the present day. Artificial craters are made by weapons run amok, but I do not believe that the weapons that blasted those craters in that ‘Historical Yesterday’ were lance-heads. The ‘lance-head’ is a straw tool that you set up to demolish, Miss Thistle. And your ‘cave’ is a straw building and your vines and your smoke-signals and your rush lights and notched sticks and bone tools are straw devices also. And so are the modern things you compare them to for their disadvantage. Personally I believe that the jet aircraft is only a sudden and temporary instance of hybrid artifice and contrivance. And so is the whole electromagnetic complex generally. It is a freakish hybrid of carried-over mind-power that had lost part of its illumination, and of magnetic kick-coil toy, It isn't any more amazing than any other double-jointed toy.

“Ah, but look at this wonderful skull!” Pioneer cried with a glow on his face and his words as if he now saw the skull in his hand for the first time. The snake had withdrawn from the eyes and excision of the skull, and Pioneer did not see it dully coiled on the deep inside. “This skull is nobility, this is beauty, this is man in the beginning when he still had the full light inside him. This is man when he possessed all his gifts, before his deterioration began.”

“Why was there a deterioration, Pioneer?” Rosa asked.

“I don't know, but look at him. This is Cro-Magnon, king of the world, the magnificence that was in the beginning. What nobility, what competence, what spirit, what mind, what benevolence! Who could argue against that?”

“Who indeed, Pioneer?” Rosa asked. “You are your own best argument, beloved man. But where did you get that wonderful skull?”

“I don't know. It seems that somebody handed it to me this evening to illustrate my lecture.”

“I gave it to him,” the girl named Catherine January said. “I am an artist, and I make skulls of the people that I love and admire. I made this one of Pioneer Reventlo and I gave it to him.”

“Is it the skull of Pioneer Reventlo himself then?” Arthur Ransom asked.

“Of course it is,” Catherine said.

“Then it isn't meant to represent a Cro-Magnon skull at all?”

“Yes it is. Of course it is,” Catherine January insisted. “I maintain that it is the most perfect Cro-Magnon skull, and the most perfect man I have ever seen.”

“What nobility! What beauty!” Pioneer Reventlo cried, but he smiled when he did it. “But I maintain again that the theory that man appeared out of the hominid substratum, that he separated himself out of it gradually, that he then gradually developed the use of tools and instruments and processes and speech is a false theory. There could not be a man without tools and devices: he would not be a man. There could certainly could not be a man without developed language. If he had a primitive language, he would be animal and no man at all. This universally-accepted theory of the gradual emergence and development has nothing to support it and everything to contradict it. Man appeared suddenly and joyfully and completely, and in his full powers, and with every superior technique and gift that he might need. Then, for reasons that I don't understand at all, he began to decline and die. I want to go back and document just how it was ‘in the beginning’. I want to see what went wrong with it all. I want to reverse our decline and death. It is very late now, I know, to discover and try to reverse things. Likely it is too late. And I have very little to work with and no funds, and no absolutely sound program.”

“Pioneer, there could be funds for whatever it is you want to do,” Arthur Ransom of the bursary said. “Other sorts of travel and expeditions and excavations are funded. We can fund yours also. We won't even have to prove you have a rational point in all this. But what do you want to excavate? And where? In the stoney earth? In stoney minds or in stoney books? Do you want to excavate the meteorological air, or in some other kind of air, as you seem to hint? Do you want to dig in the noosphere? Or on a galactic scale? Or on a sub-atomic? We can fund spades for almost any sort of digging, Pioneer. People have actually run out of ideas for the explorations of various sorts, and funds pile up. I myself would like to go on an expedition of a new sort, through time or concept, or on an uncharted ocean. Give me something to go on. I’ve been asking you to do that for several years.”

“Perhaps Mr. Reventlo is trying to invent a time machine to go back and find Cro-Magnon man in the flesh and make him display his own marvels and gifts,” Barbara Redbrick, a female science student, mocked.

Barbara Redbrick wished to master the most difficult field of science to be found. But she switched majors often in looking for it. “That is too easy,” she would say about a course that was not easy for everyone. “It's turtle soup. Even some of the male students can learn this stuff. I want something harder.” So she would switch to something that was supposed to be harder, and she would be disappointed to find that it was too easy also. So she would switch again.

“Miss Redbrick,” a counselor told her one day, “if you want the most difficult field of science, create it. That's what all the genuine and outstanding scientists have done. They have created their own fields.”

“All right, I will,” Barbara Redbrick had said. Looking for her own difficult field, she began to examine the unclaimed areas between the patches that were already plowed. It was in conjunction with this that she happened to be at Pioneer J. Reventlo's ‘In The Beginning’ Lecture. “I will look at the bottom of every stone,” she said. The people who came to such things as this might not be overly impressive to her, but they did have extensive unplowed elements about them.

“Of course I'm not trying to ‘invent’ the time machine,” Pioneer Reventlo answered Barbara. “It is not for inventing. It was one of the things that was given in the beginning, and it has been in use for more than twenty thousand years. Ah, plus or minus five thousand years, that is.”

“What, do you believe that the time machine is actually in existence?” Dorothy Blue-Ice, a doctor of Analytical Biology, asked him. “You are not talking in parables about something else. You believe that it is literally in existence?”

“Oh, of course,” Pioneer said. “it is still in working order, I believe, but I have the feeling that it has not been used very much in recent centuries. Oh yes, if the time machine were not in that recent ‘beginning’ there would be hardly anything since that time that makes sense. No, no, how would I invent a thing that has been around as long as our species?”

“Then if you're not trying to invent it, what are you trying to do with the time machine?” Barbara Redbrick asked.

“I'm trying to get on it,” Pioneer Reventlo said, and he spread his hands out in a sort of frustration. “I'm trying to find out what corner it stops at.”

“We know where to get on it, Mr. Reventlo,” Vivian Oldshoe the acrobat called from a high beam. “We ride that time cart all the time. But it isn't easy. You have to be an acrobat to do it.”

“How did you get up there, Vivian?” Pioneer asked in some wonder.

“I fell up here, of course,” she said.

“We begin to learn a little bit too much about the time machine,” Curtis Bald the other acrobat spoke. “There are people who say that we are in forfeit of our lives for the things that we have already ridden on. And they say that they mean to collect.”

They were all silent on the subject for several minutes while they grazed the provender on the side-boards of the West Science Students Lounge, and while they tapped the foamy and the bubbly. There had always been the feeling that Pioneer J. Reventlo really had something going, but that it was obscured by enemies (either inside or outside of him) who prevented him from seeing it clearly and who force him to talk in symbols. But what might be behind those symbols? Joseph Abramswell, the analytical projectionist, tried to get a little bit more out of Reventlo on the subject.

“Have you any idea, Pioneer, what your time machine really looks like?” Joseph asked.

“Not like a machine,” Reventlo said, “and I believe that it is not properly a machine, that it is rather a natural growth or a natural feature.”

“Oh, what shape do you believe this natural feature or growth might be, Pioneer?”

“I feel that it is an ellipse. Is that not the shape formed by cutting a right circular cone obliquely? I am not a mathematician.”

“If you are not a mathematician, then you have no business investigating anything,” said Stephen Tall who was a mathematical student. “Most of the woes of the world are brought about by people who cannot think (who are not mathematicians) trying to think. I wish they'd give it up.”

“Oh be good, Stephen,” Catherine January said.

Stephen Tall put his mathematical ability to use calculating odds for wagering and gaming. He played in the ‘Midnight Sun’ and in ‘Ace Hudgeon's Odds-On Bar and Grill’. And he lost. He lost to the people who have no mathematics at all. But hope is the only thing that he never lost. “The odds will have to pay me off in time,” he said. “They have run against me so long that they must reverse themselves doubly to justify themselves mathematically. I am mathematically certain of entering a very long winning streak almost immediately. Things have to reverse.” “My father used to say the same thing about the wind,” Ace Hodgeons told Stephen. “ ‘The wind has been blowing out of the southwest for forty years that I know of,’ my father told me, ‘and maybe for a much longer time before I came around. Son, all that wind has got to blow back the other way some day. I may not live to see it, but you should see it. Be waiting for it when it reverses directions. You can make a killing out of it.’ Well, I am ready for it when it blows back the other way, and I will make a killing out of it,” Ace said. “I'll make part of the killing from you, Stephen.”

“That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of, and you're the dumbest guy I ever saw,” Stephen Tall told Ace Hodgeons.

“If I'm so dumb how come I'm the one they call ‘Ace’ and not you,” Ace asked. “If I'm so dumb, how come I always win and you always lose?”

“You are extreme, Stephen Tall,” Joseph Abramswell said back in the current present. “I teach young mathematicians, including yourself. I can imagine nothing more dreary or crabbed than a society composed entirely of mathematicians. I can imagine no society that would be dead wrong on so many subjects so often. Let's go on with it, Pioneer. Have you any feeling of how large this time-touring ellipse might be?”

“Oh, it would have to be measured in kilometers, Joseph, and probably in tens of kilometers. You must know that small ellipses do not put out any numinous phenomena. Size is a necessary dimension to this. And I believe that the mechanism is always too large to be noticed or recognized.”

“You are not saying what you want to say, Pioneer. Let's go into free association. What word do you match with those large and elliptical time-rooted non-machines of numinous function that you have intuitions of?”

“ ‘Valleys’, Joseph. ‘Valleys’ is the word. I didn't know it till this instant, but it is always ‘valleys’ that comes into the association.”

“The time machines are in valleys, Pioneer?”

“The time machines are valleys, I believe, Joseph.”

“Large and roughly elliptical valleys?”

“Yes. That will do for the moment.”

“All right. Now there must be another word that attaches to these large and elliptical valleys. Is there a buried pun here? Is this one of the things that you have to excavate? Is there an ellipsis (a something missing)? Free association, Pioneer! Quickly! The word, the word, the first word that associates, however long it takes to come to you, however badly it seems to fit.”

“Games,” Pioneer J. Reventlo said. “Yes, games. We are being made game of, and also something like — like the old Olympic Games, but that instance is off to the side of them. Games, ludi, fun-games or ridiculousnesses, as the Latins called them. Games, agones, struggles or contests or agonies, as the Greeks called them. Games, meabhalscáil, mirages, or mearbhlacht, illusions, as the Irish called them.”

“The games were held in the elliptical valleys, Pioneer?”

“I don't think so, not at first. The valleys were somehow named ‘games’ or illusions or mirages, and then the contests and assemblies and entertainments borrowed the names of the elliptical valleys, as they seemed to fit the assemblies. But first there were such places as ‘Fun Valley’ and ‘Ridiculous Valley’ and ‘Agony Valley’ and ‘Contest Valley’ and ‘Mirage Valley’ and ‘Illusion Valley’. These were place names, and they were also the names of time-processes. I will be able to identify some of them now. I have been — ah — collecting these peculiarly manifesting elliptical valleys for some time, but I considered their collecting to be an entirely different interest from my attempted time excavations.”

“The two of you have just set free association back twenty thousand years, plus or minus five thousand years,” Jeffery Wind remarked.

“Ah, have you any particular one of these manifesting valleys that you'd rather explore, Pioneer?” Joseph Abramswell continued with it. “I want to go with you on your travel, mostly for the peculiar adventure of it all. So does Arthur Ransom, I believe. And he can get funding kicked loose if you make it even a little bit plausible. Any particular valley, Pioneer?”

“No — not right now. Somebody is sending! Oh, how somebody is sending! Give me a few minutes.”

“The time-excavation must be in a place where the Cro-Magnon men lived,” Rosa Caprobianco said. “Such at least is the meaning that I seem to lift from Pioneer Reventlo's mind. Where is the valley, Pioneer?”

“Where is it, Reventlo?” Joseph Abramswell asked.

“In a minute, in a minute,” Pioneer stuttered. “Oh, how somebody is sending! In Calabria, that's where.”

“What, what? Calabria in Italy?” Rosa Caprobianco asked. “Is that where your preferred elliptical valley might be? Is that possible?”

“I guess it's possible if I said it,” Reventlo mumbled. “That's the first free-association clue that came to me.”

“I never saw such blatant insinuation of words into a mind and mouth,” Stephen Tall grumbled to Catherine January.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Let us listen and learn.”

“Free-associate some more, Pioneer,” Joseph Abramswell said. “It doesn't matter that someone is sending you words. That someone might be either inside you or outside you, but it's valid in either case. Once more, A Word!”

“White Goat,” Pioneer Reventlo said. “And it's more than that. It's ‘White Goat Game’, or it's ‘White Goat Farce’, or it's ‘White Goat Illusion’.”

“This is unfair,” Rosa protested. “Pioneer has been raiding my own unconscious. The white goat is in my own undermind; it isn't in that of Pioneer. Throw that one out, Abramswell.”

“Oh the duplicity of her, the duplicity,” Catherine January whispered to Stephen Tall.

“No, it is legitimate, Rosa,” Abramswell the analytical projectionist said. “Very much free-association is dredged up from the surroundings, but it will match the shape of the undermind that reaches out and dredges it up. The underminds of others present always constitute a legitimate raiding territory to capture matching symbols and names. Why do you say that the White Goat is in your own unconscious, Rosa?”

“ ‘The White Goat Illusion’, that is the name of the valley that my family come from,” Rosa said. “That is the origin of our family name, Caprobianco, White Goat. But there is no other connection with Pioneer's notions. When I thought of an elliptical valley, I thought of the Calabrian Valley named the ‘White Goat Illusion’. And then Pioneer lifted it out of my mind. But time doesn't travel notably in the White Goat. It moves much more slowly there than it does in other places. This has been a pleasant few minutes, a ‘White Goat Illusion’ or an entertainment, but it has no significance at all.”

“Yes it has,” Pioneer Reventlo argued. “There are echoes to it that antedate my knowing you, Rosa.”

“Yes, it surely has significances,” Joseph Abramswell said. “But we are treading on somebody's coat-tail, and that somebody will divert us from our trail. It may be a murderous somebody that we are tailing a little close now. No, I do not imagine these side-places. I sense them correctly. Did you know that there was an enemy straddling the road to your excavations, Pioneer? This is of significance, people. But, by tomorrow morning the identified enemy have convinced all of us that it isn't.”

And, true enough, all of them were convinced the next morning that there was no significance to any of these things. But meanwhile before the evening meeting broke up, there came a stroke of angry menace, if not of significance.

“Are there any advantages to having a Cro-Magnon mind, Mr. Reventlo?” Stephen Tall, the young mathematician asked. Stephen was a little bit on the needle after Pioneer. “Every new development must have an advantage or a self-preserving aspect to it, or it will not become a new development. It will be blotted out instead. It will be an instant wash-out if it doesn't have an advantage. Can you name an advantage to having a Cro-Magnon mind?”

“The Cro-Magnon mind has a warning system,” Pioneer said. “It has a premonitory sense of danger, and it has a trigger for lightning-fast evasive action to go along with it.”

“Can you give me an example?,” Stephen asked.

“Yes, I'm afraid that I can,” Pioneer said. “In just a minute, in just a small fraction of a minute —”

Pioneer Reventlo suddenly swung the artificial skull that he was holding. He swung it up above his own head, hung it in the air the there as it were, and all in the same moment he dived out of range

And that skull exploded in the air. It exploded, and it went into a hundred large and small shards. And a large snake materialized in the middle of the air where the skull had gone to pieces, fell to the floor in a writhing tumble, and bumped and slithered quickly to some hiding place along the walls of the room.

It had been a very heavy weight, a solid lead statuette weighing at least fifty kilograms, that had fallen from the cat-walks at the top of the circular stairways that rose to the astronomical dome above the lounge. This great weight had shattered the effigy of Pioneer's skull, and it had been meant to shatter his skull itself.

“Where did that snake come from and where did it go?” was all that Pioneer could say for a moment. Then he asked, “Who has done this? Who tried to kill me?”

“An enemy has done this,” Joseph Abramswell said.

“I see what you mean, Mr. Reventlo,” young Stephen Tall remarked. “Such a mind, yours, does have a warning system of danger, and a trigger for lightning-fast movement. It does have an advantage. Thank you for demonstrating it.”

Chapter Two

The World's great age begins anew,
The golden years return.

Hellas. Shelley

And, sure enough, by the next morning all of them were convinced that the ‘Pioneer Reventlo Illusion’ was of no importance at all. But three of them suddenly believed that, all fun aside, they could make a good thing out of that Pioneer Reventlo Illusion.

“It was easy,” said Arthur Ransom, a deputy bursar in charge of expedition-and-dig money, and a man with green fingers, “and there isn't much new furniture required for it at all. I don't know how Pioneer gets such effects with so few props. He has masquerading qualities. ‘Soporific’ is only a notch removed from ‘hypnotic’, you know. And he doesn't have any ulterior motive. That man is clean. The mind of Pioneer Reventlo is a mirror, and an echo wall, and a wishing well. We drop small tokens or symbol-coins into it, and we draw out whatever we wish. You tossed things at him, or into him, Rosa and Joseph, and they came back in seconds, sea-changed and bright with wonder. Is there a valley named ‘White Goat Illusion’ in Calabria, Rosa? And is it elliptical?”

“Yes, there is such a place. I was born there. And it is a ‘haunted air’ place. But the sea-change you believe we made Pioneer work on things, it isn't quite as easy as you might think. And the things don't come back within seconds. I dropped some of those coins into Pioneer's mind three years ago. Illusions, like clouds, need time to grow.”

“And my own manipulation of Pioneer is a long-time affair,” Joseph Abramswell the analytical projectionist said, “a pleasurable hobby that I would never wish to terminate. It's tricky, though, and I don't know how I get away with it. Pioneer Reventlo has a better mind than I have. That being the case, the question constantly rises ‘Who is dredging whose mind anyhow?’. But, yes, his mind is a wishing well, if we're talking about the same thing.”

“Oh yes, we're talking about the same thing, a pleasant and well-funded summer in Calabria in this new-turned year, are we not?” Arthur Ransom said. “I will love it. I have never been on a ‘haunted air’ excavation before, and I have never been in Calabria.”

“And I have never really left Calabria,” Rosa said. “I cannot leave it, I carry it with me. I'm made out of Calabrian marble. The Calabrian marble is buff-colored or flesh-colored, as you may not know. The color is the result of impurities in it. That also is the case with my own coloration.”

“What variety of Calabrian marble are you made out of, Rosa?” Ransom asked. “I'm sort of a buff of buff-colored marbles myself.”

“Nicastro,” Rosa said, “of the Nicastro marble.”

Well no, Rosa wasn't exactly buff-colored. There was something in her both lighter and darker than the buff. There was elephant ivory in her coloring, and fire-rose and carmine, and a tinge of deep olive-blue. When one speaks of olive-colored one usually means a yellow-greenish touch, because Grecian olives are yellow-green. But Calabrian olives are bluish-hued, while still maintaining the olive saturation.

“Are there legends of statues-come-to-life in the White Goat Legendary, Rosa?” Arthur Ransom asked her.

“I don't know but there are facts of statues-come-to-life in the White Goat Illusion Valley,” Rosa said. “I am one of those facts.”

“Have you ever dug in the valley of the White Goat Illusion?” Joseph Abramswell asked. “I suppose it's foolish to inquire, since you’ve dug everywhere, and you’ve dug several times in Calabria, as I remember it.”

“No, I have not dug in the White Goat,” Rosa said, “nor has anyone else. It has been waiting. Many times I have dug in Calabria, but never in the Goat. That isn't allowed before now. There is a note that is sometimes sounded in the White Goat, and I don't know how to explain about it. It is linked in my mind with a back-stage legend around the San Carlo opera house in Naples. There is, as you may not believe it, at least one note (some people say there are possibly seven notes) that under exotic conditions may be preceded in time by its own resonances. This time gap is too small to be recognized by an untrained ear, but a really good ear will hear the phenomenon several dozen times in its life. This is in defiance of all the laws of physics and cosmology and philosophy, that an effect should happen, by however slight an interval, before its cause.

“There was a flautist in the San Carlo opera who was able to blow such notes. Then he wondered what would happen if, after the preceding resonance had sounded, he should refuse to blow the note itself. He had talked about this over the wine with friends, and they said that he would be compelled to blow it. So he tried it one evening the opening evening of the winter season when there was royalty present. He had the note already in his mouth. The preceding resonance of it sounded. But the flautist did not allow the note itself to sound that hundredth of a second later. He withdrew the flute from his mouth, and he broke it in his hands.

“There are three endings to this legend. I will tell only the one that is the most easily believed. That is that a great hand reached down, put the pieces of the flute together, removed the break from the flute and held it in abeyance for a moment, and put the note in the mouth of the flautist and forced him to blow it. Then, since the break that had properly been on the flute had to go somewhere, the great hand deposited it on the neck of the flautist. The neck of the flautist was broken and he fell down dead.

“The Valley that is named the ‘White Goat Illusion’ has such notes of preceding resonance. There is a compulsion to sound primordial notes in accord with an inhibiting resonance, and a person can get killed by it all.”

“Ah, I'd like to have Lucille Creighton on the expedition,” Joseph Abramswell said softly. “I like to hear her play the piano in the evenings.”

“How odd of you to say that!” Rosa exclaimed. “I have three times heard Lucille strike notes that had a ghostly preceding resonance. We may be assembling critical elements for our expedition accidentally. Do you have a talent for digging in the haunted air, Joseph?”

Joseph Abramswell was olive-colored himself, but his was a tinge of the Jerusalem olive, more of the gold-brown than of either green or blue. His eyes were of the same gold-flecked luminous brown, and his hair and whiskers were curled. He was clean-shaven, but his whiskers curled before they came through his skin and so added to the complexity of his texture. His hands were very large. Sometimes he cupped in his hands the heads of people when he talked to them. A lady who used to go to him for analysis has stated that, at the beginning of a session, this Doctor Joseph Abramswell used to cup her head in his hands, then remove her head deftly and easily from her body (it was as if a latch that held it were released, she said); and then Abramswell would set her head on the table across from her, she being conscious of her bilocation when he did it. And then Joseph the analyst would talk sometimes to her headlessness and sometimes to her head, and most often to the both of them all through the session. So it was always like a conversation of three persons, the analyst, the lady, and the lady's head. The lady said that her head spoke in a higher tone than she herself usually used, and that her headlessness spoke in a more throaty voice. It was illusion or projection of course, but Joseph Abramswell must have been a good therapeutic projectionist to get the effect.

For the rest, Abramswell was a very large man, but of a remarkable lightness. He moved around rooms at a sort of a trot. He surrounded himself with fragile objects, fine Faenza and Romagna pottery, blown glass montages, spun crystal statuary, but there was no way he could have broken any of these things by his trotting around. Something else would have happened. There could not have been a collision. Either Joseph would have moved through the delicate objects, or they would have moved through him. Such at least was the impression that this analytical man gave. He was in control of all things around him, as has not been the case since the Cro-Magnons maintained such control.

When Abramswell spoke of Pioneer Reventlo as having a better mind than himself, he must have been joking. Oh, perhaps Pioneer had a stronger, more rooted mind in some ways. But for mental balance, for kindness (always an aspect of high mentality), for passionate penetration of a situation, for all the things that make a mind good, Abramswell had a superior mind.

And he was either a handsome person or he was a genius-done caricature of a very handsome person. He was twenty-nine years old. He had been twenty-nine for seven years.

“There won't be any problem,” Arthur Ransom said. “My recommendations are never refused, never. I will put in for funding in the White Goat Valley of Calabria, and we will get that funding. The wording of the application will have to be done flamboyantly. That's what catches them. But what is more flamboyant than digging ‘time’ out of the ground with spade and shovel, and spreading it out to study in its aeons and intervals? And what is more flamboyant than the idea of literally excavating the air? I like the bit about your being an expert on ‘haunted air’ excavation, Joseph. There are whole vistas of possibilities here. It cries out for ‘super-sophisticated electronic equipment’, and there is almost no price ceiling on that. Ah, there is no way that ‘haunted air’ or ‘stratified time’ could be excavated without expensive equipment.”

“Not only have you green fingers when you talk of that, Arthur, but green eyes and green breath and an entire green complexion,” Joseph said with his analytical smile. “Aye, and even the tip of your tongue is green when it flicks out.”

“I know, Joseph, I know,” Arthur Ransom agreed with this appraisal of himself. “I love the money that all these projects must be wrapped in for safe and convenient handling. I love that money even in isolation, but I especially love it when it is accompanied by pleasant travel with pleasant people (yourselves), and by a project that is piquant and curious, and which may even have a dram of validity in a big tun of it. I could get by with another Rosa Caprobianco expedition, but I had better not try it. Rosa will be on this monomania for our front.”

Arthur Ransom had a Scotch nose and a Dutch mouth. He had the larger-than-life blue eyes of a North Sea Monster. His hair was like sand-colored rushes flopping about on his head. His eyes, to define them further, were the blue of the sky on June twenty-first at eleven on the morning on a cool cloudless day in the latitude of forty-two degrees. This detailed analysis of their color was Arthur's own. He was an oil painter by hobby-avocation, and his own face was his most common subject. He had studied his own eyes relentlessly and he had painted them many times, his eyes only, and nothing else in the picture. He knew colors and he knew his own eyes.

Arthur was dishonest with money but with very few other things. He gave himself socially and personally without asking return. It was not his fault, he said, that he was born with green fingers. He tried to make himself the most honest person in the world. He failed at it. He tried again and failed again. But he still worked at it. And he still worked at being charming. He was over-active and over-endowed in many ways. Almost everybody liked him.

“I believe that you two are using Pioneer as an echo chamber for your own predilections,” Arthur said. “And just what is this substance that you are trying to bring out? Is there really a new fire somewhere in this? I walk around and around it, and I cannot tell what it is. If we must come at it through parables, then let us have the parable of the big picture of it, of its totality. What are some of the legends of the White Goat Illusion Valley, Rosa? Digging out legends is one sort of excavation that has always paid well in side benefits. But I am the one who will have to make the presentation to obtain the funding. So give me a little bit more to go on.”

“Oh, there are trickster legends,” Rosa said. “The White Goat is the Trickster, so much so that people don't always see him as the white goat. Sometimes they see him as a man who tricks them. And even as a goat, he has a way of penning the goat-herds into the goat pen and not letting them out until they answer all the ultimate riddles. No one has answered all of them, and every goat-herd ever penned by him has died in his pen. Then there are the ‘Ghost-City’ or ‘Ghost-Tribe’ legends. There are Rip Van Winkle or Time Paradox legends, very many of these. There are ‘Subterranean Creature’ legends and ‘Preternatural Enemy’ legends. And there are the ‘Living Statue’ legends. As I told you, I am one of them.”

Rosa Caprobianco was not literally made out of Nicastro marble. She was made of intercostal (from between the ribs) flesh, as was her mother. She had strawberry hair, and that is rare for one coming from the Toe of Italy. She had an earth-strength. She had once cracked the ribs of a gentleman friend with a too hearty hug, which required medical repair on them. She was too stocky, too heavy. But how could she be less so without losing her strength and her vigor? Yes, she was a subterranean person and a cave person. She was an excavating woman, a spade woman. She had a rich and multi-dimensioned memory that seemed to take in everything. She was a mutation, or she would be one short. If not a natural one she would be an artificial one. She would have memory still more rich after she had taken a certain step with herself.

“I am of the one thousandth generation of humanity in the world,” she said. “I should get a door-prize, a janus-palma at least, for being out of the one thousandth. There aren't too many who have reached the one thousand mark yet. I have come from the eldest sons and the eldest daughters for a long time in an early-generating line; for the line began only eighteen thousand years ago. Other calculations show it longer, but those other calculations are wrong. I know how long it is for I remember it. I am of an advantaged line. Every ancestor of mine on the direct line has been an illiterate.

“Oh, they were not illiterates when they were children or youths. They read and wrote as young people have done for as long as there have been young people. The legend of people who did not have reading and writing, people who preceded reading and writing, is as foolish a legend as I can imagine. Reading and writing are natural things that young people do, like walking and talking. They are forms of chatter, usually of brainless chatter. But, for greater benefits these gifts are returned by some people when they come to a certain period of life. Many strong and intelligent people become illiterates naturally when they become full adults. Others make themselves so, in order that their minds and personalities may develop. Literacy is a crutch, and this renunciation will be like bread cast upon the waters. It will be returned one-hundred fold.”

“You are wrong in your emphasis, Rosa,” Abramswell said. “Humans are making an adjustment to that now. Literacy continued beyond childhood and youth may no longer be such a trauma and drag. There are even things to recommend it. Though late literacy has always been an enemy and inhibitor of the prophetic function, an accord is now becoming possible. One person who has been strong in the business is the name-leader of our proposed expedition, Pioneer Reventlo. He has been shedding literacy for the last several years. He would have been dead last night if it weren't for that. His premonitory system was working, and it works for few actively literate persons. But in other areas there is something wrong with Pioneer. He used the literacy crutch too long.”

“That girl, Adriana Thistle, spoke last night (with a touch of contempt) of ‘sophisticated stone tools designed for skull trepanning’,” Rosa said. “But she didn't even understand the purpose of trepanning. Why have we found hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of primitively trepanned skulls? It is not odd that supposedly backward people (backward in time, at least) should have performed this rather intricate skull-and-brain operation hundreds and hundreds of times (successfully, for the persons have lived long times after being trepanned), and not have performed other more simple operations. The number of set broken arms is far rarer.

“The purpose of trepanning, of course, was to remove the literacy nodule from the brain in cases where it had failed to wither away with the coming of adulthood. The literacy nodule and the whole literacy complex get in the way of lightning intuition and of real mental growth. The nodule should have been left behind in the cocoon. But even a few of the true people have it after they are grown, and I have it myself. Oh, I have somehow become alienated from the true tradition, here in a strange land among stuffy people. But I will have my nodule removed from my brain this summer, in my own land, and with sophisticated stone tools of the ritual sort. And then I can enter the full adult state. I have been a pupa long enough.”

“Prophets of some remote peoples do have their brains circumcised as it is said, before they enter on their full prophetic mission,” Abramswell remarked. “Possibly this is the meaning of it.”

“Are you serious about this, Rosa?” Arthur Ransom asked. “Do you really mean what you are saying?”

“Partly serious, friends. Almost half serious about it,” Rosa said.

“No you are not,” Joseph Abramswell contradicted. “You have never been as much as half serious about anything. I think you are about one-eighth serious about it. To be more than one-eighth serious is as bad as to be more than one-eighth Italian — it's in contemptible taste.”

“Are you not more than one-eighth Italian, Rosa?” Arthur asked.

“Nah, I don't think so. A Calabrian is never more than an eighth Italian. I am also a Troglodyte and a Tyrrhenian and a Troll and a Grimaldi and a Greek and a touch of one of Pioneer's Cro-Magnon originals. And other things besides. But I can tell you that literacy carried over into adulthood has been a plague and danger to us all. That is what destroyed the Neanderthals, if you will remember. Always writing on the rocks. And I’ve let it go on uncorrected in myself too long. Ah, Lucille has sounded her preceding note. She is coming now.”

“We are all in favor of it then, are we not?” Arthur Ransom tried to nail it down. “We will make the pleasant and enriching expedition to the White Goat Valley in Calabria this summer.”

“Of course we will,” Joseph Abramswell said. “Take care of it, Arthur. Get us the funding for it. With that, everything else will take care of itself. Enough of that for this morning.”

There had been an anticipatory resonance of a musical note yet to be sounded. Then the somewhat stylized, somewhat prototypical note itself walked into the room. It was Lucille Creighton.

“Will we go to Calabria?” she asked. “Will we find it there?”

“We will go, and we will find some sort of success in the expedition-excavation,” Abramswell said.

“The hypostasis that might come after that” Do you think we will find it?” she asked.

Anabella Hilary, along with Raddigan Shrike and Dean Hayfield and Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface, had gone into special session the day after the ‘In The Beginning’ lecture of Pioneer Reventlo. These five young science students had become strong partisans of Pioneer Reventlo, and they set about gathering up more spikes for nailing up his precarious theory. There was also a sixth person present, but the name of that one doesn't seem to be recorded.

“I am always the sour one,” Raddigan Shrike said, “the one who says that a thing can't be done. But we have come to a thing that has to be done, and we are the ones to do it. We are the Prometheans, and we are committed to make a fire-jump, the next great mutation of humanity. There has to be a mutating group that is at least partly conscious of its mission. Well, at the moment, I seem to be the only one of us who is conscious of it.

“There was once a person who aspired to jump over a wall. It was no ordinary wall. It was the wall that surrounded, and heretofore concealed, a birthright estate of great importance and salvation. This person jumped and jumped. He could not jump over that wall. ‘I will have to find somebody to jump with me,’ he said. ‘Together we may be able to make the jump.’ ”

“Oh, I'll jump with you, Raddigan,” Anabella Hilary said. “If I usually seem cool to your ideas, it's only because I don't like you. But I will jump over that wall with you.”

“The person obtained a companion,” Raddigan said. “And, side by side, they jumped. They still could not jump high enough. ‘If we had a few more persons to jump with us we could do it. We could make the jump then,’ the companion said.”

“We will jump with you,” Catherine January told him. “Cyclone and I will do it, though it's a very dubious adventure.”

“And I'll join you,” Dean Hatfield said.

“I won't,” the sixth person refused them.

“So five of them stood side by side and jumped,” Raddigan continued his parable, “and they still fell short. ‘We're coming closer though,’ one of them said. ‘If we had the magic number of persons we could do it.’ So they gathered a larger group, each member of which had new Promethean flame in his heart. There were twenty or so of them assembled there. They stood side by side. They jumped. And every one of them jumped over that wall. All it required was the magic number of persons. Twenty or so was the magic number.”

“And that is how the next great mutation jump of humanity is achieved?” Catherine asked. “Oh dubiety, dubiety, dubiety! Is that the way it works? We will consider it.”

But they didn't consider it for very long at that time. They had grasshopper minds that day.

“Consider the complete clarity of the lines of most mummies' hands,” F. Cyclone Boniface said.

“I always admire a thumping conversation opener,” Catherine January remarked as she fingered the bones of F. Cyclones skull. “ ‘Consider the complete clarity of the lines of mummies' hands!’ Cyclone, that's good. And it brings up the vision of the everlastingness of those hand-lines. It is like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. Those lines in the mummies' hands will still remain after the hands themselves and the mummies themselves are total dust. But really, how many mummies do you know? We have six Domrémy mummies here at the University, and a dozen of Southwestern Indians. But what others? Oh, I love your occipital bone!”

Catherine January, who made skulls of persons she cherished and admired, loved to fondle the bones of her friends' heads. She said that all bones were slightly fluid, and that the bones of a living skull change in accord with the moods of their owner. Some days the bones droop and sag. But the mood of F. Cyclone Boniface was always good when Catherine was caressing the bones of his head.

“I know quite a few mummies,” F. Cyclone said, “in Mexico, in Guatemala, the ice-mummies of Sweden, the rift mummies of Nairobi, the mummies of many universities and museums. All of them have this startling clarity in the lines of their hands, and the older they are the greater is the clarity of the lines.”

“Isn't it true though,” Anabella Hilary said, “that most mummies have their hands clasped tightly shut? How could anyone see the lines of them?”

“Most but not all of the mummies have their hands shut tight,” F. Cyclone continued with his lecture. “But there is a favorable selection process here. The best of the mummies have their hands loosely open or half open. They are the ones who went to their deaths easy and untensed and unafraid. Those with tightly clasped hands were those with tightly clasped minds. They do not represent the best of them. And yet we should examine all of them for statistical purposes. It is troublesome. The hands can be opened, but they are brittle and it sometimes means having to break off a finger or two. It also may mean discipline or expulsion or even legal process against one. Indeed I myself have been expelled from one university for tampering with mummies. But I do have a small cubical camera with illumination. This can be forced into even a tightly-clasped hand, and with luck it can take six good pictures with the six sides of its cube. Many of these turn out well and can be put together for a panorama of the inside of the hand. I work with what I have to work with, and I have accumulated a mass of very compelling data.”

“Let us launch a ‘Project Unclasp Mummies' Hands’,” Anabella said.

“The reason that cheirognomy, hand reading, has fallen from the ranks of the respected sciences is that its material is blurred and faded,” Cyclone said. “I am convinced that the first men (the first men of that ‘historical recent’ of which Pioneer Reventlo speaks) have their lives and their personalities written clearly and plainly in their hands. Today these things are written in a confused manner; but the further back we go the clearer they are. The clearest hand-lines I have found in living men are those of Pioneer Reventlo and Joseph Abramswell and Jeffery Wind. But they're not in at all with the hand-lines of the Gila Bend Mummies who are quite old. The fingerprints, the only part of the hand-lines that are accepted today as having significance, are actually no more than skimpy tables-of-contents of the books that are the palms of the hands. But the only attention paid to them is that each one is different. Of course each one is different. How would any two different books have identical tables of contents?

“The hand-lines of a person were a complete mnemotic of the person's life. The events were all there, before they happened, while they were happening, and after they happened. And there was a small node that moved down each line of each hand, and it represented the then-present time point of that hand, which was usually the person's time of death, when it had stopped moving. Even the personal name was written in the palm of each person's hand, in the old, original, post-alphabetical language. And it could be pronounced by any person of that early illuminated period. It can still be read and pronounced by an adept of the subject, and I am working hard to make myself such an adept.

“Even the moons at the bases of the fingernails of the original men of that bright morning, they were calendars, they were almanacs, they were ephemerides of the planets and stars, they were annals, they were navigation charts, they were clocks. One might read the bearing of latitude and longitude from them. I really believe that as a person traveled on a journey, the moons of his fingernails would change at the same time that the stars in the sky changed. A man could look upward and see what time it was and could see where in the world he was. Or he could look at the moons and suns and planets and stars on his fingernails and see when and where he was. There are even notations on some of the fingernails, in Chaldee or in the Original Language if it was different. I am learning to read them now. They have projections and legends that are older and more valid than Mercator's. You will sometimes see even today, a person, one person in a hundred, who looks at the palms of his hands, and the back and nails of them when he ponders something, and he reads the answers there even though he does not know that he is doing it.”

“I like the Evidence of Mummies' Hands,” Anabella said. “The hands are one of the signature zones, surely, and by them early man can still give evidence of himself. What is that noise? It sounds like somebody using a hack-saw, a micro-hack-saw, up in the chandelier.” And that was exactly what it sounded like,

They were in the Agassiz Alcove of the West Science Students Lounge. They were all sitting at a table under the beautiful and heavy Agassiz Memorial Chandelier.

“How are you going to get people to take cheirognomy seriously?” Dean Hatfield asked. “I question whether it is a science at all, since it is not taught as a science, and since there is not any consensus agreement about its results.”

“It is deeper than a science,” Cyclone said. “It is an insignia. It is an intuition. It is a reading and unriddling of flesh documents. Even in those muddy days of the world, even with muddy lines to read from, some pretty good interpretations be made. From the heart line of a person, we can tell whether he has a good heart or a bad, whether he is a saint or a scoundrel. From the hearing we can not only read I. Q. better than by any of the tests, but we can get a good idea of the style of the intelligence that is involved. From the life-line, we can tell within a month when a person will die, and we can also read the history of health, both past and future. There is a lot to be found from hands, from their lines, from their contours, from their texture, from their color and mottling. But we know that the further back we go (and we cannot really go back very far because there are no real people or mummies of them back very far), the further back we go, the longer and healthier are their lives, the better and more holy are their hearts, the finer and more intelligent are their minds.”

“Hogwash!” Raddigan Shrike and the sixth person cried together in angry exasperation. And then Raddigan went on by himself, “Cheirognomy is ninety percent imagination. Say, that does sound like someone with a very small hack-saw up in that chandelier, but we can plainly see that there's nobody there.”

“Did you know that fingerprints have been lifted from the lead statuette that was dropped from the astronomical dome last night and that almost killed Pioneer Reventlo?” Dean Hayfield asked. “Did you know that they are non-human fingerprints? They are Stoicheio fingerprints.”

“Talk sense, Dean,” Raddigan spoke angrily. “You know that the Stoicheio are imaginary. They are only a story told by children to children. Who lifted the Stoicheio fingerprints off of the lead statuette?”

“I did,” Cyclone said. “As to the Stoicheio, they may well be imaginary, but that doesn't say that they aren't real. We should have Pioneer Reventlo's ‘In The Beginning’ language available, for we don't have the words that we're in need of in the modern languages. The Stoicheio are invisible, yes, and they have some qualities of the immaterial and some of the material. We cannot see them, but we cannot think of them very well without having an image to think on. So we construct make-shift images of them in our minds (each of us likely makes a different sort of image of them). And ‘to make an image of’ is the meaning of the word ‘imagine’. But they are real because they have effect. They enter into our thoughts and our actions, and they affect us. And, under favorable conditions, they leave fingerprints.”

“Why, then, read the fingerprints, Cyclone,” Dean Hayfield said. “Read them as tables-of-contents of what things are in the Stoicheio. They should be invaluable for that.”

“I cannot agree that each of us has a different image of the Stoicheio,” Anabella said. “I believe that there is a common consensus of them. I believe that this consensus image is held by as many as ten percent of us, by as many as thirty percent of the people who have thought about the Stoicheio seriously. I have been doing considerable work on this myself, and I believe that I will soon have a composite image of the Stoicheio worked out. I will present it to the world, perhaps by next autumn. The Stoicheio fingerprints that you have lifted, they are only the fifth set known in world, aren't they?”

Anabella Hilary was into ghosts strongly. “You may say that the Stoicheio are only ghosts,” she said sometimes, “but they are active ghosts and we will have to deal with them. They are revealing their organization more and more.”

And there was, in Anabella's own adolescence-area, a ghost-infused complex that she refused to release. She still had a poltergeist associated with her. Most infested children will be rid of their infestation by the time they are sixteen. She kept her poltergeist secretly, as a young man will sometimes keep the teddy bear that was the companion of his childhood. Indeed, Anabella believed that the whole appearance and idea of the teddy bear was only an attempt (a surprisingly accurate attempt, she said) to make a poltergeist visible. Catherine January also said that poltergeist skulls were definitely bear-shaped. She had made several skulls of poltergeists she had known when she was younger.

“No, the set of alien fingerprints that I lifted from the statuette is the eleventh known set,” Cyclone said. “There had already been ten sets or partial sets authenticated. Mine is the eleventh.”

“It's elfin, that hack-saw cutting away up there,” Catherine said. “I bet it isn't ten millimeters long, from the pitch of the blade sound. How is anyone going to cut through metal with so small a saw? I almost wish that I could help it.”

“The fingerprints are good evidence for the existence of the Stoicheio as have been random bones for the existence or several animals and several sorts of men,” Cyclone said. “Osseologists used to reconstruct complete animals and men from no more than a dug-up bone or two. And those bone experts subsequently had to give up very little of what they had claimed in the name of the bones. Even near man, even man of that ‘historical recent’ period were generated by no more than a bone or two found in authenticated undisturbed strata. However, there are no bones of modern man in authenticated undisturbed strata, none that can be verified as untampered with or as not artifically placed where they were found, none that can be classified absolutely as ‘modern man’ rather than for ‘historically recent’ man or near-man. Therefore there is less reason to believe in the existence of present-day modern man than there is to believe in the existence of the Stoicheio.”

“What rot, what rot,” said the sixth person present.

“Our question as Prometheans must be: How can we make a climatic Promethean advance? Where is the new spark? Where is the new fire?” Dean Hayfield asked. “Strangely, Pioneer Reventlo has his hands full of new fire, but he believes that it is very old.”

“We haven't very much to go on yet,” Anabella said. “We haven't anything at all that can be really authenticated. We have an idea of the noble and primordial original language, and yet nobody has ever seen it or heard it. We have the noble bones, and perhaps some of the noble paintings, of the Cro-Magnon men. But we do not have any objective proof that there is really anything noble about them. We have evidence from the hand-lines of mummies that men were more clear in their thinking as we go further back, but (with all deference to dear Cyclone) there isn't any proof of any of it. The only thing proved is that old mummies tend to have clear hand-lines. We have a little bit of evidence on the invisible Stoicheio who are said to have been enemies of the Cro-Magnons, and to be enemies of ourselves as well, but this is empty talk. We have some things that might possibly point to a greatness and completeness ‘in the beginning’. But we need three thousand pieces of real evidence, not three pieces of purported evidence. What say you all?”

“We're working on it,” F. Cyclone Boniface said. “Let's take this one: The Stewardship of the World bit, we call it. The Stewardship of the World is clearly evident for several millennia after the sudden, recent ‘beginning’. It was a time when the swamps and moors obeyed man, as they should. The weeds and the trash held to their modest places. The rivers ran rich but unchoked. Paleobotany tells us this strongly. So does recent geology. There are clear eras and funny eras all through geology, but several millennia after the beginning were exceptionally clear. It was a state of order that prevailed for several thousand years, and we still live on the remnant and pattern of it. Should the dinosaurs return to earth today, they could not find the swamps and fens to accommodate them. Out of the variant geologies we can get only a half-adequate idea of how rugged the disposition of the world was before this, or how ordered it became in its golden age, and how comparatively ordered it still is. Disordered nature is a horror.

“That state of order, that draining and currying of the world that prevailed for several thousand years and still prevails in weakened form, it is not to be found at all in the millions of years that went before.”

“That is all rhapsody, Cyclone,” Raddigan Shrike said. “I do not find that in Paleobotany or in the variant geologies.”

“It is more than rhapsody,” Catherine January defended it. “It really happens, sometimes, somewhere. And, yes, we are either in the afterlight or the forelight of it now. But is it somewhere that we will be able to find, or is it only another reflection thrown on the hills behind us?”

“There may be another way of looking at magnificent Cro-Magnon man,” Raddigan said. “I am reminded of the stanzas by Chesterton:

The Northmen came about our land

A Christless chivalry:

Who knew not of the arch or pen,

Great, beautiful half-witted men

From the sunrise and the sea.

“Well, were the Cro-Magnons ‘Great, beautiful half-witted men’? Their physical counterparts today are so, or that is the way it seems to me. And I am pretty certain that Pioneer Reventlo fills that description, even though he is ‘imposing’. Are they the ‘Magnificent Morons’ and are we giving them too large a place? I know that I am small and dark and not at all of the Cro-Magnon type. But is the Cro-Magnon myth identical with the Germanic, or at least with the Aryan myth? And does anyone still take those myths seriously?”

“Someone has said that if the Cro-Magnon had been represented as dirty and unshaven, and the Neanderthal as clean and shaven, the Neanderthal would be the more noble of the two,” Cyclone said. “But there is no evidence that Cro-Magnon was a white man. And the Neanderthals and Grimaldis are not really different from him at all. Man, in the sudden beginning, had a variety of noble types, but race had not appeared yet. And yet all the races were implicit in this ‘beginning man’. Races do not take a long while to develop. A single generation could do it. A different thought pattern would produce a different race, and it may be that that is the only thing that will do it. ‘Race’ is only the narrow face of divergent thinking which is sometimes called heresy. Consider the Bogomills of the tenth to the fifteenth century. Some of them were Bulgarians, some were Moravians, some were of Turkish blood, some were Greeks, some were little Russians, some were Scandinavians, some were Romanians, some Albanians. But they all looked alike. They did not look like their own blood-brothers any longer. They came to look like their belief-brothers. A stranger could look at any of them and say ‘Thou also art one of them’. Consider the Secular Liberals of today. I have a picture of a recent congress of their essential leaders. Whether they are Chinese or Anglo or Latin or Negro or Polynesian, they all look pretty much alike. They have become a separate race, a new race that has appeared within the last two hundred years.”

“Hogwash!” said Raddigan Shrike and the sixth person together.

“There is another fragment that may turn into a piece of real evidence some day,” Catherine January said. “Our interpretation of the Aalborg Skeletons, and they are about as Cro-Magnon as you can get, is that these men lived to be near a thousand years old, on the evidence of certain accumulations in their bones and certain traits in their bone-structure. But another interpretation of the same evidence is that there was then much more carborundum than there is now.”

“I don't believe that we're helping the Pioneer Reventlo thesis very much,” Anabella said. “And yet I believe in it. I do believe in a golden age, possibly just of a canonical thousand years long, that was in the beginning. And I believe that somebody is preventing our examining it. But we must examine it and pile up evidence for it. If we discover what it really was, maybe we can bring it back.”

That flying couple, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald (‘Are they really flesh and blood?’ it used to ask on the playbills for their act) came suddenly, into the Agassiz Alcove. There was no way they could ever arrive anywhere except suddenly.

“Oh, we have all the evidence!” Vivian cried, “and it proves that Pioneer Reventlo is absolutely correct. It came to us like a series of explosions, intuitively and dynamically. It is out in the open for all the world to see, and it is almost the most important thing in the world.”

“The reason that you haven't seen the interlocking mass of evidence is that you have been looking for static evidence, and this is kinetic,” Curtis Bald rattled his words out almost like rifle fire. “It can only be caught by high-speed eyes and high-speed ears. We can't stop to communicate it to you right now though. There are enemies pursuing us to kill us.”

“Why don't you change your patter, people,” Raddigan suggested. “Your acrobatics is tops, but your patter is bottom.”

“There always are people pursuing you to kill you,” Anabella Hilary said with feigned boredom (actually, the presence of the two acrobats always brought a sort of excitement). “You always believe someone is chasing you, but they never seem to catch you. Vivian, what is that spreading —?”

“Oh, it's only blood,” Vivian said. “Mine. I'll just take this bar towel to sop some of it up. My dress is already ruined, but I hate to dribble too much of it on these classy carpets. We will try to contact you within a week if we're not pursued too relentlessly. Toot, toot, ta, ta!” And the flying youngsters were gone.

And everybody laughed. Vivian and Curtis liked to put on acts. Both of them were super acrobats and super adagios. They gave their skits in every variety show that happened at the University. They made explosive entrances and exits always. And they always talked, no, not talked, they always shouted in passing, of great secrets that they possessed and how they were being hunted down to their deaths for knowing too much.

“Are they flesh and blood, or are they Spirits of Adagio?” Raddigan declaimed in the manner of the acrobats' own playbills. But Cyclone had caught some of the scarlet fluid that had apparently been spurting from Vivian. He had caught it in a laboratory retort (“Cyclone isn't very fast with the answers, but he's never without a retort,” Catherine January had said of him once).

“I will just analyze this,” Cyclone said. “Naturally I am not without a mini-testing kit. I bet they got it at the magic shop. Maybe I can make it and sell it cheaper.”

There was metal dust drifting down on them as they sat there in the alcove. It had been drifting down on them for a long while and they had tried to ignore it. “The sound of that little saw would almost put one to sleep,” Dean Hayfield said. It was such metallic dust as might be produced by a hack-saw blade of very small size with almost immeasurably small teeth. And the Agassiz Memorial Chandelier had begun to sway.

“Let's sing,” said the sixth person present. “Let's have rousing sea-chanteys and hoe-downs. Let's sing very loudly and get as deeply involved in it as we can.”

“What in the world for?” Catherine January asked.

“For the love of noise, that's what for,” the sixth person said. “Let us create a roaring around the table. Let us make the loudest and most arousing din that we are capable of. Let's sing, let's roar, let's sound off.”

“I kind of think that we should make a big noise too,” Raddigan Shrike said. “I don't know why but I have the sudden impulse to agree with him.”

“With whom?” Dean Hayfield cried in amazement. “What is the matter with you, Dean? What are you trying to distract us from? First something was trying to drone us to sleep, but that didn't work for them. Now they are trying to distract us with singing. And you, un-person, what is the matter with you?”

“For that matter, what are you?” Anabella Hilary asked the sixth person. “And who are you?”

“It's blood,” Cyclone announced the results of his analysis. “Vivian was bleeding blood.”

“How logical of her,” Anabella said.

“No use waiting for the last possible moment,” Dean Hayfield warned them all. “Out from under it, people! We are almost hypnotized by it. Out, out!”

“No, no, sit, sit,” the sixth person, or the non-person cried. “Sit still.”

But the five persons of them were out from under it in the last instant of time. Then the big Agassiz Memorial Chandelier crashed down and smashed the table flat.

“Oh, what is the matter with those invisible enemies,” Catherine groused. “Have they only a single method of assassination?”

“Oh, clumsy, clumsy,” said the non-person who had for a while been mistaken for a sixth person. “Oh, clumsy, clumsy.” Then it dimmed out.

“I'm not sure I want to go on the expedition that is forming itself,” Raddigan Shrike said a little while later. “I want to stay here and assemble a party to — well, to jump over that wall. Really, I think that all Prometheans should be committed to the mutational jump. Whatever essential is to be found anywhere is to be found here also. Let us assemble here and make the leap together that we cannot make singly. Yes, I am scared by these attempts to kill the people who want to go on the expedition to Italy. But I believe we should stay here anyhow.”

“There will be walls to leap wherever we are, Raddigan,” Anabella said. “But maybe our company cannot be completed here. If we have an authentic call to go, then we should go. There is Appointment for us somewhere. We can jump at the place of our appointment. Lucille Creighton calls it the ‘Hypostatic Jump’.”

Three persons who in a sort of code are called 1-212-1212, 12-121-212, and 12-12-12-12 were met together at — well they were not necessarily met together at any one place. They didn't work that way. Sometimes they were in places and sometimes they were not. They had a lot of freedom in this. They were met to consider a problem.

“The Pioneer Reventlo Group, loose and unorganized and with its eyes still unopened as it is, has now become one of the ‘Ten Most Dangerous Groups to the Status of the World’,” the person named 1-212-1212 said. Oh certainly these people spoke in English, or at least they might be understood as speaking in it. They could understand it and use it, as they could all tongues. They were experts in tongues and all forms of communications.

“Yes, they are coming too close to things,” the person named 12-121-212 said. “That being so, and they being in our territory, we must take steps to root out their dangerous proclivities. What if they are able to see after their eyes are opened? What if they are able to feel, and to put out their hands, and to take the world? We must put out their eyes and cut off their ears and pull out their teeth and claws.”

“I had already taken some slight steps against certain persons of them who were due to become key persons in the movement,” the one named 12-12-12-12 said. “Well, it didn't work in either case, but we're no worse off then we were.”

“Oh that was corn, pure corn, 12-12-12-12!” 1-212-1212 said. “The weight, the great pendant dropped from a height, that went out three thousand years ago except in B movies and B stories. You'll make us objects of scorn and laughter with tricks like that.”

“It is a trick that has worked again and again and again,” 12-12-12-12 insisted. “There is no trick that has made so many comebacks. I even like it in cycles of threes, though you can call that triple corn. So I failed to kill Reventlo! But he is the patsy of the bunch. He can serve us as well alive. So I failed to kill five of his most intelligent young followers, though I did have them grouped well and set up well, and I may have found entry into the mind of one of them. Later today or tonight, I will try the falling weight trick for the third time. I believe it will work. I always believe it will work. But Pioneer Reventlo has been plugging his backward notion for several years, and we have compelled him to put it into ridiculous and inept form every time, and never more so than last night. Why should it begin to have effect now when he has every part of it all wrong? It does not matter. The odds against our failing are staggering. We can as easily go on full phase defense, and lead them stubbornly to go where we want them to go, and let them defiantly bully their way into the trap and the grave.”

“I will go to Calabria and wait for it there, if it gets that far,” 1-212-1212 said. “Well, for that matter, I am in Calabria now.” And 1-212-1212 was in Calabria then at that instant. That is the way those persons operate.

‘As among snakes, so with ghosts, only about one of them in a hundred is poisonous. Among the small number of poisonous species, the Stoicheio are the most venomous. Humans, without admitting their belief in Stoicheio, have always been convinced that the Stoicheio are unfriendly to them. This is true. Max Morning, an outstanding authority, says that the Stoicheio are the most politically active of all ghosts, if one might call it that. And we do call it that. Their politics is ‘Down With People!’.

‘The Stoicheio and all Lemures are jealous of humans and quasi-humans. The Stoicheio were first in time, and they feel that people are superseding them. The Stoicheio do not have bodies of their own, and they put on borrowed bodies awkwardly. For aeons, they used, on a random basis, the bodies of animals, in particular bears, big cats and panthers, dogs, wolverines, apes and baboons, snakes and crocodiles. When people appeared, the Stoicheio moved randomly into their bodies also; and they met with opposition. But they muddled and confused the human people, and they took the shine off them. This mental confusion of the people then took on a life of its own, like an endemic disease. There is no person now who is completely unconfused by the Stoicheio, for there is no person who has not been possessed by them, for minutes or hours or days or months or years or decades.

‘The Stoicheio have also employed the bodies of humans who have died and been buried. This has caused the old belief among humans that the Stoicheio are shades of the dead. Not so.

‘Most humans do not even know the name ‘Stoicheio’ and indeed it is only a contingent or speculative form. Most humans, even among those who know a little bit about the subject, will not agree with my appraisals. I have the name of being a crack-pot. Very well, I will bear that name and shame if I am able to sound a warning that will be heard. “Awake, awake, we are being robbed of our property and souls! Awake and defend!”

‘There is a hidden treasure to which humans hold the deed — if they can find that treasure. That there is such a treasure waiting is one of the facts that has always been known, consciously and unconsciously. The Stoicheio (it was Anaxagores who called them ‘an unsuccessful experiment on the road to humanity’ and so sent a tremor of rage through them), the Stoicheio direct the humans away from the treasure by a variety of deceptions. At times, they will direct them towards distant reflections of the treasure. Or they will direct them towards their own destruction. They have special traps and graves prepared for the treasure-seekers. But they may not be able to direct the people away from it for always.

‘There really is this treasure buried in a field, or in a cave or pleasure place, or in a grave. We will find it yet, and it will make us all rich forever. We have only to solve the geographical and temporal and categorical location of it and it is ours. This is the joy that was bequeathed to us from the beginning.’

The Back Door of History
Arpad Arutinov

Chapter Three

‘The lines are drawn for the final battle, and only one question remains: whose side are the goats on?’

Armageddon is Imminent
Karl Smelt

Prospectus of the ‘Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and Excavation of Earth, Air, and Mind Sphere, in the Region of the White Goat Valley of Calabria in Italy, for the Purpose of Solving Problems of Human Origins and Mutations in the Historical Recent Period’, by Arthur Ransom, Coordinator:

‘There has come a call for a scientific investigation of a series of borderline questions and propositions; and we are not able to assemble sufficient strictly scientific evidence to justify the investigation. Nevertheless we are requesting it, and we maintain that this is one of the times when strict requirements be waived. Is it bad bursary business to waive the strict requirements in this case? I don't believe that it is.

‘We are far ahead of the game on our investigations. There is not one of our projects of the last six years that has not achieved more than it promised. We have grown scientifically rich on the accidental fall-out from our expeditions. I know that the bursary holds the firm conviction that every enterprise and expedition must be regarded as in a separate basket, not financially dependent on any other one. But can a comprehensive theory of basketry be developed if we keep all our baskets completely separate? For all the good case and good credit that we have built up, we ask that this new expedition be approved. There is over-riding hunch and intuition that this will yield the richest fall-out of any of the recent investigations. Do not be turned off by some of the materials in this presentation. Much of it is more than it seems, and the very words of it may be cloaks and symbols for streams running too deep to be verbalized yet.

‘Go with us on this. We don't want justice; we want mercy. Approve this, and it shall return to you one hundred-fold. There is treasure buried in this field.’

Presentation of Pioneer J. Reventlo, Doctor and Lecturer:

‘I suppose that what we are proposing here is a time excavation, or at least a dimension excavation. We intend to dig in the ground more thoroughly than anyone has every digged before, and in the richest of all unexcavated valleys. We intend to dig in the ‘haunted air’ that is above that ground. We are set on excavating in the noosphere or mind-zone that is above the ordinary haunted air. We will dig in these concentric strata of the sphere, and we will lay out for study all the things that have been buried there. We will excavate time itself with spades and shovels and trowels, but I am not sure if all of it will be past time. I believe that present and future time are also buried in the deep earths, in the deep air, and in the deep aether. I believe that we will dig out the bones of the future as well as of past time, and that we will be able to assemble many of them into meaningful articulations. We will make rational skeletons out of things that have been, and still are, and are to be. And we will put flesh on some of those skeletons.

‘There is an excellent state of mankind that ‘happens’. Wherever it happens, that is the beginning of mankind. From that beginning, mankind goes on in one, or in two, or in more than two directions. It is not at all certain that time has only one or two directions. We do not have any direct evidence for some of my statements, but that is like saying that we do not have any direct evidence that this building has a foundation. For the foundation (if indeed this building does have one) is underground and invisible, and the facing stones of the building prevent us from coming onto it directly. And yet there is much good indirect evidence that this building does have a foundation. The building has great weight that is borne by something, and the clay ground around here will not bear great weight without an underlying foundation reaching down to bed-rock. The plans of this building show it to have a foundation. There are records of the foundation being built, and there are records of stone and steel and and mortar and labor being poured into it. There are people who remember the foundation being built, and there are even people who remember building it. And that is also the case with the glorious ‘foundation days’ of mankind.

‘(There is a chase going on at this moment, and it has been going on for several weeks. There are two persons, a young lady named Vivian Oldshoe and a young man named Curtis Bald, who are being pursued to their deaths. They are being hunted and harried because they have guessed too close about a treasure, and have come too close to it. And the wardens of this treasure rise against them. They are acrobats. Is that something against them? They are being hunted from city to city and country to country. I see them often at night recently, in a variety of bioscopic dream. No, no, this isn't scientific evidence for anything. But it is secondary evidence that our guess is right. No one would oppose our expedition so strongly if we were going on the wrong trail.)

‘The ‘Glorious Foundation of’ Mankind’ bears weight, and all the things without foundations sink into the clay and marl of the earth. The plans and schematics for mankind show this foundation and beginning of mankind. There are records of the foundation built, though these coded shorthand records of the builders are a little bit difficult to read after a few millennia. But there are people (I cannot say whether or not they are ‘presently bodied people’) who remember the foundation being built, and there are even people who remember building it. It is true that these ‘recalls’ are in the form sometimes called ‘folk memories’, and sometimes called the ‘folk unconscious’ or the ‘collective unconscious’. Well, the strata are in these places, and they are formed by authentic deposits. They are not formed out of nothing. I myself have never seen such rich and meaningful outcroppings.

‘This, you say, is not real evidence. What real evidence do we have for any of this? There is the existence of languages growing more and more intricate and more excessive and concise as they go back in time. There is the implication that more and rich languages were required to express more intricate and varied thought. And there is the guess that this should be followed back along the oath that might take us to the ‘beginning in completeness’ of human intelligence born with all its tools fully developed.

‘I propose the original written language, which may actually have preceded slightly the first spoken language, that writing, with its grammar (grammar is identical with thought, and it had only one inception), that writing did have, and still may have, magical effect. In that language there were word-charms that worked, and it may have been made up entirely of such. The word-charms of the old writing could transport and transmute physical objects. This is still done sometimes with the crumbling remains of old written Chaldee.

‘There is evidence that the world, in short thousands of years, became an orderly place to live in, when it had been a disorderly place for the preceding millions of years. (Man is more an anti-pollution device than a pollution device.) There is strong evidence that we still live in an orderly world, though that order may now be approaching the threshold of serious erosion.

‘And there is very much evidence for the sudden appearance of a superior man, handsome inside and outside. There is evidence for his high character and goodness, and his blazing intelligence, and for the masterworks that came from his hands. There is implicit evidence that this man is ourselves, but that we have been cast into semi-sleep.

‘But there isn't yet much of the direct evidence for this. There are levels of validity separated by steel cliffs. We want to go on an expedition for evidence of a higher validity.’

Presentation of Joseph Abramswell, Analyst and Haunted Air Excavator:

‘There are absurdities of time and space in all my presentations. There are absurdities about the nature of reality. There are far worse absurdities about myself and some of my methods. I have managed thus far to cover up most of my personal absurdities pretty well, for the reason that they work, that they give results. Sometimes, as after-thought, I am able to rephrase my methods in light of their own successful results.

‘But I work by hunches and intuitions, and it is only after I have done things that I find rational exclamation for how they are done. I hear ‘voices’, and these voices seldom mislead me. Mostly I do hear the voices out of the ‘haunted air’. Other persons hear internal voices from their own unconsciousnesses, and this is respectable. It is respected as a tapping of a legitimate deposit of intellectual substance. But my own voices are exterior to me, and I believe that they are real.

‘They are real persons talking to me, and I believe that I am an accidental adept receiver of voices. I am in accord with the ‘haunted air’. The voices must know what they are about, for they are able to inform me correctly on a variety of subjects. They are really of precursor effect, for I have originated a startling number of things by means of them. And the fact is I know that some of the voices have been dead for thousands of years, or at least they have been unfleshed for such lengthy periods. (I no longer believe in ‘death’; mark that against me.) Well, I know that some of them are removed from me by many thousands of years. They may be conventionally dead, or they may be unborn. The two effects are very similar.

‘If and when we go to Calabria, I will hear more voices there, because I already know that there is a concentration of voices there that will be able to inform me. And yet, from my pleasant place, I hear voices in Calabria now. (Et in Calabria ego.)

‘There is an element of hypertension and hysteria in all good receivers of voices. It is controlled tension and hysteria. I have these elements in myself. We run into paradoxes in trying to analyze all of this. Certain statements that are necessary to make turn out to be mathematical fictions. Dammit, almost everything is a mathematical fiction. And the voices, our unconsciousnesses and our exo-consciousnesses, are smarter than we are. Our basest interior organs are smarter.

‘I plead for the approval of this expedition and excavation. I feel that it will pay off in rich tangibles as well as intangibles. I feel this so strongly that I don't even bother to put my plea into rational form. I put it there in its strength, that it has intuitions and intimations of every success, and that these intuitions have never deceived me.

‘Like Pioneer J. Reventlo, I see vivid bioscopic dreams of the young persons Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald being pursued to murder them to shut their close guesses off. They have strong evidence of the truth of several matters, and there are persons who will do anything to prevent these truths being made manifest. If we were wrong in our new project, there would be no need for enemies to hunt down these two young associates of ours. But now it has gone beyond bioscopic dreams about them. They have just been here, for the first time that anyone of the University has seen them since their flight. They came into my room suddenly here. ‘I have a document to write,’ Vivian said. ‘Ah, this will do nicely.’ She took a three liter jar of priceless persimmon jam and smashed it. ‘I will just write with this on the blank white wall here,’ she said. Blank white wall! It was Groben's famous ‘White on White’ which he did for me personally. It is one of the most valuable paintings in the world. But Vivian was in a transport and did not hear my objections. In rapid and sudden words, she wrote with the jam right over the face of the painting. Visually, of course, the painting is the equivalent of a blank white wall, but psychically it is much more. Well, the damage is done now. Or is there any damage done to the psychic constituent of the painting? It may be improved.

‘Arthur Ransom, the coordinator of the project, has copied these words from my wall. He says that he intends to include them in his Prospectus for the Expedition and Excavation.’

Presentation by Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, Acrobats and Psychics, which presentation shall be known as ‘The Handwriting On The Wall’:

‘It is because we are always so swift and acrobatic and intrepid that we catch such prime facts on the wing. You don't catch such them by waiting on your perch for them to come to you. Some of these soaring ideas and insights are sky-birds that even sleep on the wing and never come to roost.

‘We know about the ‘Golden Age’ now, about the ‘Treasure Buried In a Field’, and about the glorious ‘Foundation Days’ of mankind. What we know about them absolutely is that they are. We will indicate the blessed critical area of all of it by our own flight which will be seen by many of our friends as bioscopic dreams. Our acrobatics are like bee-dances in the air. They indicate where persons should go for best nectar or treasure. One of the blessed coordinates of this time-space location (the handiest of the treasure gates) has already been guessed correctly by all the propounders of the excavation and expedition. Bear with us then, and we will trace out the other coordinates for you if we have to trace them out in our own blood.

‘As to that, the reason I am able to write so fluently and minutely and clearly with my fingers in chromatic jam is that I have had several occasions recently to write rapid and telling messages in secret places in my own blood. I must write them in what I have or write them not at all.

‘The reason that we are able to see things that other people miss is that, because of our acrobatics, we have learned to take a rotational view of things. This opens them up to us and gives us quick views of their interiors. The reason that not all of us are able to go quickly and easily to our inheritance in the golden promise is that there are enemies of mankind who wish to block us from our rightful possessions. What they say to themselves of mankind is “This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and we shall have his inheritance.” There is one particularly fell species that wants, out of jealousy of us, to turn or lead mankind away from all his birthrights and rightful possessions. This revolting species gives false maps of these promised place, and sets up false sign post to point away from it. This is a murderous species, and several members of it were appointed to murder Curtis Bald and myself, Vivian Oldshoe. But we will let them kill us. And even if they do kill us, we will not let them stop us for a moment.

‘Always throw your weight as far forward as possible, and always move as rapidly and intrepidly as you are able to (the first part of that was given to us by a tumbling coach before we outgrew the need for coaches, and the second part of it was devised by ourselves.) If you throw your weight far enough forward, then you will have to move forward always.

‘I flew this morning, just about an hour ago. I flew for the distance of more than one hundred meters and to a height of about thirty meters. This is much the furthest that I have flown. I fly by throwing my body very far forward. It's fly then, or fall on your face. When you are you are flying, you are sometimes able to look down and see your own body below you, a phenomenon that I still do not understand.

‘But I don't believe that the two bodies that will be discovered today are really mine and Curtis's. They may look like ours, but that is trickery. We die harder than that. They are a diversion made by our enemies. They are part of the false trail that our enemies strew. They cannot be ours, or at least I do not believe that they are. We are hunted, and we are harried closely, but we will come to the blessed and fortunate place. And when we get there, we will trumpet the location, so that everyone can come to it.

‘Mr. Abramswell has just said to put in a plug for the ‘Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and Excavation’. Of course this must be approved, gentlemen of the bursary. The expedition is going to one of the nodes of the great diagram, and is going in a primary dimension of it.

‘Let us go further than this. Only one part of the secret for which we are being pursued can be given now: ‘Come to the White Goat Valley. There is appointment there.’ It is important that the entire party should come there together. Come there, we may transmit the rest of the secret to you. Or we discover that ‘Come to the White Goat Valley’ was the entire secret.

‘I believe that some of our chase sequences are pretty good, considering that they are unrehearsed, considering that they are real, considering that people are actively trying to kill us, considering that we are not running at random but are always going toward the Treasure Itself. All our friends and interested persons can be getting these sequences by bioscopic dreams, and some persons are accidentally picking them up on commercial TV. There have been four or five of our recent escapes that I particularly love.’

Presentation of Jeffery Wind, ‘Device Identifier’ and Classifier of Artifacts:

‘Gentlemen, as an ‘identifier of devices’ I am good. I am the most consulted identifier in the world. Without me the museums — well, they would now be in straits as sad as they were before I came along. Now I want to identify a particular singular device and tell the purpose of it. This singular device has the tentative name ‘The Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and Excavation of Earth, Air, and Mind-Zone, in the region of the White Goat Valley of Calabria in Italy, For the Purpose of Solving Problems of Human Origins and Mutations in the Historical Recent Period’. This device will tell us what we ourselves are all about, what we can be, and what we so far miss being. I am putting my reputation on the line with this. This is a machine to be constructed to give us valid answers. Approve it, and let it give them. I know that there are seven persons on the bursary board. That includes our colleague Arthur Ransom who is committed to this project and who is putting the prospectus together. I know also that one of you seven persons is dead set against this project, dead against it with a cold fury. He will be so strong against it that he may be taken to balance two or three others who are weakly in favor of it. Do not let this happen. For this member of the bursary board is not a true person. He is a device. And I know about devices. I am a device identifier, and I will identify him by his nature and his name as well as I am able to do it.

‘I am not yet able to identify him by his human name. But his name in Hell is 12-121-212. A wise person has said ‘Whenever seven human beings sit down together, statistically one of them is not human. For we are heavily infiltrated by non-humans, by as much as one in seven. Some of the non-humans who abide with us and pass for us are really friendly to us, though always with certain reservations.’ But this device person, known as 12-121-212 in his own place, is no friend of ours at all. His purpose is to block us, to mislead us, to destroy us. And it is very important to him and to his that the Pioneer Reventlo Expedition should not be approved. But this device person has not opposed other expeditions and excavations that have come before the bursary board. What is the difference? The difference is that this proposed expedition knows where to dig.

‘Is my own presentation here helping the prospectus? I doubt that it is, but I write what I must write. I am now dealing with principalities and powers and such things that are not commonly found under the scientific umbrella. Gentlemen and ladies, I am telling you that the scientific umbrella is too small by far, and that it is mostly midgets who are huddling under it.

‘I see these arrant principalities and powers are as devices among other devices and as living artifacts among other artifacts; and I will oppose them where they are identified and classified as unfriendly to humans. They are unfriendly to us on this, for we come too close to their den which is athwart our patrimony. Permit me a symbolic levity that covers a true fact. For our particular excavation it will be necessary that we move the Devil's Tail, for it is in the way where we intend to dig. Dante, I believe, describes how the Devil's Tail curls around under the hilly land of Calabria before it curls deeper.

‘People of the bursary, approve this request. It is important that you do. Come out from under that little umbrella of seemly opinion before it miniaturizes you completely. Make a spacious decision here. Approve.’

The seven members of the bursary board were met in ordinary session to consider a prospectus sponsored by one of them. These were the seven members:

Arthur Ransom who introduced and sponsored the Prospectus and Application for the ‘Pioneer Reventlo Expedition and Excavation’. Arthur was a multi-talented associate of the University scientists, an inspired smatterer and joyful dabbler who had a sure sense of what would work and what would not. He had oversized blue eyes and hair like floppy sand. He was honest about all things in the world except money. He had the green passion. But he was an oil-painter and a gentleman.

“People, this one is a crackerjack,” he said when he handed out the Prospectus for the Reventlo Expedition. “There is even a surprise in the box somewhere, the pearl beyond price. Do not look at it as narrowly as you look at other applications. It is time that we enjoyed a sabbath from narrow judgements. This has almost everything against it, and the only thing in its favor is that it will work. It will work. I know it will. It is working in me like wine now. As to such other applications as I have submitted, I have always let them speak for themselves. But I speak for this one strongly. Vote for it, vote for it, vote for it! And again I say, vote for it, vote for it, vote!”

Bobby Birnbaum was the second member of the bursary board. (We are counting counter-clockwise around the table.) Bobby was the manufacturer of Unethical Bowling Balls. He was a large, fat, jolly man who usually talked ‘no’ and voted ‘yes’ on request before the bursary board. His bowling balls were said to contain ‘nonmetallic, gyroscopic-activated seekers’ that would give the bowler an average of twelve to fourteen points higher than anything he would be able to get with another ball. Birnbaum had several times been charged with making false claims for his ball, and he had always countered with the stout statement that he had made no claims whatsoever. So he had not made them, not on any slate that could be nailed down. It had all been rumor and bowling alley talk, subsidized sometimes by minor bagmen. Even this process of getting an idea planted had been called unethical by a lower court. It was in a counter-move against this decision that Birnbaum had called his ball the ‘Unethical Bowling Ball’. And, after that, his fame and wealth were assured.

“This is slush, Arthur,” he said as he speed-read the prospectus. “It does not mention the Promethean group, but I understand that they are somehow pushing this expedition. Isn't it that they are working for a next mutation jump in humanity? What do you suppose this jump would consist of, Arthur?”

“I believe it will be ‘direct apperception’ as a short-circuiting of more cumbersome and conventional thought. But this is only a feeling.”

“ ‘Direct apperception computers’ are becoming common, but the Prometheans are not interested in them. Is direct apperception easier in Calabria than here? And are mutational jumps easier there?”

“Somehow I believe that they are, yes, Bobby.”

“The prospectus, it is badly done slush and nonsense. I don't believe I have ever seen worse.”

Clyde Zerubbabel was the third member of the bursary board. Clyde dealt extensively in phantom companies and phantom currencies. His transactions went on forever. “He can make an international deal out of changing a dollar,” Francis X. Brogan once said of Clyde, “and he can confound banks in six countries. But he will end up with three thousand dollars change for one dollar.” That was true. Clyde collected transaction fees on his own transactions, from persons who had nothing at all to do with them. “The sun has to pay him a slight fee before it can rise in the morning,” Dorothea Nash said about him, “and it also has to pay him a ‘no-show’ fee on cloudy days.” Clyde Zerubbabel was a punster of finance, a caricaturist of the ‘whole money process’. He kept his kited paper flying on an international scale, very much like the farmer who drove a wagon loaded with live chickens to market every morning. Whenever they went over the weak board in the bridge, every blamed chicken of them had to get airborne for an instant or they'd never have made it. If all of Clyde's flying paper had come to rest at the same time, the weight of it would have crushed whole empires.

“This is the worst you have ever done, Arthur,” he said as he scanned the application. “This is the most inept application I have ever seen. And is it true, as I have heard from someone in your office, that the presentations not selected to include here are even worse than those included? I heard that the screed of Rosa Caprobianco (bless her scarlet heart) was so silly that it set the very mice around the cheesey Science Buildings Compound to giggling. Is that true?”

“Yes, sadly that is true,” Arthur Ransom said. “And hers was not the worst.”

Estrella Villarreal was the fourth member of the bursary board. Estrella was into beauty strongly, especially Men's Beauty. Her line of men's sachet was tops. She was very from rich her beauty industries, but was not herself particularly beautiful nor even pretty. She looked, as she herself said, like an Andalusian farmer woman. “Oh, I make all that for the vanity trade,” she said, “but I haven't any vanity myself, only practicality.”

And now she said, “This is pretty awful, Arthur. It is intellectually contemptible, grammatically insulting, and rhetorically ridiculous. It is tainted through and through. Why do you do things like this to us? Why do you not take more care in your presentations? There is no scientific justification for a line of this, is there? Haven't you gone too far this time, really now?”

“I suppose so,” Arthur said. “But I did take care with it. No one could have done a better job in presenting it, considering what it is. And yet I ask you all again, vote for it, vote for it, vote for it. There is something here that escapes the eye and wit. There is real worth to to be found in this speculative expedition. It is just a little bit truculent about letting itself be put into words.”

Robert Qoth was the fifth member of the bursary board. Robert was an Arabian from Minnesota. “We liked it that way,” Robert said. “We were the only Arabian family within eighty miles, so we hadn't much competition in anything. Naturally we became very rich. There is no way that we could have missed being so. Naturally we were all very handsome there too. We hadn't much competition in that either.”

And now he said: “Really, Arthur, this is one of the most interesting things that I have seen this morning. For some reason, I missed ‘Malaprop Comics’ in the paper this morning, and this will take the place of it. Even your acrobats aren't at their best in words. You know, I was getting the bioscopic dreams of that acrobatic couple the night before last and last night very strongly. I don't understand that part at all, and my alienist doesn't understand it either. He is getting the bioscopic dreams also. He said that most of the alienists were getting the dreams very vividly. I can hardly wait till tonight to see how they get out of their latest trap. And I agree with Reventlo that we live on a diminishing remnant of order in this world, and I half-accept that a more perfect order was in the beginning. But I can't believe that this original order is to be found by excavating the Calabrian hills. And Abramswell, who usually makes such masterful presentations, busts completely on this one. And so — by the principalities and powers! — does Jeffery Wind. Ah, throw this one in the trash barrel outside, Arthur. How could you all have done so badly at the same time?”

Dorothea Nash was the sixth member of the bursary board. Dorothea was a poverty person, deep in the machinations of ‘World-Wide Poverty Enterprises’. That's where the money was, that's where the diamonds were mined, that's where the little mill that grinds out tile currency was located. Dorothea was the author of such satirical masterpieces as ‘The Mystique of the Opulent Poor’, ‘The Fiduciary Policies of Prodigal Sonship’, and ‘Face-Grinding For Fun and Profit, a Drama Pousee’. She was a conspicuous person with a gleam on her.

And now she said “It's a bad joke, Arthur. And with acrobats yet! What are these acrobats, Arthur?”

“Oh, I think that they are ghost poems. Yes, that's what they are. They're also a form of ballet.”

“Aren't they flesh and blood?”

“Their own playbills for their act always ask that question. I'm not sure whether they are or not, Dorothea.”

“I am almost tempted to vote against this, Arthur. And I am half-tempted to push to get it approved and then try to go on it to Calabria. In some of the things here none of you know what you're doing or saying, but you are babbling about something that may well be worth recovering. I won't vote at all on this though unless there's a tie vote.”

Francis X. Brogan was the seventh member of the bursary board. Francis X. took a rather strict and scrutinizing view of many things. He believed that heavy walls and firm foundations were a prime requisite for serenity. “With your outlook on things, you should be a monk, Francis,” Dorothea Nash had said to him once. “I am a monk,” Francis Brogan had answered. “I am a residual and care-taker member of one of the oldest and most obscure orders. Actually it was extinguished many centuries ago, but now it flames up in me again.” But Francis X. didn't like poor performance in anything.

“Where are the mathematical equations for all your propositions, Arthur?” he asked now. “Can you have a supplement containing them ready for us by two o'clock this afternoon? Where are the graphs and tables and citations? Where are the supporting papers? Where, I ask you, is the Prospectus itself? This, as you must know, is only a heavy-humored preamble to a prospectus. Where is the main part of it?”

“That's all of it, Francis X. ,” Arthur said in a heavy voice and with a heavy heart. “This is the main and only document of it. This is all there is.”

“You need a vacation, Arthur,” Francis X. said. “You haven't been working nearly hard enough, and you need a vacation from your debilitating ease. Oh, I am voting against the proposition.”

“And I,” said another person. “I vote against it.”

“And I,” said still another person. “I vote to turn it down.”

But the state of things was this: the bursars were attempting to raise their threshold, to move onto a higher financial plateau for the institution. They wished to put the entire University Funding on a higher basis. This would be done money-talk, by intimidation and by arrogant assumption, by manipulation of foundations, by calling for payment of certain claims to good will. But it would also be done by subscription and by vulgar money-drive. The decision of the board was that this institution should break into the magic circle of the top seven funded American Universities. As an aid to this push, they had to show a crisis in funding. They had to show an empty barrel. And so they were, for this month only, approving every request that they could put their hands on to approve. There was a lot of money that had to be gotten rid of quickly to be able to put the worst face on things.

So it was a game. Four of the members now had to vote in favor of the request, after three of them had humorously voted against it. It was approved. It was taken care of. It was finalized.

And Arthur Ransom went away from there whistling ‘On the Road to Calabria’ happily. But we still don't know which of the seven board members had the name 12-121-212 among his own people.

Comment by H. H. Hughes of the Pentagram Group:

“The group headed by Pioneer Reventlo and Joseph Abramswell, Jeffery Wind, and Arthur Ransom is not working with real material and is not applying valid evidence rules. After discounting the meager information they give us (for all the information that is exchanged in such exchange groups as theirs and ours is ‘shot-gun’ or ‘brother-in-law’ information and we smile at some of the information we have given them), the residue is still found to be tainted and empty. There is either arrant deception on the part or University Group, or they have fallen into self deception. Pioneer Reventlo and Arthur Ransom have always been prone to self-deception. Joseph Abramswell and Jeffery Wind have not been.

“This project began with Pioneer Reventlo's famous spotted horse named ‘Ursprache’ or ‘Original Language’. The fact that there are several complex languages in the distant past and that there are many eroded languages in the present betokens nothing. There also were eroded languages in the distant past, and there are highly complex languages in the present. Let me say that the system of highly developed inflections does not make for a highly efficient language, perhaps only for a cumbersome language. Some of the classical examples are like old dromedary saddles, tall and ornate, and not well fit for present day use.

“To use the fact of intricate past language as evidence of a Golden Age in the past is stretching a non-existent rubber banana to breaking point. And the other evidence — that the lines in the palms of very old mummies are clear and deep, that there was an ordered terrain in the most-recent distant past, and a disordered terrain in the less-distant recent past, that is all selected evidence, or it is blather.

“I believe I am justified in asking ‘What is wrong over there?’ It is not my business how the University throws away its money; but it is my business when any part of community, by fatuous utterance, reflects unfavorably on the rest of the scientific community. But two of the persons who head this program are intelligent, and all of them are honest. That being the case, what is the cause?

“This is surely a Wild Goose Chase. Somewhere that group, in its proposals, uses the term the ‘White Goat Mirage’ which is the same as goose chase. Is this flammery? Who is doing it then? Is all the information they are putting out merely code-talk for something very different and very secret? But raw code-talk should not be used in even ‘shot-gun’ and ‘brother-in-law’ exchanges. And pseudo-science should not be slipped into such exchanges either.

“Competent groups such as theirs do not suddenly become unhinged. Not without a reason. Reasonable persons do not suddenly drop into idiot jargon. This is apparently an empty expedition chasing an empty enterprise. Why? Who is gulling these patsies? If there is something meaningful behind all this, we must ignore it until it comes to the fore. At the present moment, this is unworthy of report and evaluation. Maybe, ten years from now, they will tell us over the gin what it was really all about.”

Chapter Four

We are imprisoned by our enemies in a fortunate place.

We are a body. We are a banquet.

Now we open a transforming secret and feast upon it.

After much feasting, we will be quiet for a day and a night and a day.

Then the Spirit will come and move over us.

Transformation Poems
 — Catherine January

“The most dense ghost population in the world is in Calabria in South Italy,” Lord Byron said. “There are really more ghosts than people there.”

“Just as the Italians are three times as superstitious as other people, so are the Calabrians thee times as superstitious as other Italians,” Browning said.

“All the Calabrians are half-asleep in the daytime, and this is also the case with the beasts in their fields and the birds in their air. It is said that all of them are involved in very much illicit night business which is what makes them so sleepy in the daytime,” Shelly said.

But the poets have been jealous of Calabria because every Calabrian is a natural poet. And others have spoken in more friendly fashion of the region.

“You are my delight,” God said of it.

“It is a fair and pleasant place, but it is not good for anything,” Napoleon said of it.

Calabria is the southern-most part of continental Italy, the toe of the Italian boot.

The Pioneer J. Reventlo Expedition-and-Excavation came to Calabria on the last day of May. The year, not then in doubt, is in doubt now because of a time anomaly that developed about the doings of the group. The people of the expedition trans-jetted to Naples, loco-planed to Cosenza, autobused to Nicastro, and took a hill-buggy taxicab (owned by Il Trol Automobile Rentals Company) into the Valley of the White Goat Illusion. But they had to walk and climb to Goat Castle (Castello Capro) itself, and they didn't know how they would get their heavy equipment up there.

The persons of the expedition were Pioneer Reventlo, Joseph Abramswell, Rosa Caprobianco, Arthur Ransom, Lucille Creighton, Jeffery Wind, Dorothy Blue-Ice, Anabella Hilary, Raddigan Shrike, Dean Hayfield, Catherine January, F. Cyclone Boniface, Adriana Thistle, Stephen Tall, and 1-212-1212. 1-212-1212 was now unaccountably going by the name of Leon Yuri. There are several discrepancies about this last one, Leon. Arthur Ransom and Raddigan Shrike said that of course Leon had been with them on the trans-jet to Naples. They had played cards with him the whole journey. Others said that Leon had not been on that flight, that he had met them later, at Naples, or at Cosenza, or at Nicastro, or in the Valley of the White Goat itself.

Well there were fifteen of them in the party now, all of them personable and talented and intelligent. And now as they came up to Castello Capro they were all in the state of high-strung ease. What? What? There is such a thing as high-strung ease?

Oh absolutely, there is nothing like it. It was a confident pleasure for them to be there, but it was also a wide-awake and challenging pleasure. It was like the first day on a new continent, as it was for several of them. It was like the first day at sea when the sea was still in general use. It was the first day in love, or the first day of the racing season. They were together there, the last time when they would be absolutely together until the time of their passion. And then they scattered again for trivial things.

Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface went to find out how the heavy equipment might be brought up to the castle, for it had now arrived at Castle Hill in nine more hill-buggy taxicabs. This was a very steep hill for bringing up heavy equipment. Stephen Tall and Dean Hayfield had gone to see what they could do about much-needed power supply, for there seemed to be nothing except candles and oil lamps in Castello Capro. But Stephen had suddenly become truculent towards the whole White Goat Illusion Valley.

“This is all wrong, it is a trick, it is an illusion,” he said.

“Sure. It's supposed to be an illusion,” Dean Hayfield said. “One of the reasons we came here was to excavate and study illusions. This is the Valley of the White Goat Illusion, so naturally there is illusion here.”

“I balk right now,” Stephen announced. “Things here just aren't as they seem to be. Why can't the rest of you recognize that? The very air here is crooked. We are into ‘hallucination country’. This isn't really happening as it seems to be. Henceforth we are in a trick. Why can't you all see that?”

“Perhaps we do see that, Stephen,” Joseph Abramswell had said. “Would we have traveled this far without some hopes of advantage here? The availability of an alternate framework to enter into and withdraw from can be a very great advantage in solving certain sorts of problems. If the whole White Goat Valley is indeed such an alternate framework, then we will work it for all it is worth. There should a mathematical symbol to indicate ‘This isn't really happening, but proceed as if it were, for the duration of the problem’. We should place such a mathematical symbol, as soon as we invent it, at each and every entrance and exit of the White Goat Valley.”

Arthur Ransom had gone to find the persons from whom the castle had been rented, to make payments and arrangements with them, and to get some answers to questions that were just beginning to shout their presence. But in the meanwhile the view was pleasant in this the most fulfilling valley they had ever seen.

And the castle was perfect for serious and original work. There were a score of very small monks' cells that would be perfect for sleeping and study by the individual members. There were half-a-dozen large halls where courts might be held or meals served. There were libraries with every sort of book in them, even printed books. There was a wine cellar, a cheese cellar, and a mushroom cellar. There was an armory and a bakery and a butchery. There were leather tanning areas, and cloth-making facilities. But mostly there were the great arcades or galleries with their stone tables and benches where persons might talk almost forever and so resolve every sort of problem. And the weather at the castle was perfect that last day of May. This was a very strong castle, and it brought up questions about strong castles in general.

“Why are there such strong castles?” Jeffery Wind wanted to know. “I have heard stories and nonsense about them, but I haven't heard anything that explained it. Castles are over-defensed, They don't have to be built that strong for defense against people.”

“For defense against what are they built then?” Lucille Creightton asked. “Yes, I know that people do have preternatural enemies, but most of those uncouth enemies are unbodied or only occasionally bodied. Castle walls and castle ramparts would not keep them out, no more than they would keep thought out.”

“But castle walls and ramparts do keep thoughts out,” Pioneer Reventlo said. “They keep whole classes and sequences of thoughts out. Castle walls are like semi-permeable membranes in that they are very selective about what they pass through. This is the reason we selected this castle. Its walls and battlements sein out all worthless and trashy thoughts, and they bring in only such as we need. They also sein out ambushes and treacheries.”

“Come back to my question,” Lucille said. “Against what enemies have castle walls always been built so strong, since they do not need to be built so staunchly against people?”

“Oh, they're built against Titans,” Dorothy Blue-Ice told her, “and against Troglodytes and Tyrrhenians and Trolls, all of whose blood Rosa carries in her canals, so she says. She's set up quite an opposition in the castle already. And castles are built against giants generally. And against Stoicheio.”

“Many of those are legendary creatures,” Lucille said, being stubborn about it yet. They could see everything from here. And they could see several pieces of their heavy equipment beginning to appear over the edge of the west cliff.

“So perhaps are people legendary,” Joseph Abramswell said. “There have been studies made by the Stoicheio on this point. These studies have been translated neither by humans or Stoicheio, but by another race entirely. I have a long fragment of one of those studies. It arrives at the belief that humans are entirely legendary. But this does not explain why the Stoicheio so hate and fear humans, if they do not believe that they are real. I have the opinion that many species are only real to themselves, and that they are legendary or simply not noticed at all by most other species. But we build strong castles against both real and legendary giants because weak castles simply will not keep them out. And they're also built to keep things and people in.”

“The castle itself is a legendary building,” Arthur Ransom said with a green twinkle of a smile. “It isn't very functional. And there is not any building of which we can say it is actually a castle. Not only are there no two castles alike, but there is not one of them that conforms to even the loosest definition of a castle. This building, according to what history of it I have been able to dig up, was a lodge headquarters for one of the military-religious orders of knights. Most of its defenses are ornamental. It wasn't designed to keep anyone out.”

“This one was designed to keep out goats,” Perpetua said.

“My question still goes unanswered,” Lucille Creighton complained, “and now I have another one. Why did you give that green twinkle smile, Arthur, when you spoke of castles themselves being legendary buildings? You only give that smile when you see wonderful profit in something.”

“True,” Arthur said. “I can see and smell a windfall profit coming. It's always a joy to me. And here comes one of the windfall profits now. She comes and goes, and her husband is ten meters behind her.” But what was coming and going was a serving maid, Perpetua, or maybe she was a gracious hostess, or a retainer of the castle, or just a fine woman in the bloom of second youth. This person brought them food now, pork and pears for the mid-day meal, and small raw eggs of the Mountain Plover. Also white wine, and flakey barley bread. And sea salt taken from the evaporative tidal flats that very morning. There is a crystalline sparkle on such sea salt when it is just taken. And this woman, though the only words she had spoken yet were ‘this one was designed to keep out goats’, had her own sparkle and saltiness and old nobility.

“You are not paid for your work in the castle, are you,” Arthur asked her.

“Oh no. Why should I be paid?” the lady answered. “One does not take pay for the easy amenities. And it is a privilege to be in so fortunate a place. Besides that, it is not possible that I should be paid. I am not in such a state as that.”

“And your husband is not paid either?” Arthur asked, referring to the second person ten meters behind her.

“Oh, he is not my husband,” the lady said. “He is something else to me. No, he is not paid. He is not in such a state either.”

“You are not paid for the work that you do, or for the pleasure that you give here,” Arthur said. “But the majordomo of this castle, Signor Vilicus, he will collect from us for your services.”

“I bet he doesn't,” the lady smiled, and she stroked Arthur's cheek. And Arthur showed a negative sort of shock at her stroking. “He may collect from some other visitors, but he will not collect from you, Green-Eyes.” Then the lady was gone. She came and left like that.

“What was that all about?” Lucille Creighton asked curiously. “Yes, I did see her disappear. Was it her trick, or yours?”

“That was just a verification,” Arthur smiled. “One does not pay for every service supplied. One does not pay for the service of one who is not in the state to be paid. And one who brokers in such services does wrong.”

The lady was gone, and yet no one had seen her go. Or at least no one had seen her ‘go away’. Maybe in the primordial language that Pioneer loved to hark back to there were words for the fine distinction.

“Oh!” Dorothy Blue-Ice said with a delayed note of surprise. “Was that in line with Lord Byron's saying that there are more ghosts than people in Calabria?”

“Just so,” Arthur Ransom said, and he seemed to be pleased by his own cleverness. No one would collect from his entrusted funds for the service of a ghost.

“What? Is Perpetua a ghost?” Lucille asked. “But she carries and serves material food and drink. Or is it? I'm not quite certain about the Mountain Plover eggs, but the rest of it is material. Well, how did you verify that? You do want me to ask that, don't you?”

“I as much as asked her if she was a ghost,” Arthur said. “You just heard me. And she as much as told me that she was. And here is Signor Vilicus coming. I must be sure that he does not bill us for the services of Perpetua and Marius, as I believe that their names are.”

“By what signs did you suspect that she was a ghost?” Lucille asked, “if that is the word for them here? I'm sure there's a better word.”

“In a day or two here, Lucille, you will be able to guess who is in such a state and who is not,” Rosa Caprobianco said, “and you will seldom be wrong about it.”

And the majordomo of the Castle, Signor Vilicus, came to them as they sat on stone benches at a stone table in one of the arcades of the castle.

“Are not Perpetua and her man ghosts, Signor Vilicus?” Arthur asked of the majordomo whose eyes matched Arthur's own with their green glow.

“I don't know the word, good sir,” the man said.

“Spettri,” Rosa told them.

“There are many such in the area,” the majordomo said. “It is their business what they are, and I do not inquire about it too closely if they do their work right. And those two do that. There are always more of the creatures in the south than in the north of any country. ‘Ghosts’, as you call them, don't like cold weather.”

“But Perpetua and Marius, are they not ghosts?” Arthur still insisted. “Or do you not have the feeling, sir, that in this place, every problem and misunderstanding might be easily and quickly solved.”

“It has always been that way with me,” the majordomo said. “Problems are not a bother here. Yes, that feeling goes over you like a breeze, does it not? The knots all untie themselves. You can watch them unravel from their standing lines sometime.”

Then they all took note of the problem of lifting their heavy equipment up the Castle level, and the easy way it was solving itself. Crates and bales were coming up over the edge of the west cliff, almost as if they were coming by their own power, and being set in the middle of a little cleared area.

“That should be investigated,” Joseph Abramswell said. “There is something improbable about whatever method is being used to lift our heavy equipment up that cliff. There aren't any rational possibilities.”

“Let's go see,” Lucille Creighton suggested. “That's one way to satisfy our curiosity.”

“That may be the wrong way,” Abramswell worried. “Whatever it is, it's a wild thing, though Pioneer Reventlo might call it an ultra-ordered thing. It could be spooked if we go to it ignorantly.”

“Catherine January and Cyclone Boniface have just been lifted up that cliff face themselves,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “They didn't spook it. They used it. But Cyclone does look a little bit spooked by something. They are coming this way. We will have them explain how it is done. We can only see the very top of the operation from here, but that is enough to show that the thing is impossible. Catherine and Cyclone will have some tall explaining to do.”

“Oh surely it is only the ancient way of lifting very heavy objects,” Pioneer Reventlo threw his bit in. “In all esoteric literature we find lintel stones of twenty thousand tons or so set up on stone pillars hundreds of feet high. It is always stated that they were raised by the ‘Forgotten Secret of the Ancients’. The key word there is ‘forgotten’, for moderns have several times learned the secret, and several times they have forgotten it. Some of the very heavy stones have been raised up thousands of feet on sheer cliff faces, or else they have been let down thousands of feet from above or from the sky. I wish I didn't always forget how it was done. I'm sure that I myself have known it and forgotten it.”

“Catherine, how are the heavy crates being lifted up?” Dorothy Blue-Ice called as Catherine and Cyclone approached the group at the stone table in one of the arcades. “How were you and Cyclone lifted up yourselves?”

“I forget,” Catherine said. “I half-understood it a moment ago when it lifted us up, but I forget it now. It was pretty slick, but it had to be prepared for previously.”

“It was the ‘Forgotten Secret of the Ancients’,” Cyclone said. Well, Cyclone was a kidder, but had he been close enough to hear Pioneer's use of that phrase as he approached? “The secret is still in operation. By it, objects of almost any weight can be raised to almost any height. Yes, it works pretty slick. I forget just how, but it's mighty slick.”

“But what is the motive force?” Joseph Abramswell asked. “I know that this is ridiculous, that I can get up and walk no more that thirty meters and find the answer to one of the most puzzling of questions. But somehow I hesitate. I will know the answer soon, but there will be something the matter with it. And I will not know it for very long. Catherine, give us a hint. What is the motive power?”

“Oh, a man and a donkey, that's the motive power, I think it is. The man and the donkey are both rented from ‘Il Trol Automobile Rentals’. I have big news. We're going to get married today. It's a very recent decision.”

“Who is going to get married, Cat?” Pioneer asked. “You and the man with the donkey?”

“No, no, myself and Cyclone. There is only one ‘we’ on this whole expedition, and that is myself and Cyclone. There are no others who are that close to each other. What finally got him was the way I rub the bumps on his skull. And I love his occipital bone. We will be married right now if we can find the priest, and there should always be a priest in an old castle in Calabria. Where is Perpetua? She should know where there's a priest.”

“And what if the priest that she finds is as much of a spettro as she is herself?” Arthur Ransom asked. “Wouldn't it be only a ghost marriage if it were performed by a ghost priest? And how do the man and the donkey lift the crates up a sheer cliff?”

“Not at all. It wouldn't be a ghost marriage. Why are all you big professors always so ignorant? Two persons marry each other. That is the direct and fundamental act. They marry each other by pledge and intent. But their pledge must be witnessed and attested to whenever that is possible. A ghost priest can witness it as well as any other one can. A marriage itself will always have a ghostly or transcendent aspect to it, so a ghost priest would be perfect. Oh, I think the man and the donkey use a rope part of the time. And part of the time it isn't needed.”

Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface went into the winding interior of the castle to find a priest and be married. And Pioneer Reventlo, Jeffery Wind, Lucille Creighton, Dorothy Blue-Ice, Joseph Abramswell, Arthur Ransom, Rosa Caprobianco, and an eighth person (probably Leon Yuri or 1-212-1212) walked the thirty meters to the cliff edge to see how the heavy equipment of the expedition was being hoisted up to the top of the castle level cliff.

Well yes, there was a man and a donkey down below, and a large crate was coming up, turning slowly in the air as it rose, seeming to be in the control or grip of something. But that something was either hidden or invisible. Neither the man or the donkey seemed to be doing much of anything, but the donkey was wheezing with effort and was in a lather.

“Why doesn't the man help the donkey a little bit?” Dorothy Blue-Ice asked. “The donkey is doing all the work and the man none at all.”

“I can't see where either of them is doing any work,” Lucille Creighton protested. “They seem to be concentrating very hard, but neither of them is doing any work. The donkey is apparently concentrating the harder. Oh yes, I see a rope now, a very thin one going up the cliff and fastened somehow to the crate. But how does it work? The rope can't be pushing the crate up. It hardly seems as if the rope is strong enough to lift the heavy crate in any case. And what is that pulley, if that's what it is, fastened to it?”

“The rope is a concession to common decency,” Joseph Abramswell said, “so that we may not see the ancient secret completely uncovered. It may be an illusion, but I don't believe the rope is bearing any weight at all. What is it then? I can feel it, but there is no seeing it. There's a force field set up, of course. It works by a sort of repulsion. It repels the objects upwards, as soon as each of them is designated to be repelled.”

“I can see the rope now,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “I couldn't see it at first when the rest of you could. And I'm not sure that it's only a concession to popular ideas. Still and so it would take six to ten such ropes to lift some of our heavier crates. I do see the gin-poles or tip-trees coming together now to support and swing the hoist, but they look pretty flimsy for the job. And possibly I see a tread-mill down under the leaves and bushes there, and that may be what powers it all. The donkey doesn't move his feet much, but he does move them a little bit. Yes, that's the way it's done. I see it all now. It's a simple donkey-powered hoist to lift weights.”

“What is really at work is a combination of concessions to — ah — unpopular ideas,” said Jeffery Wind the device identifier and classifier of artifacts. “The mechanical contrivances are mostly concessions to common decency, yes, and concessions to the donkey also who probably lacks abstract visualization. And it is also a concession to the telekinetic mentality that is being forged by the man and the donkey. It is all symbolic of something slightly different. But it's an old legend that a donkey will put tremendous traction and thrust into such a telekinetic effort until he finally bursts a brain and dies. And there are donkey bones, in crypts of honor, in almost all the megalithic constructions. They are in seeming support of the view that it is all done by massive telekinesis. There are sometimes several sets of donkey bones about these massive works, and now I understand the lithogliph often found that such a work is a six-donkey, or a nine-donkey, or a twelve-donkey job. The donkey hasn't much imagination, but he can pour out his very brains on a traction-and-lift job when he is given a clear idea of the direction that his effort should take.

“But this interpretation is also a concession to intellectual decency. These are only a couple of small arcs of the effecting circle itself. Look closer and you will see how the trick is really done.”

“I listen closer, and I'm told by the humming air how it's really done,” Joseph Abramswell said.

“I remember closely, and I remember how it's really done,” Pioneer Reventlo said.

“We can talk all we want to, but we don't see how it's done,” Dorothy argued. “Could we talk the boxes up there ourselves? We could. I believe that the donkey is verbalizing. That's what that low moaning is. They are talking the crates up there, and thinking them up.”

“Oh, I’ve always known how it was done,” Rosa Caprobianco said, “but when I'm away from it, I tend to forget how it works. After I have a little trepanning brain surgery done to myself, and have had the bothersome nodule removed, then I'll no longer have a tendency to forget such things.”

“I see how it works now,” Lucille Creighton said, “and it is slick. But I'll forget in an hour, till I see it again. But after we have made the jump, we will always remember all of such things.”

After a bit, as the final heavy crates were hoisted up to the top of the cliff by the man and the donkey, they all saw how it worked, that ‘Forgotten Secret of the Ancients’. But, once they were out of sight of it, most of them would not remember how the wonderful trick was done. And, even in sight of it, several of them expressed doubts.

“We're being had after all,” Joseph Abramswell mumbled. “Oh, how we are being had! Who is playing such tricks on us? Who is pouring such drool into our brains? I myself thought that I understood for a minute how it worked. Forgotten Secret of the Ancients! No, no, no, how can they get away with such stuff in the sight of smart people like ourselves?”

“I think maybe we should have a talk with the people at Il Trol Automobile Rentals,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “If this service is being rented from them, we have the right to ask how it works.”

But something else intruded and they forgot for a while the lifting of the heavy weights and equipment. They were all overswept by a daytime spectacle which itself seemed more lighted by arc-lights than by the sun. There came now to most of the people of the expedition a splendid bioscopic vision of Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald. It was an episode of ‘Death Chase’. It was the two adagio acrobats at their best.

It was the old chase sequence, and these two persons, or ‘ghost poems’, were being pursued to their deaths. (‘Pursued to Their Death’ was the name of the orchestral piece that accompanied the act, and the words also were chanted or spoken by a species of Greek Chorus.) The acrobats were pursued through rushing landscapes and city-scapes in dizzy unrolling panorama.

This was ballet, and it was also rinky-dink vaudeville combined with old silent movie chase motif. There was absolute clarity of all the lines and forms standing out from the rushing backgrounds. There was no fuzziness at all. Vivian, of burnished copper skin and hair, was in creamy white and velvet black. She was striking from the first in her incremental movement, and even more so when the blood began to appear on her.

Curtis Bald, lighter toned than Vivian and lithely muscled, was clad in black panther-skin. The music was all ice-cream notes, pleasantly shocking in their coldness and whiteness. They were white bright and loud, clear in outline, visual notes, with a touch of syrup on them.

“Gather in the pavilion, that's where it will happen. That's most of the secret,” Vivian called out of her tumbling motion. But what pavilion?

This was all the old pursuit movies together. This was The Mark of Zorro and The Thief of Baghdad acrobatics. The pursuers or adversaries, dozens of them, all masked, all looking alike, were like a rushing river. They were part of the foamy flow of the country-side and town-side. They flashed knives, they flashed guns. They wielded garroting ropes and bludgeons. It was a leaping, swinging, climbing go to escape them, up ropes that were severed in mid-climb, over fences, through windows, into trees and then upon roofs, up tall buildings by the ornate windows and cornices of them, down fire escapes that swing apart in every way like Jacob's Ladders, onto the tops of railroad cars or canal boats, through burning buildings, in and out of maniac traffic; running along high-tension wires while the coronas from them curl like flaming snakes, diving thirteen stories into open man-holes, then into the crocodile pit at the zoological gardens, assaulted by homing firebombs and by singing tracer bullets, swinging on chandeliers or on bell-ropes or on grape-vines, climbing cliffs and having those cliffs cleft like shaker shingles by dynamite in mid-climb, escaping ten killers or a thousand of them (for they all looked alike, and perhaps the same ones were escaped again and again). Always trying to convey the ‘message’, which might be conveyed by the ‘bee-dances’ of the flight and escape. Being pursued and entrapped, shouting the secret, and shooting it by the bursting flare-flames from a very pistol, sky-writing the message in the sky while scampering onto the wings of the rolling airplane to escape the cockpit unaccountably filled with savage snakes. And coming down in parachute while mad monkeys cut the parachute ropes one by one with their flashing knives. More blood then, real blood. And the ice-cream notes of the sharp and cool orchestra building to a climax.

Those bioscopic presentations were thrilling.

There was another wonderful thing in the Valley of the White Goat Illusion. The people opened their eyes to it now, after Vivian calling out about it in the bioscopic dream. It was wonderful in the classic sense that it did not always have the same appearance or shape. It was the Pavilion.

They all went down to the Pavilion now, though they had scarcely noticed it before. Not down the cliff though, but down the north slope from the castle height. If they had seen it earlier as they saw it now, they would have gone to it sooner.

“The Red Pavilion of My Heart,” Francis called it. “She did lie in her Pavilion… cloth of gold,” William spoke of it. “Pavilioned in splendor and girdled in praise,” Robert alluded to it. “A Pavilion in a garden of cucumbers,” Solomon referred to it. “Lord, who shall dwell in thy Pavilion?” the Psalmist asked. “Pavilion — the lower faceted part of a brilliant, between the girdle and the culet,” Noah (Webster, that is) gives as his third meaning.

In the case of this pavilion they were approaching, the pavilion itself soared up from the culet-base in a spreading building that seemed ready to take wing. And the pinioned roof of the building, the bezel, had a jeweled translucence, for it was a set of sky lights. The whole building was a jewel, a brilliant.

Easy, people, easy! They don't really have buildings like that.

It had a temporary look about it, and yet it had stood at least since Solomon was king. It was a pleasure building. Somewhat commercial though, for the children were selling soft-drinks in the arched and fluted doorways of it, and their parents were selling hard drinks and wine inside.

But the majordomo of the castle, Signor Vilicus, came down and warned them that they should not go into the pavilion.

“It is a sordid trap,” he said, “and good people do not go there. And such good people as do go there, they seldom come out alive. They are buried in that graveyard beyond it. So will you be, likely, if you go into the deceptive place.” But the people of the expedition paid no attention to Signor Vilicus. They had to visit the pavilion.

The pavilion might have been considered a sort of hotel. It was named ‘The White Goat’, and there were handsome British and Scandinavian tourists there. There were several little bars and dining rooms, all fresh and friendly as if they had been made only a moment before. There were dogs wandering in and out as if they had prior claim to the place. There was a boy playing a concertina, and there was a harp there that nobody was playing right now. There were several beautiful map-globes on a walnut table: one of them at least was of this world, and others of them were of other worlds. There was a cinema screen possibly, or at least a hanging screen of fleece or white-wool. A Danish woman was painting at an easel. There were scrolls and stelai and librettos that scholars had just left off reading. There were sofas and couches, some of them draped with animal skins. There was a loom on which someone had been weaving a pictured fabric. A face was just emerging from that fabric: the upper brows were already done, and the slitted tops of the eyes and the tips of the ears were well underway. It was a very old, or very new, under-loom that wove from top to bottom instead of from bottom to top. There was a colored schematic there showing how the picture should go, with thread count and designated color and broken color to use for each warp and woof thread. The instructions on the schematic were printed in Swedish. There was a treddle-operated wheel there and a heavy cudgel-like tool such as is used in metal-spinning. Someone was into arts and crafts. Well, almost all the tourists who came there were into them.

There were stratigraphic rocks there, and rock crystal, and petrified wood. Someone had been taking samples from the country-side. And there was a mummy case that contained a score of well-mummified effigies. There was also a scroll which a Danish lady said was called ‘The White Goat Document’. It was a roll of separate sheets, not all one long sheet as scrolls sometimes are.

“Can they be read?” Catherine January asked.

“So they say,” the Danish lady told Catherine. “But there are several different versions of what they say.”

“Oh yes, they can be read,” said a person who seemed a sort of curator for this museum corner of the pavilion hotel. “They have been read often. They're not really old, a couple of millennia only. My father read the document and published a translation of it. It isn't very interesting, not yet anyhow. It's a covenant drawn up by these mummies here, when they were facing death. ‘We join our hands and our hearts here and wait for the lightning to speak to us,’ the document says. If the lightning did speak to them it must have spoken to them gently, even though killingly, for there are no marks of violence on any of them. And the document is also full of stuffy philosophical comments.”

“Maybe it isn't stuffy at all,” Joseph Abramswell interrupted.

“It is, Joseph, it is,” Rosa said, “I've known about this all of my life. There is a stuffiness placed around it all to turn intruders away. You cannot raise very much interest in it yourself. You should be full of questions about it. ‘What writing is it written in?’ you should ask. ‘Let me see it.’ But you do not. All such finds and preservations as this are guarded by a dragon. This group of things is guarded by a dragon named ‘Stuffy’. He throws sleep-chaff and inattention-dust into our eyes.”

“I didn't mean ‘can the scrolls be read?’ ” Catherine January Boniface said. “I meant ‘can the mummies' hands be read?’ I was teasing Cyclone who is usually fascinated by mummies, but he isn't interested in these at all.”

The people weren't interested in the mummies or their things, only because an impediment had been thrown to distract them away. But they were interested in everything else there. There was a welling up in all of them, a ‘Joy of People’ with themselves and these pleasure pavilion surroundings. This ‘Joy of People’ is kindled in the middle of special groups only, and cannot be experienced by a person alone or in an inferior group.

Central to the biggest of the rooms was a flaming fireplace. A dozen people were around it, sitting on hobs or in barrel chairs or captain rockers, or on gilded benches. What in the world for? Why should there be a roaring fire at mid-day on the last day of May? For the crackling joy of it, and for the kaleidoscopic pageant of it, that's why. And it was not at all too hot with the mountainous fire leaping. And neither would it have been too cool without that roaring fire.

A bear was being roasted whole on a turning spit in that roaring fire.

Besides, it did not seem as if it were necessarily mid-day of the last day of May in that master hall. It could have been any time of the day or night, and any season.

“In the beginning, people lived in pavilions,” Joseph Abramswell said.

“Of course they did,” Dorothy Blue-Ice agreed. “They lived in pavilions as families and as nuclear families, and as open-ended clans, and as patriarchates. Really, for people who are in the fortunate case, there is no other way to live. Hovels and houses came in later, but in the beginning there were only the grand pavilions. The people of the plains, as you recall, tried to build a towered pavilion to reach to Heaven. That was really the last of the grand ones.”

There were ripe grapes there, purple, white, and red. There were ripe olives, as well as figs and dates. There were melons and pomegranates. But this was only the last day of May. How could all these things be ripe so early?

But it was out under the sky that the excavating took place. People completely inexperienced in excavating can still get a fair idea of what it is like to excavate in the earth. But they can hardly comprehend what it is like to excavate in the ‘haunted air’, or in the noosphere or ‘mind sphere’. Well, Joseph Abramswell was already an admitted expert at excavating in the ‘haunted air’ but there were no admitted experts at digging in the noosphere.

“Digging things out of the haunted air is always tricky,” Abramswell tried to explain as he checked out the heavy electronic equipment that had been set up for the excavation of the teeming air. “The things are always there, but it's necessary to startle them so they will reveal their places by their movements. It's a little bit like beating on a hollow log to drive its denizens out of it. The hollow log will seem to be empty when one looks into it. But hammer on it and beat on it, and things are likely to come out. Out of a hollow log may come a cotton-tail rabbit, or a ground squirrel, or a boar coon, or a sleepy possum, even a cranky wildcat. They seem to materialize there, and really some of them are too big to have been in the log. Maybe a skunk will come out of it, or a wood chuck, or a badger, or even a beaver. When we hammer on the resounding walls of the haunted air, we are likely to rouse out stranger things even than those.”

Some of the electronic equipment was for putting light-tracers into the system, or setting outlining halos, or for auras. There are any number of things in the haunted air at any time. The thing is to rouse them up and make them visible and audible. And of course pictures and recordings will be taken of anything that makes itself known. If a thing can only be ‘seen’ by radio waves or heat waves, then it is by such that it is recorded. Amplification and conversion will do wonders. Almost every sort of phantom can be given visibility. But some of the things will make real and solid appearance, and they may even converse with one.

After Joseph Abramswell himself, Dorothy Blue-Ice and Catherine January were the most adept at excavating in the haunted air. It wasn't the prize creatures that they most easily roused out of airy logs though. It wasn't usually the fine badgers or beavers. It was the ordinary cotton-tail rabbits, as it were. It was the smaller and more common animals, and it was the smaller and most common people: it was the ordinary animal and human ghosts of the comparatively recent centuries.

The most common of all the human ghosts were from the first half of the twentieth century. Ghosts sleep for about fifty years after their deaths and before they start to walk, or that is what Cecelia told them. And ghosts from the whole nineteenth century were very common. There were lots of them from the middle of the nineteenth century when King Ferdinand II (‘King Bomba’ or ‘King Bomb’) ruled in Naples, which included Calabria. A lot of people had died then in uncertain circumstances. But all of these recent and easy ghosts appeared out of the air, powered by their own curiosity, to see what was going on, and to offer to work or to help. But they were puzzled by the electronic equipment. They said that it made the air feel stormy.

“There is no reason to make a mystery about us,” Cecelia said. “We are only poor people in Purgatory. Purgatory, as you know, is not a place; it is a condition. We wait in that condition until our time is over with. But whenever someone opens the door, we come out of it and be in a place for a little while. The big yellow/orange-colored hissing and sparking machine, it is a pretty good door opener that you have.”

Even more common than the ghost people and the ghost animals were the ghost plants; and perhaps they were even more informative. Joseph Abramswell, who had a feeling for landscape-in-depth, understood the history of waves and undulations of trees and boscage sweeping over a land. He understood how the trees of one century will move along to higher ground in the following times and will be replaced by savanna grass, which in turn will be replaced by another wave of trees several hundred years later. So there was always good ghost-tree hunting in the open lands where the living trees would not interfere.

“This is the process,” Abramswell explained to his friends and co-workers. “We will make an old tree reappear, first in outline, then in depth and solidity, then in complete cellular detail. And then we will make selected recordings of the most likely of such trees. I wasn't sure that we would be able to do this, but we are having some success already. We are able to record the tree-rings of ghost-trees. I don't believe that anyone else has ever done this. We are able to copy or transcribe them from ghost records to permanent, contemporary, non-leaking records. And then, by the data of the science of dendrinology, borrowing from the data and adding to it at the same time, we are able to date and collate those rings by their sequence of dry and wet years. We are dating and identifying ghosts, that's what we are doing. The same thing has been done before, of course, with other sorts of ghost trees, boles and logs resurrected from Scandinavian bogs after their long sleeps. But we resurrect our trees from air-bogs.”

“But how are they preserved in the air when the wind blows through and changes everything?” Cecelia Calca asked. “I understand how they might be preserved in the covering earth or in the soupy water-bogs, but I don't at all understand how they are preserved for centuries in the open air.”

“I don't entirely understand it either, Cece,” Abramswell said. “But who are you to ask? Your case is more difficult than that of the sessile trees. How are you preserved invisibly for a century-and-a-half in the open air? I don't understand it but I feel it, as I believe that you must feel it also; and feeling a thing is often as close as we can come to understanding it. The ‘haunted air’ is really the ‘recording air’. No record is erased or abolished completely, but the records do grow fainter and fainter. Their clarity is halved and and halved again, as we go back from the newest to the oldest of them. It takes fantastic amplification to bring them out and make them speak when they have very much age on them. We have set ourselves certain goals here which would be clearly impossible if it were not for certain anomalies.”

“What anomalies are these, Signor,” Cecelia asked.

“They are anomalous clumps that we find in the air, inexplicable but fortunate for us, cohesive in a very lucky way. You yourself are such an anomalous clump, Cecelia.”

“If my lover were here you would not call me a ‘clump’,” Cecelia said in a lowering way with a flash of feigned anger. But then she laughed. She was at a disadvantage here with those new people, and she really did not seem to miss her long-dead lover very much. She was swept up in new interests now, and all her old life was behind her. She liked to take part in the air excavation, and she liked Joseph Abramswell. And indeed she liked all the persons of the expedition.

And Joseph Abramswell liked to have her to talk to; it was really talking to himself out loud. He could say the fundamental facts to her. But if he said them to Dorothy Blue-Ice or Catherine January they would make him feel small and inept. He had invented the science of air excavation, but others had gone far beyond him in their glib phraseology of it.

“There are clumps in the air that are the people and animals and plants, Cecelia,” he said, “but there are also patterns and penned-off areas. There are immaterial weir-dams that separate the air into smaller patches. If it were not for the patterns and marked off areas, the ordered baffles and fences, the pens in the air, you can have no clear idea of how hard the wind would blow and how wildly the air would move and tumble. We have some indication of it from our studies of the atmospheres of unordered worlds and planets. We have some idea of it from studies of our own world during its unordered millions of years. The power of the wind must have been frightening. That is why we can mine the air only from the beginning of ordered time. Do you understand me, Cecelia?”

“Not very well with your Roman Italian. Why don't you speak Calabrian?”

This Cecelia Calca was a nineteenth century ghost, one of those who died when King Bomba was king in Naples and there was violence in the land. She said that some day she would tell all of them all the history of how she and her lover met their deaths, and indeed she had already told many parts of it.

But the anomalous clumps in the haunted air! That was the fortunate puzzle, and at the same time it was the advantage that they needed. Abramswell had discussed it with Pioneer Reventlo and Jeffery Wind, with Cyclone Boniface and Stephen Tall, with Rosa and Lucille, and with all of them who had time to listen to him. It was a happy sort of thing to come onto an advantage like this. Problems in the field now solved themselves, and all the supposed difficulties of one sort evaporated by themselves.

More and more, the others were finding these fortunate anomalous clumps in their own excavations of earth and noosphere. They concluded that such blind luck was the beating heart of any successful excavation.

In the earth, bodies and artifacts and old stone works were always clumping together far beyond the randomness of blind strewing. They might not even have been recognized as special things had they been distributed with real randomness. And in the noosphere there was this aggregation and clumping also, of ideas, of notions and inklings, of speculations, of inter-linked thought systems, of old and magnificent intellectual patterns, of commitments and purposes, of directing and ordering. Jeffery Wind was the leading practitioner among them at noosphere mining, but he was not expert at it. And there were no experts anywhere. To some extent, though, the noosphere provided leadership for its own excavating. There were rich ideas and projections leaping out of it, all of them suggesting good ways of exploiting themselves.

“Are these mines salted?” Jeffery Wind had to ask himself very early. And he had to conclude that all the mines in the valley, those of the earth and the air and the mind-sphere, did seem to be salted, to be streaked with bait-gold of every sort. Well, were they salted by enemy or by friend? And what to do but analyze their gold in all its contrived streakiness?

And always there were some intrusions from one stratum into another. And the fluid sea-medium, which they really hadn't intended to excavate at all on this expedition, permeated all the other media. All night long there in the Goat Valley, the sea could be heard breaking against the very feet and foundations of the castle. But the sea was seven kilometers away.

And if the sea came to the very feet of the castle, then the pavilion and the lower plain would have to be under the sea. The people at the pavilion, including the British and Scandinavian tourists who lodged there, and including Catherine January and F. Cyclone Boniface who were spending their honeymoon there, gave the information that there was indeed an under-seas feel to the pavilion, that under-seas dreams were dreamed there; and that often sand and shells and sea-bracken and weeds could be found on the upper sea-decks of the pavilion in the early mornings; and also small gasping fish, drowning in the air.

Joseph Abramswell and Dorothy Blue-Ice excavated out of the haunted air the shadowy outlines of big, puffy grumpus fish drifting in the air like balloons. And when they are alive, the grumpus fish graze in the green waters just under the shore-shelves.

The several working strata became real quarries from the material digged out of them. Rooms in the castle became laboratories and work studios and appraisal rooms. But the pavilion had become the pleasure place for the people of the party. And it was clear that current pleasure was as important to the project as was excavation from the past.

Cecelia Calca was always snuffy about the cinema screen in the pavilion.

“For such persons as you to have the cinema is unfair,” she said. “It is an infringement. It is a theft. You have everything, and we have so little. You should not rob us.”

“Whatever do you mean, Cecelia?” Dorothy Blue-Ice asked. “When you say ‘you’, do you mean us regular unghosted people? Why should we not have the cinema? We invented it.”

“No, no, it is the spettri, the ghosts who have always had it. It is not a thing to be invented. It is ourselves cavorting, that is what the original cinema is. Some of those old classics of our cinema, our ‘Walpurgis Night’ for an instance, are real ghost movies, but why can you not see it of the whole field? We had it first. We even used the screen first. We used a fleece sometimes or any light animal skin for our background. It is no secret that sometimes we are hard to see even by ourselves, so we need a background. But it is you who make caricatures of us now when you create the artificial ghosts. And even these substitutes of us that you use, they are animations of pictures only, not of real ghosts or real people. You make false ghosts to take our places, and you thread them into your machines. That's what you do with your cinema.”

“Do you spettri really have something like cinema, Cecelia?” Pioneer Reventlo asked. “Could you go onto that cinema screen now and enter into that cinema scene? Could you mingle with the cinema figures performing there now, and assume a role in the drama?”

“Of course I could,” Cecelia maintained. “I have done it often. It was fun at first, before we realized just how much we were being insulted by the whole thing. Several of us used to go into the old movie house in Nicastro in the time when movie houses were just beginning. We would have fun being unauthorized characters in the hammy little plays. But that was long ago. I will never do it again now, not even to prove that I can do it. It is all too insulting.”

“How is it insulting,” Catherine January asked. “Who insults whom?”

“The false ghosts on the screen insult us the real ghosts. They will not acknowledge us at all. They will not answer us when we speak to them. They will not even admit that they see us, but they do. Sometimes they walk right into us and knock us down and trample on us. And even when they are doing that they will not admit that they see us or hear us. They look right through us. These are affronts. They are a bestial bunch.”

“Maybe they really don't see you, Cecelia,” Lucille Creighton said. “They are reproductions, and they are as unconscious as the pictures of people in a paper. I believe that it is all an illusion that you and they are on the same screen together. It only seems that you are there together. You are a different sort of shadow from them. It is all an optical and aural misunderstanding. But they and you are not on the same plane. You can pass through each other like, well, like ghosts. You pass through each other as ghosts pass through matter.”

“No, no, they do not pass through us. They knock us down,” Cecelia insisted. “We are on the same plane or they would not be able to knock us around like that. But there is another reason why I wouldn't be on the same screen with them again. It is their immodesty. People on the screen dress even more immodestly than do real people. See those women there. They are under-dressed. You must admit that.”

“And you perhaps are overdressed, Cecelia,” Rosa Caprobianco said. “I have noticed this overdressing in many ghosts, particularly those who are, as you are, literally from the Victorian period. And I have wondered about it. Why do ghosts wear clothes?”

“For modesty, you loose-tongued, underdraped woman,” Cecelia said angrily.

“I do not believe that anyone has ever seen a completely unclothed ghost,” Rosa said. “But how do you do it? Is it ghost clothing that you wear? I can understand people themselves sometimes surviving as ghosts, for the stubborn and unquenchable animation that is in some of them. But clothing does not have any animation. How can it survive and make these stubborn reappearances? is there such a thing as ghost clothing, Cecelia?”

“It is our own clothing which we must be careful of,” Cecelia said. “I don't know whether it is ghost clothing or not. It does wear out, but ghosts do wear out too. But when we wear out our clothing we can hardly replace it. Sometimes we have to borrow clothing from each other. And if we cannot find sufficient modest clothing to appear in, then we simply do not appear anymore.”

“Are all ghosts of one sort, Cecelia?” Jeffery Wind asked.

“No, no, they can be classified and developed in a number of ways. One way they can be divided is into ghosts of the past and ghosts of the future. I am a ghost of the past.”

“How can you tell each other apart, Cecelia?” Anabella Hillary asked. “I imagine that both sorts of you are continually committing every sort of anachronism.”

“Often we can't tell each other apart,” Cecelia said, “not at first meeting, not for a while. But very soon we know the difference. The future ones are not as substantial as we are. They are conditional, and we are absolute.”

“But if there are ghosts from the future at all,” Cyclone Boniface hazarded, “that would mean that the future is already ordained and decided, would it not, Cecelia?”

“Oh, I don't think so, Cyclone, no,” she said. “The future is probable at best, and no more than that. And so are the ghosts from the future merely probable. But the future is not ordained and decided, and neither are the ghosts from it. There is an area of horror in this. Sometimes a detail will change in the present (I think that is what happens), and then several details in the future will become impossible. They will cease to be, and other details will rush in to take their places. When this happens, a future ghost or several of them may be obliterated completely. One of them will be extinguished. He will go away absolutely. And then it will be the case that he was not, that he will not be, that he is not, that he never was possible. I don't know whether I can make you understand the agony of seeing a friend obliterated like that. There are certain persons in the past who were made, for very grave offenses, never to have existed. They were wiped out. But once they were, however cute the arguments that they were not. No matter how they are nullified and blotted out of the book of the world, they were once. But this is worse, for a future ghost to be cancelled, to lose all possibility of ever being, when he once had a ghost of a future at least. It is worse even than to be a soul suffering in Hell. That one can say ‘I was, and I am.’ And the cancelled past ghost can say ‘I was.’ But the cancelled future ghost cannot say anything, because he is not, was not, and will not be. I do not believe that God knows what a horror is involved in this paradox if He realized it, He would not permit it.”

“That Cecelia is the phoniest baggage I’ve ever seen,” Stephen Tall said in a low voice to Adriana Thistle. “She is no more a ghost than I am. She is a phoney.”

“How does she appear and disappear then, Stephen?” Adriana asked him. “How can she make herself either translucent or transparent or invisible? Or, on the other end of it, how can she make herself shiningly visible in total darkness?”

“Maybe she was a magician's helper once,” Stephen suggested. “All her tricks are absolutely second-class. And her patter is second-class magician's patter too. She is not a ghost. She may, however, be a pick-up from one of Abramswell's scanners and reconstructors. Those electronic machines of his are picking up a lot of strange phenomena now. But they're not to be trusted. The scanners do good work, but the reconstructors aren't to be depended on. Because his reconstructors show a thing to be one way, that is not to say that it ever really was that way. They are speculating and guessing machines. I think that Cecelia is one of the things that his electronic reconstructors have got wrong. She is a mechanical malfunction. And, in addition to that, she is a personal phoney.”

Who was the phoney? Stephen Tall knew that ghosts do not depend on volume for hearing. They can hear anything spoken, and they can also hear sub-vocalizations. Cecelia had heard all of Stephen's put-down, and he had meant that she should.

Be careful. Bad feeling in a group can blow all its prospects.

But sometimes Cecelia seemed to misclassify persons. She was of three or four different minds about Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, those intrepid acrobats who sometimes appeared in their chase sequences in bioscopic dreams and also on the cinema screen in the pavilion.

“I don't know what they are,” Cecelia would moan. “There is so much of the unreal in both of them. Sometimes they are people and sometimes they are ghosts. Sometimes they are in the past and sometimes they are in the future. But they have learned a real and compelling secret, and they are trying to write it out for you for both warning and directional guide. They may be saying that they can write it out only in fire and blood with their own limbs. They are trying to tell you where something must happen, and I believe they have already told you that. And they are also trying to tell you what shape it must be.

“They seem to be puppets sometimes, dangled down on strings by persons who are giant-sized in comparison to them. But wait a minute. They are the creative people, with their acrobatics and adagios, and not the puppets. The real puppets (figures who are giant-sized in comparison to them) are huge balloon figures full of hot air and floating above the puppet theatre, but restrained from floating clear away by the strings on them that the acrobatic couple hold them down with. It is not easy, at first sight, to be absolutely certain which are the puppets and which are the puppeteers.

“But all of you here, and you have known them longer than I have, you have a tendency to regard them as cheerful clowns who are putting on knock-down acts and Hogan's Alley chases. You regard them this way even when they come covered with their own blood. And the high point of it is when the big, artificial snake begins to swallow them. The same two people are inside the artificial snake making it work as are inside the artificial horse in the next skit.

“But the snakes aren't artificial. They are real. An enemy had made them seem artificial. There is a horror that comes over it all when we see that these two ‘people of the secret’ are really being hunted to their deaths, and that the death may be being eaten alive by the giant snake.”

As a fact, all of the watchers at these bioscopic chase sequences were feeling a growing horror about them. Sick humor will stretch only so far, and then it breaks open to show the fundamental death sickness that is behind it. These were eschatological chases, and the most likely eschatological alternative is always horrible death. Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald were sacrificial victims, however often they still escaped the knife.

Jeffery Wind had taken on the most difficult of the assignments. He was trying to excavate the mind-sphere that was above the haunted air. He had three or four particular excavation points, a turret on the pavilion, a high tower of the castle, a haunted eagle aerie on a tall cliff, and a balloon. Most of all it was the balloon he used to rise above the haunted air. It rose on the end of a cable, and a boy let out the cable or cranked it in with a windlass. Jeffery didn't know how high he had to go. Cecelia Calca, the most communicating of the local ghosts, was of the opinion that the ghosts of the haunted air cannot rise more than thirty meters high; for she herself could not. But when a thing was encountered higher than that, how could one tell whether it was an ordinary ghost or an unbodied idea or a shared philosophical construction?

Well, if it is all noosphere above this, why do high flyers in jetostraters not have mind-encounters with the native fauna of the brain-sphere? Very often they do. But they do not do it more often because it is difficult to have a meaningful encounter with things when you swish by them at speeds in excess of eighteen hundred kilometers an hour.

Jeffery Wind was attempting to excavate and mine the noosphere with no tools and instruments at all except standard ghost-detection machinery, and amplifiers and recorders and scanners. And ‘Maxfield Thought Sensors’. Possibly he was trying to mine immaterial things (thoughts) with material equipment. But Jeffery Wind, as a device expert, couldn't admit that there was any difference between the material and the immaterial. A good device man can never admit that there is such a distinction.

Would there be minds here? Or only thoughts that may or may not have been in minds? Oh the pure thoughts of the noosphere! Oh to be mining them and gathering in whole cataracts of gems from their torrent! But, for starters anyhow, those were not pure thoughts that Jeffery came upon there. Early dipping in that ambient revealed that they were mostly impure thoughts in the noosphere, mixed thoughts with unthoughtly material clinging to them. There were analogous air-snakes and sky-snakes of thoughts writhing through the zone. There was frog-and-toad philosophy abounding. There were stenches and miasmas and insincerities. But all those things were rather pleasant and bracing in the open, second-story air. (Some of the more pungent drifting streams were not thoughts at all; they were smokes drifting all the way from the industrial chimneys of Naples.) But many of the mind-fishes drifting in that stream were genuinely trash fish.

And yet there was good mentality to be found. And there were persons there, most of them shrugging off the intervention. They were solitary and not-to-be-seen persons browsing there as in a special and gracious library, with figurative or transcendent wine at their elbow and the spirit of music playing in the background. But were they trying to impose a condition of silence or non-intervention on all interlopers? And some of the invisible persons were just up there for the view. There were countless fine, unbodied eyes looking down on all the kingdoms of the earth and placing earth-operational factors in the processes and minds below them. Every zone is rooted in all the zones below it. This was the great panorama to graze the minds upon.

Almost all the towns of middle Calabria could be seen from the balloon: Cosenza, San Giovanni, Amantea, Sambiase, Nicastro, Catanzaro, Vibo Valentia. Two seas could be seen from there, the Ionian Sea in its guise of the Gulf of Squillace over the hills to the east, and the Tyrrhenian Sea in its Gulf of Sant'Eufemia embodiment to the west. There were the mantled hills, the very ends of the Apennines Mountains before they disappeared into the sea. There was only one river to be seen, the Crati. The whole of Calabria together owns only this one river. But there were very many short streams and sudden torrents, for the route down from the steep hills to the seas on either side was never more than fifteen kilometers. A number of valleys of the elliptical shape were to be seen from the wavering height, and the most elliptical of all of them was the Valley of the White Goat Illusion. The balloon was anchored by windlass and line that was coming right out of the throat of the White Goat.

Yes, the White Goat outline could be seen in the White Goat Valley. But it could only be seen from above and at a certain height. It was picked out by about two hundred white limestones strewn about in patterns that seemed random from the ground. The pattern of the White Goat couldn't be seen anywhere at the ground level, and it couldn't be seen from a great height, for the individual stones were small ones. It could only be seen by one who was anchored in the wavering air, thirty to fifty meters high.

‘The White Goat’ was said to be the name of a secret society. Not, however, a society of humans. It was a society of usually unbodied persons who had one of their campgrounds thirty to fifty meters high over this Calabrian valley. And the members of the society had not set the stones on the ground themselves. They had coerced humans into setting them. Each of the limestones had been set, independently of all the others and out of sight of all the others, in a place that seemed a logical place for it, by the human who set it. And yet there wasn't any human logic at all in the setting. Jeffery Wind got this background bit by a valid drifting intuition.

One could see in depth from the balloon. It takes no more than penetrating vision and vertical perspective to see a few meters down into the earth. In the immediate region, Pioneer Reventlo and Rosa Caprobianco and others had already removed much of the outer skin of that earth. This seeing in depth revealed some long forgotten places.

Under all of Calabria was the older country, Ager Bruttius, and the difference between the old and the new was in more than the name. Not under but above and still diffusing the S. Giovanni Hills were the old Sila Mountains, for the older heights had been higher and sharper here, and now they were eroded. Under Vibo Valentia was the old city of Hipponium. There was an old city under almost every new town. Under Catanzaro was old Scylletium. Under modern Crotone was the ancient Greek colony city of Kroton, greatly different in everything except name. Jeffery Wind resolved to tell Pioneer and Rosa that several of these would be excellent digging sites. But the expedition was to dig inside the White Goat Illusion Valley only.

Under the Valley of the White Goat Illusion was the Valley of the White Oreamnos Illusion. The Oreamnos was a shaggier and smellier ancestor of the goat. All of that could be seen quite clearly from here by a device man. The device that was the White Goat Valley had already been identified by Pioneer Reventlo and others. It was a time machine.

From the balloon, Jeffery Wind saw on the ground a huge trap with jaws. Jeffery did not comprehend what he saw; he did not understand how there could be a trap there capable of gobbling up scores of people.

Then the light changed. It was the pleasure pavilion that had had the appearance of a trap for a few moments.

“What a curious illusion!” Jeffery Wind said.

After he had given notice that he was hospitable to thoughtful visitors, or to loose thoughts of any kind, Jeffery would sometimes spend the time in the balloon by reading the great classics of balloon literature. ‘Tom Sawyer Balloonist’ was surely one of the greatest of these, though the author mistakenly labeled it ‘Tom Sawyer Abroad’. Oh, and ‘Five Weeks in A Balloon’ by Verne was also the greatest. ‘Ballooning Above the Land of the Piff Bandits’ was good. So was ‘The Balloon Pirates of the Sulu Sea’. Jeffery had not brought his complete set of ‘Balloon Stories Weekly’ with him on the expedition. It was really too valuable to carry about. But he had many other items. There is an old adventure literature about travel and life on river rafts; and it will make the river water in anyone's veins rise and surge. But it is nothing to the adventure literature of balloon travel. ‘Balloon Battalions Against The Kite-Dragons of Skokumchuck’ was what Jeffery Wind was enjoying right now. It had used to be the case, when Jeffery was becoming famous as a growing and exciting brain, that he would read balloon books inside the covers of erudite books. But here in the wind-buffeted balloon The Calabrian Queen itself, he had no need for such deception.

Then the moment came for which he had baited his hooks and set his scanning traps. The ‘Thoughts of the Region’ closed in on him like morning thunders. He closed the balloon adventure book with half a sigh and half a smile, for now there would be still more adventures in still more rarified air. It came on rich, the thought complex.

There was a rhapsody both inside and outside of words. This was chrestomathy for acquiring all the Holy Ghoster tongues. This was flaming transport, egregious ecstasy, multi-personal rapture with an almost blinding glint to it; and at the same time it was cool to the touch, to the internal touch. “I will bring Dorothy Blue-Ice up here tomorrow,” Jeffery Wind said inconsequently. “She always likes to revel in thoughts. And there is really more here than a single neophyte can enjoy.”

These were clouds of cool-blue rationality with flaming linings. (All metaphors are Jeffery Wind's own. There were coruscating systems of logic and speculation. The mind-sphere had been there all the time, not much more than thirty meters high to the beginning of it, but it kept that distance from all intrusions, from towers, from spires, from most but not all trees (not from the ailanthus, but this tree will seldom grow so tall), from airships and airplanes, but not always from balloons. Of course this wasn't a new thing, going up there to experience it.

A Babylonian Calif used to have himself raised up in a balloon for an hour every day to converse with the wise persons and the detached wise thoughts to be found up there. Several of the wisest Chinese Mandarins used to ride up there on kites. Both Paul and Aquinas had been swept up to this low ‘seventh heaven’ (they didn't know any other name for it), and had been drenched in mentality there. And both had come back mumbling ‘I have seen such things — I have heard such things.’

But perhaps the mentality sphere is a transcendent region and will not have any effect on material instruments, so that the only instrument Jeffery could employ up there would be his mind?

Not so. Not have any effect on material instruments! Those instruments were neighing like a string of spring colts. Those instruments were recording as they had never recorded in their electromagnetic lives before. This stuff was of incredible richness and abundance, and they were getting very much of it down in permanent form.

The noosphere circles the whole earth with its intellectually. But here it was a special case. The noosphere over the Valley of the White Goat Illusion is one of two dozen or so places in the world where it really outdoes itself.

What has been accumulating in the noosphere since the appearance of the privileged species is the “integral achievement of man as intellectual, aesthetic, and physical animal”; and also the integral achievement of several other species as intellectual, aesthetic, and physical and paraphysical animals and animas. There are several other intellectual species who are concentric with man on this world.

“Is nobody alarmed that everything is going so easy?” Dorothy Blue-Ice asked of several of them that day. “Does nobody of us known what an outrageous ambush and trap smells like?”

“Oh, someone is greasing our way,” Jeffery Wind said. “It is thoughtful of them.”

“Or, to use another parable,” Dorothy went on, “we are like a surgeon operating unaided, and he finds that all his instruments are handed to him by invisible hands even before he quite needs them. He has never had such excellent assistance before. Then he looks down at the patient, and he sees that it is himself that he is operating on.”

Chapter Five

And I will go on holiday

And shovel air like sandy dunes

And mow the deepest earth like hay

And harvest skies from high balloons

Penny Rimes, Penny Rowley

“Mr. Abramswell,” Raddigan Shrike asked, “are we not trying to rediscover the rationality that was in the beginning?”

“Let us say that we are trying to discover the rationality that is in the beginning.”

“And aren't we coming to it through some mighty irrational swamps and mazes?”

“Oh, there are swampy riddles enough, Raddigan, but they might be quite rational when finally we fit them into a comprehensive piece. It's going to take quite a piece of an answer though to fulfill the several thousand shaggy questions we’ve raised.”

“Yes, it's shaggy. That's what bothers me. How will it ever come clear?”

“Where will we fit in all the plain unrealities that we are finding in our excavations?” Rosa Caprobianco asked. “We validate them, but they're still unreal.”

“Where will we fit in the swarms of unhuman enemies who are buzzing around us?” Lucille Creighton asked. “Oh, it is a cheesy situation.”

“For that matter where do we fit in Vivian and Curtis and their chase sequences?” Dorothy Blue-Ice asked. “They have become mythological or prototypal elements. They are not quite the adagio kids we used to know. Are they dead and still giving us these entertainments?”

“Where are we going to fit in the White Goat Enigma and the Elliptical Valley Enigma?” Joseph Abramswell asked. “There are too many irrational unknowns for easy solving of this problem.”

“And where do we fit in the new people who have joined our party?” Pioneer Reventlo asked. “I don't remember that they were supposed to join us.”

“You don't remember the party and its program as spacious enough,” Jeffery said. “We do want the new members. They are all elements who were crying for inclusion.”

Several noble, handsome, altogether charming, and highly intelligent persons had now accrued to the Pioneer Reventlo Expedition. These exceptional additions came in like wind-flocs and attached themselves to the party. They were notable persons from all over the world. Or they were private persons who had been quietly motivating the world for a long while. But how did it happen that they all came at the same time, and where did they come from?

“Me. I'm a Djinn. I’ve just escaped from a bottle. Your instrumentation unwittingly helped me to escape from it,” said the Count of San Angelo. “The next thing that anyone knows, I'll be reclaiming my estates. That will send those two-legged rats to scurrying. They occupy a set of estates for a few hundred years, and they begin to feel that they own them.

“Englanders Reventlo, Abramswell, and Wind, I believe that your little project requires my participation. Really, you are like bare babies standing in the gates of Hell, and you would be roasted alive without some knowledgeable person like myself to guide you. Do you not know that you have the tip of a dragon's tail between the breads of your sandwich and you are about to bite down on it with your corporate teeth? I tell you that the old dragon will tear up whole mountains with his writhing when he feels that bite. The tip of his tail, which is the identical place where we are right now, the Valley of the White Goat, it is one of my estates. But more than my suzerainty here, more even than my wealth, it is my immeasurable erudition that you need.”

“We figure that erudition is our own strong point,” Joseph Abramswell said with the wink with which the timeless great ones of the world recognize each other. “Do you play ‘berzirk’? Our crying need here is for one more superb ‘berzirk’ player. We need a seventh at ‘berzirk’.”

A person has to be extremely intelligent even to have heard of the game of ‘berzirk’. In all likelihood the best ‘berzirk’ player in the world would also be the smartest person in the world. When the people of the party played ‘berzirk’ they played to see which was the most intelligent of them, and also which was the most smashingest gambler.

“I do play it,” the Count of San Angelo said. “I played ‘berzirk’ with the Fathers of Trent. I played there with two future popes, two future Emperors, one future Queen of France, and one future King of Naples. It was at the ‘berzirk’ tables at the Council of Trent that I won this particular estate, The Principality of the White Goat Illusion. I didn't know then what was buried here. But I did realize that one distraught noble person was glad to the bottom of his soul to lose it.”

“We are not Englanders, my dear Count,” Pioneer J. Reventlo said.

“To me, all persons who speak English are Englanders,” the Count justified himself. “I do not differentiate.”

“The Count of San Angelo is a phoney,” Stephen Tall said in a low voice to Adriana Thistle. “He is no more a Count than I am. I believe that he is a shoddy confidence man. I expect him to break out at any time with a new version of the Spanish Prisoner Con.”

“He makes my flesh crawl,” Leon Yuri said. “He gives me the hives.” And for a fact, Leon would break out in a hive-like rash whenever he found himself in the same room with the Count.

“Anyone who gives Leon the hives can't be all bad,” Anabella Hilary said with her rare insight.

Another new person who came to them was Doctor Fritz Otto. It was as a movie mogul that Doctor Fritz was best known to the world, but he was many other things as well. This Doctor Fritz was himself a movie camera with special features. He recorded camera-perfect everything that he had ever seen or heard in his life. And he himself was a movie projector with a high degree of movement and drama and contrivance. He was always on scene, and the world was on scene to him. There were a few silent stretches and unmoving stretches in the world for him, it's true. But they were put in for effect. Never more than fifteen seconds without vivid movement or sound. He had the constant feeling that the world was playing a scenario that he had written, so he was seldom surprised by anything the world did. Not surprised, but often displeased. “Bad drama, bad drama,” he would often say. “Bad timing, bad emphasis. Oh world, world, can you not sharpen up your act a little bit!”

And now he said on his joining the Reventlo party “I have come to try to get something on the acrobatic couple. The lines of them lead to several members of your expedition party. Though it has been validated that they have been killed in the United States, and indeed the authorities have their validated bodies to prove it, yet I never believed that. It is still they themselves playing the roles. They're the hottest and most dramatic property in the world at the moment, a property that is running loose and uncontrolled and unmanaged. Money is always second to art where I'm concerned, but both the money and the highly kinetic art are going unharvested in this puzzling case. This couple appears in bioscopic dreams several times a day to a minority consisting of a few million people in the world. There are several flash artists who have animations of each episode on the market within an hour of their viewing them, but these flash artist versions are accused of being subjective, of being not quite as other people remember them. And the couple appears on TV sets and cinema screens, but we can not even guess how they do it. All the appearances are random, however, and not everybody is able to see them.

“Now these are highly developed instances of real life drama, and they excite me as nothing has done for many years. They have effect that I can not duplicate. I have tried to make other episodes of the Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald chase-to-death cycle, but the results are poor. I don't know, though I can guess, who the enemy is who pursues them to death. I don't know what the secret is that they are trying to communicate before they are obliterated, but I know that it is to you people here that they are trying to communicate it. And meanwhile many persons in the world have died while watching it. There is talk of prosecuting because of reckless performance causing people to die, but how will they prosecute people who are already officially dead for the dreams that other people dream about them? Well, I want to learn the secret also. I want to be one of the special persons. And I want to halt the deterioration until I am sure they have communicated the secret. What time does the next show start?”

“We don't know that, Doctor Otto,” Joseph Abramswell said. “There are not any certain number of shows a day. Sometimes we sit together at noon or in the evening and an episode is given on the cinema screen or on the TV or in the form of group bioscopic appearance. Sometimes an episode is seen by only one of us. Sometimes two or three will be able to see it.”

“Can you have an episode whenever you want to?” Doctor Fritz Otto asked.

“Oh, I suppose so,” Joseph said, “but two or three of them a day are plenty. More than that are too much for our feelings, and they are surely too much for the unfortunate couple.”

“Could I sit down in front of that cinema screen now and see an episode?” Doctor Otto asked.

“Probably,” Joseph said. “Or you could sit down in another place and see it just as well. Or you could stand or walk, or go look down at the sea from one of the towers, and probably you would see episodes to fill your heart.”

Doctor Fritz Otto did all of these things, and he garnered more chase episodes and sequences than anyone else had ever viewed. One not knowing what he was doing might have regarded him as demented when he was seeing the hyper-dramatic things that no one else was seeing. He breathed hard, he cried out, he flung himself into the action with flailing fists, he shouted warnings and encouragement. He wept, he groveled, he went into transports. And yet this Doctor Fritz Otto was the most sophisticated movie mogul in Europe.

After the Count of San Angelo and Doctor Fritz Otto, the most noteworthy of the new people who came to them was an entity known as Il Trol. Oh, he came after the Count and Doctor Fritz in time only. He was equal to both of them together in almost everything else. He had that monicker because he looked like a troll, and he had now taken Il Trol as his legal name. This was a successful advertising stroke on his part. Oh, there was no doubt that he was a troll. He was about the height of an average man and was about twice a man's breadth. And his head was quite large.

“There is no way that he could have been born,” Lucille Creighton said. “He is an extreme brachycephalic with a cephalic index of about ninety-nine. The maximum radius of his skull had to be at least two-fifths of what it is now at birth. This is an inflexible rule. There is no way that he could have been born. If, at birth, his head had been only one-fifth the radius that it is now, it would still be as large as the head of the average adult man. There isn't any way, there isn't any way.”

“Oh, I would bet that it was no problem at all,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “You have never seen a female troll, perhaps. I have. There would be no problem there.”

Il Trol was everlastingly cheerful and everlastingly talking. He was barefoot and was dressed in moleskin. “It must have taken hundreds and hundreds of moleskins to make your garment,” Adriana Thistle said. “How did you kill them all?”

“Oh, we don't kill them,” Il Trol said. “We wait for them to die. We are never in a hurry.” But Stephen Tall pulled Adriana aside by her arm and whispered furiously to her.

“You know that is not moleskin. It is ordinary rabbit-skin, dyed. Il Trol is a phoney. He is no more troll than I am.”

“He is more of everything than you are,” Adriana said.

Il Trol constantly passed out business cards. On them were caricatures of himself. He was already a caricature, of course, but the picture on the business cards was shocking in its power and humor, something really aboriginal in caricature. There are old rock drawings like that. There is nothing later that catches the spirit.

And the lettering on the cards was “Il Trol Auto Rentals, Cosenza, Calabria, Italy. Rent it from the barefoot Troll! He always has his feet on the ground. Call ‘Il Trol’ or merely think ‘Il Trol’, and a rental car will be at your door.”

“Before I went into the auto rental business, I was a professional wrestler,” Il Trol said. “I was one of the most colorful wrestlers in southern Italy. I have never been pinned. If you will look at me closely, you will understand one reason why it never happened. It would be anatomically impossible to put both my shoulders to the mat at one time. And then I am entirely too strong for the other wrestlers. It was a business I enjoyed, but I also am in love with the auto rental and donkey rental business. I can hardly think of a business in this whole world that I would not enjoy.”

These three persons, the Count, Doctor Fritz, and Il Trol were welcome additions to the Pioneer Reventlo Expedition. It gave them the best ‘berzirk’ playing group in the world. They were all very intelligent, even the troll. They could all lie like gentlemen, especially the troll. Things need never be dull around the three-level dig now.

Il Trol said a curious thing the first day he was in the Pavilion with most of the others. “We must be careful that we are not all in the pavilion at the same time,” he said. “One or more or the party must always be outside of the pavilion. You do all understand that, don't you?”

“I don't,” Arthur Ransom said. “We have not had any guards at all in the White Goat Valley thus far. Why should we begin to have one or more guards outside of the pavilion now when most of our aid lost of our dug up fruits are at the castle?”

“Not guards to guard,” Il Trol said. “Just a member of us to be on the outside. Then, if an accident happens, the outside one can open the door for us, and we will not be in any trouble.”

“Open what door, Il Trol?” Jeffery Wind asked. “The pavilion is made up almost entirely of open archways. The arches have no doors to them at all. There are more than a hundred such. It is clear that is no way to shut up such an open building as the pavilion.”

“How topographically naïve you are,” Il Trol said. “It is an illusion that there is no way to shut up such an open building as this. The fact is that we could forget to leave one of us outside of the building, and someone could close the door of the building, and we would never be able to get out of it.”

“The fact that you have a big grin all over your outsized face, Il Trol,” Joseph Abramswell said, “tells us that this is troll humor, yes?”

“Not to me,” young Stephen Tall said suddenly. “I will take it upon myself to see that one of us is always on the outside of the pavilion. And that one will usually be myself. I don't trust the place at all. The pavilion also has a big grin all over its outsized face, and I believe that its humor is more murderous than troll humor.”

So Stephen Tall, along with Raddigan Shrike, undertook to guard the people from the pavilion, not knowing quite what the danger was however.

The wife of Il Trol was not a troll. She was tall, thin, and Italian-blonde. She did not take up residence with the people of the expedition. After all, someone had to look after the automobile rental business, and the donkey rentals also. But she came to the valley for a visit for several hours every day. She was quietly beautiful. She was probably younger than Il Trol, but she hadn't his childish elements. She was stylish. She was cultured. She must have been expensive. Was she at ease with the pleasant monster she was married to? “Not quite,” she said.

“Not at ease with him all the time, no,” she said. “No, no, Lucille, we are often a trial to each other for sure. But there is more than enough pleasure in our relationship to make up for the awkwardness. Particularly in Calabria, there have been these marriages for thousands of years. They are our health and happiness. By that I mean that they are the health and happiness of all the people. I wonder if you know just how wide is the gap between the kindred, Lucille? You see, Il Trol isn't an extreme example of his people. He's rather on the conservative side in appearance. And there is a sudden resistance in some of the people against these matings. Do you know what the legend of Romeo and Juliet is really about? Or the legend of Beauty and the Beast? Do you have any idea what Romeo really looked like? My own people have lived in this very land of Calabria for thirteen thousand years. And his people — oh, his people have lived under this very land of Calabria for that same time.

“Rosa Caprobianco is from here, and she understands what this is all about. She herself is the result of such a mixture of bloods, within the last two or three generations. That is why she loves to dig in the ground. And yet she cannot move naturally through the earth.

“I myself began to love to enter the earth from the time that I met Il Trol. We would go down into every sort of cave and crevice and passage and worm-burrow, and we would work our way under the roots of the hills. I am very thin, and am especially narrow in both skull and pelvis. When I am stripped and greased, I can crawl through some remarkably straited passages. Il Trol and myself are exactly the same height. But he weighs five times as much as I do, and his bones are as thick as those of a rhinoceros. And yet he can crawl through — really, he can almost run through — passages so narrow that I could not even begin to work my way through them.

“He is a clown besides. He is so outlandish a clown that he not only raises the hair on one's hackles; he makes one grow new hair from the frightful rippling and shivering of the skin. Did you know that the legend or fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’ that I mentioned, is a troll legend and not a surface people legend. It is about a troll girl and a surface lad. The troll is the beauty, and the surface lad is the beast. Ah well, let Il Trol be with you at the goat then, for many hours and days. I love to be with him. But I love almost as much the wonderful memory of having been with him. And the hours and days that I spend recuperating from him are equally wonderful in their own way.”

Well, they all felt that there would be hours and days when it would be wonderful to recuperate from Il Trol. But that time was not yet. He was still too new to them.

“I didn't understand what the troll's wife was talking about when she spoke of the very wide gap between the kindred,” Arthur Ransom said. “Between what kindred?”

“Oh, between the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals, to put it simplistically,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “In non-essentials they are even further apart than is remembered of them.”

“Holy Troglodytes!” Arthur gasped. “That isn't possible. There aren't either of them around any more. Not for thousands of years has that been possible.”

“No, of course not,” Dorothy said. “It's impossible, as you can plainly see. But she believes it. So do I. I very much hope that I'm able to dig a troll of my own out of the reminiscent ground here.”

The outlandish clownishness of Il Trol — it sometimes took this form.

Il Trol would excavate in the earth, as Pioneer Reventlo and Rosa Caprobianco and the others would, with a short-handled shovel and with overflowing strength. But he would not start to dig where the others would. He could start lower down. He would go down a badger burrow or a fox hole, and he would find one that opened down from the bottom of it. He would be heard digging far underground sometimes, and then the sound of him might be lost. But the diggers from the surface often got the feeling that Il Trol was directly below there inside the earth, and sometimes they got grotesque proof of this. Time and again, one of the diggers, excavating a promising site, would break through to an underground space, and there would be the ungainly head of Il Trol grinning up at them like light out of darkness. It was always unnerving to excavate Il Trol in such a way.

“Some time I am going to cut your nose right off with my spade, Il Trol!” Adriana Thistle said in exasperation once. “I will break through with a great downthrust, and I will cut your grinning nose right off.”

“Not done, not done,” Il Trol grinned. “No way a little steel spade like that could even scratch me. It will bounce off my nose just like off hard rubber. I am one hard rubber man.”

People, you don't realize what it does to you to be digging one of your own companions out of the ground like that.

“Let us stop right here and take an over-view,” Stephen Tall said to Adriana. “This isn't quite happening like this. None of the things in the White Goat Illusion, or for quite a while before we arrived here, is happening quite as it seems. The framework has been distorted. An illusion has been impressed on all our doings. The things that we have been doing are really very prosaic, but they are made to seem otherwise here. These things aren't really happening, Adriana! Other things which resemble them superficially are happening, but these things are not. Let us be sure of this.”

“Let us be only partly sure of this,” Adriana said. “I revel in the illusion myself. I will be sorry to give it up when we have to. Oh, here's another of them. I'm sorry that I woke him up, but it's done now.”

“It is not really happening that it's done now,” Stephen argued. “There is no digging this one out of the earth. We are deceived. I believe that he is one of the young louts who is supposed to be working at putting up hay in that next meadow there, and that he is hiding in wind-row hay there to escape his work. You must be digging in a row of wind-row hay instead of in the honest earth.”

“It does dig too easy here,” Adriana said, “but I can plainly see that it is dirt and not hay, and I can see that I have dug this person out from several feet of this dirt.”

“This is not really happening like this at all,” Stephen still insisted.

Well, it seemed as if it were happening like this, and when Il Trol came up full of cheerful protest it seemed to confirm it as happening.

“No, no,” Il Trol said. “You are digging up private persons, three of them already today, who for their own reasons have buried themselves for a little while in the White Goat sanctuary and asylum. You should not disturb them. They have asylum right not to be disturbed here. Besides, if they do not hide, they will have to work at the hay in the hot sun as they are hired to do.”

“They should hang out ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs over themselves then,” Adriana proposed.

“No, chicken, no,” Il Trol answered. “My chicken, they have done so. In everything except an actual sign-board with words on it, they have hung it out.”

“This is not happening, this is not happening,” Stephen Tall repeated, as the youth who had been dug out of the ground hurried away in a state of half-awake confusion. “This is not happening, and you are not happening, Il Trol.”

“But yes, I happen, Stephen, I happen. I am full of happenings.”

“You happen too glibly, Il Trol,” Stephen challenged. “That's exactly what's wrong with you.”

“I happen glibly as if perhaps I had happened before?” Il Trol asked, an eye cocked higher than any eye could cock. “Yes, you are right. I have happened before many times.”

Here was another bioscopic vision of the adventures of Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, a mid-day presentation that came without asking. It was a far-gone piece. It had passed the perfection of the several recent adventures that had preceded it. But it had become riper, more fulgent, more dramatic in the contemporary European-Decadent meaning of dramatic.

There was the consciousness of strong direction in this sequence. It was Doctor Fritz Otto, in the opinion of many persons the most powerful director of kinetic drama in the world, who was imposing his own flairy personality on this action.

“In the White Goat Pavilion, that's where it will happen,” Vivian was crying out of the relentless action. “That's all that matters. That, and the swiftness!”

This was not hay-seed ballet. This was not rinky-dink vaudeville. This was end-of-the-world opera-made-flesh. The orchestra wasn't playing ice cream notes now. They were sabre notes. There was the actual smell and reek of fresh-hot blood accompanying the dozens of devil-masked, look-alike adversaries. There were still the landscapes and cityscapes rushing past them and through them. But those scapes were more surrealistic now. There were erupting volcanoes, there were exploding underwater sequences, there were burning desert interludes where all watchers felt their throats parched with thirst. There was still the wall-scaling, the cliff-climbing, the scampering up the sides of buildings. There were battles on the swaying cables of bridges and on the dangling ladders of helicopters. There were false deaths, and then splitting open a murdered artificial body and the real Vivian stepping out of it, still alive, but possibly looking ever worse. There were horrible sequences in the garish caverns of the folk unconscious where monsters clanged and roared.

There was still the attempt to convey the ‘message’, the ‘secret’ on which depended the safety and survival of the expedition, and perhaps of the world. Curtis Bald, his breast torn open and ligatures encircling his heart to kill him, still bravely transmitted the ‘secret’ by the skip-beats of his heart, in international code, on agreed-on frequency, which, however, the members of the expedition had forgotten. And then Vivian had swooped to the rescue, torn the killing ligatures from the wounded heart of Curtis, killed certain animal-shaped guards, and then had gone up an iron ladder with the not-quite-dead Curtis asling over one shoulder. The rungs of the ladder, however, proved to be white-hot. Pain worse than that of Hell then!

Immediately after this, Vivian, transfixed by a lance, teetered on the brink of — Ah, that was great action drama! But real death had already eaten all the edges of the vignette and left only a diminished and oddly shaped field of action for another time.

The people of the expedition dug interesting things out of all of the zones of the earth, air, and mind sphere. They procured associates out of each of the three zones. Cecelia Calca had already joined them out of the haunted air. (“It isn't really happening like this,” Stephen Tall had said of Cecelia, “she's a phoney and no more a ghost then I am.”) Then they got one out of the delved earth (Il Trol), and one out of the mind sphere. It took only slight cheating to complete this symmetry. Il Trol could pass for the one out of the delved earth easily enough, but really he had come to them from the world of commerce and diurnality instead. So, to fulfill the case more exactly perhaps, they got a youth who had really been buried in a field. If he had been buried in a wind-row of hay, it was in a wind-row that was two meters deep in the earth.

This young man said, or he seemed to say, that his name was Nerone Estensi. He was dug up by Adriana Thistle, and he seemed to adopt himself to her.

“In his confused state of waking up, he is like a little duck just come out of the egg,” Lucille Creighton told Adriana. “You are the first moving thing he saw, Adriana, and he has taken your impress. In some respects you will be like a mother to him. “

“She had better not be like a mother to him,” Stephen Tall said sourly, for he had a proprietary interest in Adriana, and a hot-blooded sort of interest also. “Be gone, Nerone, or I'll bust thy skull in — Io te smasherai — ah — romperai tuo skullo — ah — cranio.”

“I don't believe he understands you, Stephen,” Lucille said.

“Why don't you say ‘This isn't happening, this isn't really happening’, Stephen?” Adriana mocked. “Why don't you say ‘He is a phoney. He's no more dug out of the ground then I am.’ ”

“Because I don't want you to come over to the ‘this isn't happening’ side of the barrier, Adriana,” Stephen said. “I want you to continue to happen.”

But this dug-up Nerone Estensi was a complication. He continued to be mixed in his wits, as are many persons who have been buried in the ground for too long. He showed the mental dimness that many ghosts show (he was hard of hearing, and sometimes bestopped of tongue), and his dug-up body also showed many of the qualities of ghost flesh. But he would see things with penetrating intuition at times also. So have many ghosts this untrammeled intuition.

“Oh sure, he's a ghost,” Cecelia Calca the ghost said. “There are all kinds of them. There are house-ghosts like Perpetua and her husband Marius here. They are always in faithful service and will not leave it even for releasing death. Then there are the period-ghosts like myself, nailed by their own blood to a spot, for most of us were murdered in our blood. And there are ghosts like this one, buried in the earth but not having the decency to die there. For some reason they lack the ability to decompose and disintegrate. They can be dug up again and again and set to do simple tasks. They are the zombies of the zombie countries. But they cannot learn harder tasks, for their brains were somehow damaged when they were buried. The Invisible Man though, that new friend of Jeffery Wind, he is a ghost of a still more tenuous type, a type that I do not understand well.”

The friend of Jeffery Wind though, what was he anyhow? He was the addition who came to them out of the mind sphere. Was Cecelia Calca right in her guess that he was some sort of ghost? Well, Jeffery had met this friend when he was up in the balloon. The handwriting of this friend had first appeared in the ship's log, which was really a sort of note book (or notion book) that Jeffery kept aloft with him.

The handwriting first appeared when Jeffery wasn't looking. This went on for a while. There would be a friendly and penetrating note here, a witticism there, an observation yonder. And then Jeffery was able to watch it appearing several times, rapid handwriting done without pen and without hand.

“That's the damnest thing I’ve ever seen,” Jeffery said in some wonder.

“Oh yes, it's a pretty good little trick,” the voice told him, “but it doesn't get much better with practice. I never could write a really crashingly good hand.”

“Who are you?” Jeffery asked the person. “You’ve made a pretty good first appearance, without appearing.”

“I'm Cedric Sinclair de Orsatti,” the voice said, “but it would simplify things if you'd just call me the ‘Invisible Man’. I'm British and Italian, of a very elite line of both.”

“Oh yes, that goes without saying,” Jeffery nodded. “Will you come down with me now when the boy winds the balloon down with the windlass?”

“Yes, I'd like to,” the Invisible Man said. “I'm like a kitten. I can get up pretty high, but then I forget how to get down again. I get frightened, and I don't know whether to back down or go down head first. I would appreciate the ride down in the balloon, yes.”

“I'd like you to meet the rest of the party,” Jeffery Wind said. “We will offer you the best hospitality possible, if I can figure out how to do it. Do you eat?”

“That depends entirely on what is on the bill of fare,” the Invisible Man said.

But Stephen Tall was quite angry when Jeffery came into the castle with the invisible man. “That breaks it,” he bawled. “That is no more an invisible man than I am. He is a phoney through and through. You are not really like that, man. I confront you here.”

“You're confronting him in the wrong place, Stephen,” Jeffery Wind said. “He is on this side of me, not on that side. How did you know that an invisible man was with me? Nobody mentioned the fact to you.”

“This isn't really happening, not as it seems to be,” Stephen was chanting. “You are not really here, man. Some other thing that resembles you superficially may be here, but you are not. We will have to break this illusion and get rid of trash like this.”

“Be quiet, pup!” the Invisible Man said to Stephen with surprising sharpness.

“Stephen can see right through the Invisible Man,” Raddigan Shrike mocked.

But all of them in the party got on pretty well together. These little disagreements would always be out. They were experiencing either the deficiencies or the advantages of the White Goat Illusion. They were inside one of the alternate frameworks, and they had to come up with improvised behavior to cope with it.

“He may be invisible but he isn't untouchable,” said Catherine January who had been feeling the invisible skull of the newcomer. “I say that a man with such head-bones as his can't be all bad. I will make a model of his skull immediately. Then I and all the rest of us can see what he is like, and it may help him to regain his identity.”

There were golden threads of good nature running through all of them always. But on this afternoon now, they were gnawed by a growing doom-fear for two lost companions of theirs. “The devils have killed their bodies,” Raddigan Shrike said bitterly, “and now they make their spirits jump on jack-strings.” That daredevil duo, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald, were appearing to many of the party in bioscopic dreams this day, and the cloying sense of murder was all through the chase scenes.

“They are tired, and the buoyancy has gone out of them,” the cinemographer Doctor Fritz Otto said. “The climax of their chase sequence will not be at the end of it. The climax was somewhere back along the way, and I will have to dip back and try to pick it up. There is a sordidness, a trashiness in tired endings. Even a killer sometimes averts his eyes when he makes a finish to it. But that is not good drama.

“When a deer is run down to his death (and single American Indians have run deer to their deaths, and groups of men have often done it), the deer takes on a ghastly appearance near the end. I have film clips of such cases, and they were cut out of sequences of The End of Summer, which took the All-Europe Prize three years ago. At the end of the chase, the hair of the deer is no longer deer hair; it is like short, dead grass. The eyes of the deer are no longer deer eyes; they are like large, featureless, grey pebbles. The tongue of the deer is no longer red when he lolls it out. It is as grey-white as alkali dust. And the gait of the deer — ah, he no longer has a gait, only a stumble. There were many points where we could feel compassion for the deer, but not when (having ceased to be essentially deer) he staggers to an undeerlike end. It is bad drama, regrettably bad drama. Oh, the heroism still pulses up in our two acrobatic friends today, but the pulse is weaker and weaker.”

“Will we see the two of them physically at the end?” Anabella asked.

“I think so,” Doctor Fritz said, “but some of you might not bother to look.”

“I will bother to look,” said Leon Yuri (1-212-1212), “I will sure bother to look.”

“Where will it be?” Cyclone Boniface wanted to know.

“Here,” Il Trol said. “Oh, you can look at me as if to say ‘How does he know?’ I know.”

“What does the deer look like when it loses its deer look?” Catherine asked.

“I don't know,” Doctor Fritz said. “I can't describe it.”

“I can,” Il Trol said. “It looks like the other side of the medallion of the White Goat Illusion, but the people never show the reverse side of the medallion. On the reverse side is the dead scapegoat, dingy, unwhite. “

Perpetua and Marius, those faithful servants, served the people of the expedition a spacious supper that night in the main dining hall of the castle. There were twenty-one persons at the table, the fourteen members of the original party, and Leon Yuri (1-212-1212) about whom there was some doubt whether he was an original member. And Cecelia Calca, Doctor Fritz Otto, the Invisible Man, Il Trol, and the troll's wife who stayed over for supper. And the Count of San Angelo. The dug-up youth, Nerone Estensi, was not at table with them.

There was a sort of belligerent gaiety on all the party. There were five hundred indications that a time of trouble was enveloping them, and they were resolved to meet those troubles gallantly.

“I don't know why we should though,” Rosa Caprobianco said. “All day long I dig zombies, and they are gallant bones, every one of them. This can be told by the fundamental texture of them, even when they are brittle and broken and disappearing. We never dig up cowards' bones at all, not of man, not of beasts, not of anything. The cowards always escape with their lives, and escape again and again and again. You never find any cowards' bones because they are still in use, and all the cowards are still alive.”

Rosa Caprobianco had had surgery that afternoon. She had had her skull trepanned, a big section of her skull bone taken out, the brain probed, and a nuisance-node cut out of it. And then she was all put together again. As Rosa was already past first youth when this node or growth was removed, she would probably remain literate to a certain extent. But she would no longer be excessively literate as the rest of them were. And she would harvest all the advantages of illiteracy or post-literacy.

Il Trol had performed the surgery on her, with ritual stone knives and other instruments. The wife of the troll, and Dorothy Blue-Ice, and Catherine January had all aided in the process, all of them understanding the technique perfectly. And now Rosa was having pain and unease with the flushed flesh of her head, and her eyes were burning and weary. Catherine January had made for her a set of slitted bone blinkers that looked like eye-glasses. Eskimos use these to guard against snow-blindness and glare, and Rosa wore them like sunglasses. But the light in the castle dining room was not too bright — candles and olive-oil lamps and yew-wood torches.

“Among the bones that I dug up this morning was an almost complete Neanderthal skeleton,” Rosa said. “It was in natural and undisturbed situ, but it was buried impossibly deep. This has happened again and again with Neanderthal bones, and it throws my private time-niche for them off completely. I don't understand it at all.”

“Oh, the Neanderthals are very like the Trolls,” the Invisible Man said. He was no longer invisible; but he was translucent, and the torch-light shone through him. Probably he had not changed since he had ‘appeared’ among them. It was simply that the people of the expedition had learned better how to see him. “Being trollish, they could move through the smallest passages in the earth and come up under old strata. Really, they could move through the earth as if it were water. When they felt their span ending, they crawled deep into the earth, disturbing it not at all, and died there. So their bones are an intrusion to a lower level, but they do not leave any of the signs of intrusions. And there is something else about them. Their bones always make seemly adjustments after the persons are dead. Nobody would believe their bones otherwise. They would be entirely too enormous for belief.” And it seemed as though the Invisible Man was looking at Il Trol as he said all this.

“Are there any pure Neanderthals left in the world?” Adriana asked.

“I think so,” the Count of San Angelo said. “I think there is one.” And the Count of San Angelo seemed to be looking at Il Trol who was not dead, and whose bones had not yet made the seemly adjustments from their enormity.

“And are there any more Cro-Magnons left in the world?” Anabella asked.

“I think so,” the Invisible Man answered. “I believe that there are two or more of them at table with us right now.” Probably he meant Pioneer Reventlo and Dorothy Blue-Ice and — “They have been active in groups in very late historical times, I know. They have surfaced within the last few hundred years. It was a group of about a hundred of them who were at the heart of the Italian Renaissance.”

“What is the different framework in the White Goat Valley?” Cyclone Boniface asked. “How can one place perform an illusion on people who come from another place?”

“I think that there may be a different sort of geometry here,” the Count said. “I think there is a different sort of topography, and of sequence, and of materiality. I think that there may be variants of all these things in the Valley of the White Goat Illusion. This is part of my estate, you know.”

“It is part of my own estate, distant cousin of mine,” the Troll's wife said. “I believe that my own claim is as good as yours, Count. In our house we say that I own all the White Goat Valley above ground, and that my husband Il Trol owns all of it that is below ground.”

“I have it for my family name,” Rosa Caprobianco said, “and I have as good a title to it as either of you. Later we might fight over it. Not this evening.”

“But the White Goat Illusion plays further tricks,” Catherine January said. “It plays tricks even with living bodies.”

“I will give a dissertation on bodies,” the Invisible Man said. “Bodies have been demeaned just because they have an inferior role. But they fulfill their roles more adequately than do any of the higher things that I can think of. All bodies have always been perfect. They have been what is called workably perfect, that is to say complete. From the most primitive sea-wheel or sea-worm, they have been what they should be. It is the practice to place these bodies (or the reconstructed ideas of these bodies) into a sort of sequence, and then to say that each of the bodies has turned into the following one. The same can be proposed, with about equal justification, for the numbers of the sequence. We can say that the number two has turned into the number three, and the number three has turned into the number four, and that all persons who do not subscribe to this proposition are ignorant and superstitious and priest-ridden.

“And all minds have likewise always been workably perfect, that is to say that they have been complete for practical purposes. The mind of the cockroach is perfect in its way, as the mind of a greyhound or a whale or a man is perfect in its way. There have never been, as belonging to a general class, moronic cockroaches, or moronic greyhounds, or moronic men.

“But there are some persons who, while accepting the tolerable perfection of bodies wheresoever they are, and of minds wheresoever they are, still do not accept them as perfect together. I myself am usually of this divided acceptance. There are only two ways we can have it, as to man (we don't possess the duality that many non-men have). We can perhaps accept a new mind being infused into an old body; that is the easiest but perhaps the less correct view. Or we can accept a new body becoming associated with an old mind that had heretofore been existing without a body. There are very many of these unbodied minds, and it isn't always easy to persuade one to become associated with a body.”

“I think, with all this high-flying talk that is going on here, that we are not touching on our problem at all,” Stephen Tall said. “We have forgotten the aim of this expedition and excavation.”

“The aim,” said Pioneer Reventlo stiffly, “is the solving of problems of human origins or of human mutations in the historically recent period. Our chatter uses approximately those words, and I believe that they cover everything.”

“Maybe they cover it too widely,” Stephen said. “Is the ‘present’ a part of the historical recent period?”

“Oh, the present impinges on it, surely,” Pioneer said. “Yes, for lack of a better place to put the elusive present, I would say that it was part of the historical recent period.”

“Then we are trying also (and mainly, I hope) to find answers to that elusive present, as you call it. Somehow it doesn't seem as if we are.”

“I suppose that we are, Stephen,” Pioneer Reventlo said, “though it all seems very trivial. Just what are you really asking?”

“The Problems of the Contemporary World, we don't seem to be considering them at all. And I believe that they are central.”

“The Contemporary World has problems?” Reventlo questioned. “Oh, I don't believe so, not really. It is my impression that the Contemporary World has run out of problems, just as it has run out of zest.”

“It is my impression that it still has a lot of both!” Stephen Tall spoke in near-anger. “Oh, it isn't really like this! This isn't happening. It's an illusion. We must find a way to separate the phenomena from the real people here.”

After supper, they went to the pavilion. There they saw, in bioscopic vision and on the cinema screen and on every channel of the TV, the current and presently-happening chase sequence of those adagio fugitives, Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald.

There was an overpowering feel of weary hysteria in this chase sequence which all the watchers believed to be pretty near the last of them. Vivian Oldshoe, who had always been so kinetically pretty, was hideous now, her face contorted into a mask of torture. That doe deer had become very undeerlike at the stench of approaching death (or at the stench of something worse, if she was already dead.) That bubbling girl had become very unhumanlike.

The scene was in a landscape that was almost familiar. It was Italian on the verge of being Calabrian. This was no more than an episode away from being in the White Goat Valley itself.

It looked somewhat as the White Goat Valley might look if it were covered by a new and growing layer of ash and hot pumice. Perhaps it should be said that it was as the White Goat Valley appeared when it had been, or when it would be, covered by such a layer.

There was the smell of scorched flesh, that of Vivian and Curtis. There was throat-rotting thirst, and the feeling of having drunk molten sulphur instead of water. The landscape and wilderness-scape did not rush by like a river, as the scapes in the other sequences had done. The landscapes walked, with a scuffing gait. They stalked slowly after prey who moved even more slowly.

There were the blood snakes now (they had started as annoyances and had grown to be horrors) that entered every new wound on the acrobats and drank and gobbled their life-blood. The land was all mire now, all hot quicksand, and yet the scene had plainly become that of the beautiful White Goat Valley.

Vivian leapt for a swinging vine. She had very few leaps left in her. And she caught it and swung with new animation. On a swinging vine there was no way that an enemy could get the best of Vivian. But then the vine came loose from the confused trees overhead. It swung down and coiled tightly around Vivian, and they crashed to the hot ground together. It was a giant anaconda snake and no vine at all.

There was a rattle of machine guns then for a touch of contemporaneity. And one could only crawl deeper into the hot ashes to escape the volleys. But this was the place for the meeting, or almost the place. The goal was nearly at hand, but the goal was not quite ready for them.

“Shout the message! Shout the secret!” Pioneer Reventlo called loudly. But that was not the Pioneer J. Reventlo who was sitting stupidly and watching the death drama. It was another one of the same name and appearance, the one who was inside the drama as an effigy.

“The secret isn't in words yet,” Vivian cried through the ashes in her mouth. “There is no way we can shout it. Open your head and I'll pour it in.” But the Reventlo in the drama made a mistake. Instead of opening his own head he opened the artificial skull that Catherine January had made for him. Vivian, not knowing the difference, poured the message into the open skull. But the snake who inhabited the skull ate it.

Then everything broke into flame which, as it happened, was the habitat of the enemies who hunted the couple. They came with burning spears and ran Vivian and Curtis through and through and set them on fire. The couple contended as well as they could, but they hadn't their old agility. Then a choking and stupefying smoke blotted out everything.

That wasn't quite the last episode of the chase sequence, but it was coming very near to the last one.

Chapter Six

‘Let's talk of graves, of worms, of epitaphs.’

King Richard II
 — Shakespeare

They woke to bells every morning then. And bells in the morning make the whole day worthwhile. It was Il Trol who now rang matins on the castle bells every morning right at sun-glint. The matin bell was very heavy and it had not been rung in many years.

The old lord of the castle had ordered that the matin bell should hang silent until one man heavy enough and strong enough to ring it should come. Previously it had taken three large men or five ordinary men to set in motion the matin bell. A single man on that bell rope was not of much more effect than a flea on it.

This old lord of the castle had given the order to silence the matin bell because he had been told that he would die while matins was ringing. The provision about a single man ringing the bell had been added only because the only man who had ever rung the bell by himself was a giant, an ancestor of the castle lord, who had done this a thousand years before. The castle lord believed that the world would be set right again if his giant ancestor should return; and death would then be a short thing — since the following morning would be Resurrection Morning. Now, Il Trol, a creature strong enough and heavy enough to ring the bell by himself had come along. And he rang it. Then what had happened to the old castle lord?

“Oh, he died, just as he believed he would,” that sunshiny and ghostly servant Perpetua said. “I'm really glad that he died. I seldom saw him, but he cast a gloom over the whole castle. Now I will find him and throw him out in what bones and dried meat is left of him. Then I'll bring the sunshine in.”

“But when did he die, Perpetua?” Joseph Abramswell asked. “I was sure that he was only a castle legend.”

“He will become one now, old olive, he will become one now,” Perpetua told Joseph. “Oh, he died when the bell rang the other morning when Il Trol first rang it. He was right that he would die then. Now it is the third day that he is dead and it is getting pretty stenchy in that old wing of the castle. The mass this morning is for his soul. But he hadn't been in very good state for his whole last century.”

It was the morning mass that Il Trol always rang the morning bell for, but there was some question about the validity of that mass. The old castle priest was regarded as being as much a ghost as the old castle lord, as much a ghost as Perpetua herself. Well, the castle lord had been unghosted just long enough to become a ghost again, but the old priest remained one. Tenuous and transparent, he remained a ghost. It was by this ghost priest that Cyclone Boniface and Catherine January had been married. And it was this ghost who still ministered to the souls in the scarcely-populated White Goat Valley.

“Is a mass said by a dead man a valid mass?” Arthur Ransom questioned.

“Yes, it should be, if all the rites and words are fulfilled,” Joseph Abramswell gave the opinion. “It is nowhere said that death is an impediment. ‘Thou art a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech’ is the promise, and that promise isn't restricted by such accidents of the flesh or by such changes of state as are represented by death.”

Half-a-dozen of the inhabitants of White Goat Valley had begun to join the expedition people from the morning they first heard the matin bells. And a British couple, the last of the tourists who had been lodging at the pavilion, joined them also this morning.

“We are leaving at mid-day,” the British lady said. “All the other tourists have gone already. This is odd, for they all intended to stay longer, and it is the season when still more tourists should be coming. But something impels us to leave.”

So a certain brightness had come into everything after the morning bells began to announce a new awakening. This counteracted the gloom that had accompanied the winding down of the death-drama of Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald. The affairs of the expedition and excavation greened and brightened, especially on this last day (though they did not know that it would be the last day) of the normal routine of the party. In both senses, the spade work of the expedition had mostly been done and the harvest was ready.

“As Prometheans, we must be both open and fastidious,” Lucille Creighton said. “We believe in excellence as a condition, so we must be fastidious lest anything secondary might be introduced. But at the same time we do not understand the use of everything, and it may be that some very awkward things are to be a part of our real requirements. We have to be open to the most outlandish persons and ideas and things. We don't know what is involved in a mutating jump, so we don't know that it isn't surrounded by irregular prodigies. The death drama of Vivian and Curtis is such an irregular prodigy, and it is part of our process no matter how awkward it is. The ghosts of Calabria are irregular prodigies, the appearance of prototypal persons in the midst of us (Oh Fritz, oh Trol!) are irregular prodigies. So are the anomalies of time and space and matter that are part of the White Goat Illusion. There are prodigies all over the place. We need a guide.”

“We have a guide,” the immeasurably kind Annabella Hilary said. “We all love each other so much, in spite of the brittle things we sometimes say to cover up. This is the big thing, I believe, and this is the guide. It is the awakening that comes now, you know.”

“What, even before the sleep?” Lucille quizzed.

Evidence, good evidence, absolutely ‘golden’ evidence and artifacts were being dug out of the ground in profusion and quality beyond every promise. This was an explosion of evidence and discovery. And there seemed to be preternatural conspiracies in favor of the party of them, so that all the links of the evidence should come to hand timely, and the persons would be able to appreciate the scope and sweep of what they were discovering.

They discovered consummate and prototypal machines here that were so simple that they would not even have been recognized as machines by excavators who did not have their eyes strongly opened. In these machines (how old were they anyhow? how new?) all future machines of any worth were implicit. The idea of the nature of a machine would have to be changed. Change it then. There was a whole spread of ‘highest-ever’ culture. There were amenities, there were arrangements, there were provisions and techniques. All this was dug out of the ground and the inhabited air and the hyperactive mind-sphere. Here was the plan and providence of everything that anyone would ever need.

And, even beyond that, here was the fortunate mixture of superb stuff that no one would ever need and that everyone should have as a special bonus. Here was the seed-bed (Oh, and the harvest rows at the same time!) of all the arts and enjoyments and praises, all the virtues and miracles, all the divinity of life, all the excellence. It had really become a ‘musical earth’ that they dug in, with all the singing things that they excavated, with all the remnants of the muses themselves. It had become a speaking earth.

“Mint,” said Jeffery Wind, and he raised his head at the aroma of it. “It is the euphoric mint affecting us. Mentha euphorica! It is the simple secret of Paradise, that one should always be within smelling of the euphoric mint.”

“It is more than that,” Joseph Abramswell said. “It is solum euphoricum, the well-being soil of the earth itself. Enjoy it!”

“We must take time out to enjoy all of this,” Pioneer Reventlo said. “We have to feast our eyes and our senses on it. It's the magnitude that we hoped for. It proves all our points, of course, that the magnificence was complete in the beginning. But it dwarfs our point also. Can man ever catch up with his starting point? He can if he continues to receive bonus after bonus as we have been receiving here lately.”

“Lift up your eyes, Pioneer,” Joseph Abramswell laughed. (‘He laughs like an olive tree,’ the sunny ghost Perpetua had said of Joseph.) “You are seeing only one-third of it, the one-third that was buried in the earth and is seen from the outside. Look now at the ‘haunted air’, which should be called the ‘inhabited air’. You must see this as great things should be seen, see it as being inside it. We are not alone here, and we have never been alone. We tend to form companionships and corporations of the living and the dead and the not-yet-born all together. The air is loaded with mentors, and we will be mentors to others. We can even enjoy the multiplicity of ourselves, in our younger and in our older forms. We meet with elder mortal coils and with our own immortal adult forms. But why should I have to tell you what the haunted air, the inhabited air, is telling you loudly? It is our extra-dimensional ambient, and we are inside it. Enjoy it. Explicate it. Be blessed in it. Oh certainly, Pioneer, this is the ordered rationality and para-rationality that was in the beginning, this is the ruled beauty. Like the cosmos itself, we are exploding with a big bang, and it is still graciously ringing in our ears.”

(In truth, persons had reported a bale of genuine euphoric mint from Arcadia and had opened it for its aroma to mix with that of the native mint. This was a trap and a trick, and it was catching the people.)

“Lift up your eyes still a little bit further, people,” Jeffery Wind said. “The mind-sphere opens into dimensions of a world of which this is only a token. We have still other eyes to open, after we have opened our first and second and third sets of eyes. And when these are all dazzled, we will open still other sets.

“How ironic is the trashy idea that any living thing should ever be alone and unidentified. There is one mind, and we are on the inside of it. It is human, and at the same time it is animal and angelic also. We can travel in the spacious and unconscious depths and extents of all its persons and groups. Have you wondered what it is like in the unconscious mind of angels? Maybe you have forgotten it, but you have been there. We are in these regions, and we walk through them. And all the people of every kind move through our corridors. Heretofore we have been characters in each others' dreams. Now, as we rediscover our own sphericity, we will be characters in each others' and in the ultimate realities. But analogies and rhapsodies break down after a while, until we have learned to talk in the proto-tongue again.”

Oh, this couldn't have been the effect of just the euphoric mint that was in the air. There were half-a-dozen euphorias around there.

“This really is happening,” the young Stephen Tall said. “It is euphoria, but of the valid sort. The illusion has fallen away, and the reality is much more powerful. Everything that was phoney has been melted out of it or skimmed off.”

“This is like seeing everything at once,” Adriana Thistle said, “and yet all the implications opened up by it would take a thousand years to follow to their sources. Very well then, we will follow them in total joy and grace. We have that thousand years to use as we wish. It is given to us now for the joyous work. And after we have drunk that thousand years, we are given ten thousand more. And then we are given forever. We have found the pearl that was hidden in the field, and we discover that it much bigger than the world. Yes, yes we have been sipping euphoria wine and breathing euphoria air. It's good, isn't it. There are no limits now.”

“Easy, little chicken, easy,” Il Trol said. “Yes, it is wonderful. All my fat days I have been trying to tell people how wonderful the world is. But it is not all euphoria. There are more serious things in it, and they also will prove to make it worthwhile. Oh, it is a fat and wonderful world!”

“I wonder if something or somebody isn't taking us just a little bit fast this morning though,” the youth Raddigan Shrike asked.

They all began to drift down towards the pavilion from what had been a spontaneous meeting and enjoyment in the open air. They were all caught on the aroma of something impossibly rich. The wife of Il Trol had joined them and she brought a sort of well-bred joy with her. This balanced the big and ill-bred joy that Il Trol himself always showed. Or which was which? Which of them was the beauty and which the beast?

The fact is that Il Trol had always talked and acted in perfect sanity and reasonableness, and his speech was all in intricate and flowery and archaic words. But the speech came out of the resonating clay that his belly and body (his soul was in his belly, not vulgarly, but because it was a very large soul and there was no other chamber even in that huge body that was able to hold it): and the eyes of Il Trol (each of them bigger and more golden than a Calabrian grapefruit) rolled around in his head in a low-comic manner that might be taken by some as ill-bred (‘His is the the only horizon to horizon ogle,’ Anabella Hilary had said of Il Trol.)

“We can throw away our crutches now,” Rosa Caprobianco said. “We can forget most of the token scratching in which we have kept records. Now we come to the things that all previous things were tokens of.”

“Are we perhaps seeing more than is here?” Raddigan Shrike asked. He was a young man who had a strong skeptical streak in him. And yet even he was beaming all over his face and form at the unfolding realization of the day. Oh, the mentality and aesthetics of it! The grace of it! The remembered joy! Yes, the joy that was remembered, as an old-new thing, across many millennia.

“Of course we are seeing more than is there,” Lucille Creighton burst out like a new bloom. “We are the golden inchworms, and this is the way we inch along. And when we do see a thing, then it comes to be there. We effect new things by our act of seeing them. We're magic today.”

“Easy, little chicken, easy,” Il Trol said. “I also feel the expansive mood. We have uncovered the treasure. But have we counted all the guards who were set to guard us away from it? Have they played their last trick?”

“We have aces in suits that have just been invented,” Arthur Ransom gloated. “All the principalities — we will heat them at every trick. And we have accounted for every guard, even that dragon guard named ‘Stuffy’. Nothing could be stuffy today.”

“Perhaps this thing needs a devil's advocate,” Dean Hayfield ventured. “Yes, we see the light. We fracture it and analyze it. And the spectrograph tells us that the light is the bursting of new dawn. We know that this is true. We know intuitively that no light shatters into such spectacular colors as does the dawnburst. But are we seeing it directly, or are we seeing it only by reflection? I have my own intuition that we are seeing it off of evening cliffs.”

“From the East even unto the West,” said Jeffery Wind. “That is the sign by which we may know the parousia, the appearance that was in the beginning.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Hayfield said with still a touch of wariness. “But I still wonder which evening cliffs they are. Are they yesterday's cliffs or tomorrow's? And is it yesterday's dawn or tomorrow's that it reflects? I think we're still at ‘yesterday evening station’.”

“Are our faces too much alike?” Lucille Creighton asked suddenly. “Are we becoming a single vine with all of our calyx-faces identical?”

“We are becoming a single vine, yes,” the Count of San Angelo said. “But our faces will be our own, however much in accord with the others they may be. The Scandinavian lady tourist in the pavilion had nearly finished her ‘Shouting Faces Tapestry’ before she left. They are our own faces that she has done passably well, and they do shout. We are forming the ‘Shouting Face Vine’, a powerful plant.”

The Shouting Faces of the people of the expedition were these:

Pioneer J. Reventlo. He had looked like Cro-Magnon man once. Now he had decayed, but he still made a haunting ruin. Though the light had been dimmed in him, and though his eyes were as blank as those on an old Greek statue, he was still imposing.

Joseph Abramswell, the analytical projectionist. He had the gold-brown color of the Jerusalem olive, curly hair, and curly whiskers under his skin. Gold-flecked eyes, and the cupping hands. He was a large and light man who traveled at a lope.

Rosa Caprobianco. Ivory, fire-rose, carmine, olive-blue, she was made out of buff and living Nicastro marble. Strawberry hair. She was too stocky, too heavy, too sensual. Hers was a Grimaldi face with many of the colors gone wrong.

Arthur Ransom. He had oversized blue eyes which he himself painted in oils often. He had green fingers, and the reflection from them showed in his face. He had a Scottish nose and a Dutch mouth, and his hair was like floppy sand.

Lucille Creighton. “Stylish and French and thirty-one-year-old pretty.” She was a hazel-eyed brunette. Her piano-playing fingers were long and knobby, and she was holding them to her cheeks as she often did, framing her face.

Jeffery Wind, the long, lean, freckled, pleasant southpaw, with the curiously pudgy lips that coronet players always have. He was casually stunning in his intellect, and it showed in his face. He fulfilled the George Borrow verse ‘A lad who twenty tongues can talk/And sixty miles a day can walk’, and this and other talents showed in his face.

Dorothy Blue-Ice, the doctor of analytical biology. She was blue-eyed and yellow-haired. “Your skull, it can't be that big,” Catherine January had said to Dorothy once when she fingered the head bones with her affectionate and arty fingers. “There cannot be a skull that big. There cannot be a person that big. But you don't look big at all. I won't tell anyone if you won't.” “All right,” Dorothy had said. Her face was bigger than any of theirs, except Il Trol, but it didn't look so.

These seven form the middle leaf of the triptych. There were not such faces to be found anywhere, but how could one explain their excellence? They were simply a superb series of living portraits.

Anabella Hilary, sandy, freckled, drawly, and immeasurably kind.

Raddigan Shrike, small and black. “I am always the sour one,” he had said, but his wasn't a sour face. It was a true ‘shouting face’. His eyes always looked as if he were watching an opponent in the kid's game ‘Fast Hands’, a sort of ‘Fast Draw’ game without guns. Raddigan had fast eves. All the persons of the expedition were larger than life. Raddigan Shrike was a larger-than-life runt.

Dean Hayfield. He was very young, and really his face hadn't formed much yet. But it was a big full-moon of a face, and there was plenty of room for features to form.

Catherine January, the skull-maker with the former's hands. They were more distinguished than her face. Her face was doll-blank. Pretty, but nothing. The animation was in her voice and in her hands, and a little bit in her smile. Nobody could look at her face without wanting to try a hand at illuminating it.

F. Cyclone Boniface. He was fast and he was competent. He looked as ‘smart as a hickory thistle’ in the old country expression. He was a very tall boy with a very tall face.

Adriana Thistle. She had the wind-blown look like a tumble-weed or her name sake-thistle, and the rummy eyes of people who lust alot. She also had the slightly crooked nose of a rogue. And something else. And something else. You would take more third and fourth and fifth looks at her face than at any of them.

Stephen Tall, the mathematical student and gambler. He was very mobile of mouth and eyebrows. Adriana used to say that by looking at his mobilities one could tell which of his nine jokes he was going to tell.

These seven formed the right-hand leaf of the triptych. They obviously weren't finished, but they just as obviously were very good and could well become stunning.

Leon Yuri (1-212-1212). He looked very much like a man-sized rat who was trying to pass as a man, like one who did pass much of the time.

Cecelia Calca, the period ghost. She was dated. She was pretty, pretty enough for murder and legend. Nobody would fail to notice that she was nineteenth century. They made skulls just a little bit different, and they finished them with slightly different hair and features.

Doctor Fritz Otto. This was a man who did so many things that his features were always in a noble jumble. He didn't really have a face of his own. He had a thousand faces to mirror the thousand plots that he was always narrating in some form, and the thousand persons he had chosen to play the lead roles in those plots. ‘He is as handsome as it is permitted Germans to be,’ Dorothy Blue-Ice had said of him. ‘There are limits put on us, you know, to punish our pride.’ All of Fritz Otto's thousand faces were quite handsome, for he created them all himself.

The Invisible Man. He looked better as he was. The translucence and sometimes transparence was kind to him. He had rough places on his visage that reflected rough deeds that he had done long ago, but the screen of half-invisibility hid the defects most of all and gave him a shimmering mystery.

Il Trol. He was the ‘beauty’ of the fairy tale. ‘His face is like the State of Texas,” Adriana said once. ‘When he came into the Union, he had permission to have it divided into five faces whenever he wished, and each of them to have full representation.’ Oh no no, there is no way to describe Il Trol's fat and beautiful face.

The Troll's wife. She is the ‘beast’ of the fairy tale, but it has always been a troll-viewpoint tale. “There is no way for a woman coming from less than a hundred generations of beauties to be that beautiful,” Lucille Creightton had said of her with pointed envy. The Troll's wife had easy style, and had had it for much more than a hundred generations. Her face was next to the Troll's, and she was the one you would look at first and last.

The Count of San Angelo. Oh, he was from the old nobility, and was a distant cousin of the Troll's wife herself. The background of his face was darkened with age, and his own features had somehow suffered from it. One always wanted to put a little more light on that face to have a better look. But it was still dark.

These seven formed the left-hand leaf of the triptych. There was hardly to be found in this world twenty-one faces as excellent as these, for good or for bad. And if something was going to happen of great moment, it was to these people of the ‘shouting faces’ that it was going to happen.

“What, what, have these unlicked cubs of devil's advocates any more questions?” Stephen Tall asked. “I was always the one who objected before.”

“I have one more small question,” Raddigan Shrike said. “Leon Yuri here, Leon who may have another name, why does he have all his fingers crossed? I didn't know that a limited set of fingers could be crossed in so many different ways. But I remember now that his people are even more fetish-ridden than are humans. And why does he have his eyes closed in such tight concentration? Why is he praying such gloopy fetish-prayers to his fetish father? What words are you mumbling, Leon?”

“Don't let them kick it away now,” Leon mumbled half out loud. “Don't let them kick it away when they're so close. Don't let them muff it now.”

“Oh, we'll not muff it,” Pioneer Reventlo proclaimed. “We aren't about to kick it away. We have found the ordered glory that was in the beginning, and we are going to return to it.”

“I don't think that's quite what Leon means,” Adriana Thistle said. “He's of the enemy, you know.”

“Don't let them kick it away when they're so close,” Leon Yuri still mumbled the fetish orisons as he stumbled away with his eyes closed in the intensity of his concentration.

Then, one by one and three by three, they were all in the pavilion to celebrate their discoveries, to rhapsodize over them, and then to make hard valuation and assay and implementation of them.

The majordomo of the castle had told them that they should not go to the pavilion for the clear reason that there wasn't any pavilion, that it was an illusion from another time altogether and was not to be found in the present.

But they hooted at him, and they went with happy hooting to enjoy the pavilion which was the plainest thing on the landscape.

“We are absolutely correct that there was a grandness and completeness and ordered intellectuality and implementation in the beginning,” Pioneer Reventlo was saying to the world. “Why do I feel so well today? This is what they used to call having the bob-cat by the tail on a down-hill drag. We have the convincing evidence of it all now, and it has turned into living evidence under our hands. Now we must bring it to fuller life after its long sleep. We must reconstruct it all as it was before it eroded, and we must lead all creatures to it. This is our human birthright that we have rediscovered.”

Now?

Yes, now.

There was a slight click when they were all inside the pleasure pavilion, so faint a click that perhaps only one or two of them heard it.

“Oh damn, they closed the door,” Dorothy Blue-Ice yelped. “Desolation, desolation! It's all over and finished with us now.”

It takes some persons several seconds or even minutes to apprehend a new situation. Others do it immediately.

“In my Sealed Room, when the first hint of what has happened hit Erik Hoff, his eyes get as big as dinner plates,” the cinema master Doctor Fritz Otto said. “It is of very dramatic effect, the way he dilates his eyes.”

“What has happened?” Arthur Ransom asked. “Why do you, one by one, turn white in the face? Nothing has happened, has it?”

“Someone shut the door,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “That is the end of it. We are finished. There isn't any way out of this for us.”

“Il Trol, isn't this some of your under-the-rocks clownishness of several days ago?” Arthur asked with some degree of irritation. “Weren't you talking about somebody shutting the door of the pavilion, and we would be caught in spite of a hundred doorless doorways?”

“Some of my under-the-rocks clownishness, yes,” Il Trol said. “But I forgot, for a moment, which rock the truth was under. And our guards forgot to guard. I was swept up by some sort of mania a few minutes ago. I forget just what it was. Some enthusiasm.”

“Satisfied? Leon Yuri, alias 1-212-1212, are you satisfied?” Adriana Thistle asked bitterly.

“Yes, satisfied,” Leon said sleekly. “We have you all in the goat pen, and the gate is closed. Not a one of you sad cattle bolted. I was afraid that some of you would, and I dreaded that we might miss it after having it so close. But now we have you tight.”

“In the Sealed Room, Erik Hoff pounded on all the walls and rolled his eyes when he discovered that he was irrevocably trapped,” the cinema master Doctor Fritz Otto said. “That doesn't sound like much, but Gunter Schnurr was playing in the role of Erik Hoff. Gunter was the greatest eye-roller in cinema. We used to write scenes just around his eye-rolling. That ‘Oh-my-God-I'm-trapped!’ scene in the Sealed Room was one of the most dramatic pieces that I’ve ever directed. I believe that it would be fitting if Pioneer Reventlo carried on a little bit in that manner now.”

“Pioneer Reventlo won't be carrying on very much from now on,” Rosa Caprobianco said. And in fact Pioneer had become quite listless and dull, as if someone had turned off the light in him.

“Would it be quite useless to check all the doorless doorways for a way out?” Stephen Tall asked. “There is no reason why there still isn't a hundred ways out.”

“Oh yes, quite useless,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “This is the end of it.”

“We'll do it anyhow,” Adriana Thistle proposed with only a faint pretense of hope, and she pulled Stephen along with her to search.

Surprisingly it was the always-sane Joseph Abramswell who pounded on the walls and rolled his eyes. “Only in a thousand lifetimes does one touch such a thing!” Joseph bawled. “We touched it, but we let it get away. How have we failed?”

“We'll have plenty of time to figure out how we failed,” Lucille Creighton said. “Have we food here for a while? Have we water? Never mind, we will have several days, even if they are hungry and thirsty days, to figure out how we failed. How did they do it to us anyhow? How did they hypnotize us?”

“Oh, they did that with mirrors,” Jeffery Wind answered. “They did it by flashing lights in our eyes with mirrors. Very hypnotic.”

“Then there really is a very bright light somewhere in this?” Lucille asked.

“Very bright, very very bright,” Dorothy Blue-Ice agreed. “But we were mistaken about the location and time of that light. We thought that it was behind us. We were looking for it in the wrong direction, so we were patsies for the mirror trick.”

“There are hundreds of possibilities crowding into my mind,” Anabella Hillary said. “How about going through the floors to some of our recent digs? The ‘Powers That Oppose’ cannot be current with all of them. We have deep excavations, one of them under one corner of the pavilion. How about the towers? Even if we are buried, we cannot be buried as deeply over the tops of the towers as elsewhere. How about the water shafts and conduits, and the electrical services entrance? How about the gabled roofs? If they hold, they will fault and crack almost any dirt fill, and we could dig right up a new fault. How about Il Trol who can go through earth almost as if it were water?”

“We have been trapped by persons who will have ticked off all the possibilities,” Jeffery Wind said. “I myself could have devised an absolutely inescapable trap, and I am sure that our adversaries have done that. But we will go over it all just to admire the ingenuity with which we were taken.”

“No, there is no possibility of getting out,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “There was a change in everything when that little click sounded. There was an alteration in the light and temperature, in the pressure, and even in the composition of the air. The air now is stale with the staleness of the ages. There was a change in the year also, and probably in the century.”

“Maybe I am slow,” Raddigan Shrike said. “Yes, I find a change in almost everything, but just what has happened? Why are we scared? Why are we despondent? There was the sound of a little click, and several of you went into shock. And very soon, the rest of you followed into that shock and trauma. What has happened?”

“Oh, we're trapped,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “We can't get out of the pavilion, not ever.”

“Why in white goat whiskers can't we?” Raddigan demanded.

“Oh, we can't get out because there isn't any outside any longer,” Dorothy told him. “Oh that's what it amounts to. All the doors and windows and other exits of the pavilion are closed and locked tight, and the pavilion itself is in some sort of stasis. The majordomo of the castle was right when he said the pavilion was not really here, that it was all an illusion. Now the illusion has popped like a bubble.”

“I will find a way out of it,” Raddigan vaunted.

“Join the others who are searching then,” Dorothy smiled. “I bid you luck. I don't want to die here, myself, you know. Not of suffocation or starvation or thirst of claustrophobia. I always dreaded being buried alive, and now I am.”

But there were some pretty notional persons in the party, and for several hours they explored every notion of a way out of the pavilion. Then they drifted back into the big hall, wanting to be together all in one people, spooked by the unknown caul that contained them, unused to a world with no outside.

“The towers are gone,” Adriana Thistle said, coming back from one of her ventures. “They aren't collapsed, they aren't broken, they're just gone, and with no sign that they ever were a part of the building, with no sign of a place where they were ever joined on. I read the brochures that are around here, the little booklets that they give to the guests here and that relate a sort of history of the White Goat Hotel. The towers were only added on a little over a hundred years ago. We're further back than that then. And the building has had to be excavated and restored several times. It sinks badly into the land here, and the land has to be peeled back from it. In our peculiar present time, the pavilion is in an unexcavated state.”

“Why do you say ‘We're back further than that,” Adriana?” Raddigan asked. “And what did Dorothy or someone mean when she said ‘The pavilion itself is in some sort of stasis?’ And, a while ago, ‘There was a change in the year also, and perhaps in the century’? What kind of talk is this?”

“Did you have a deprived childhood, Raddigan,” Dorothy asked, “that you weren't acquainted with these things, the great machines? You must know a little bit about the contrivances of fiction and of the future. The pavilion, in every line and element of it, is a time machine. I'm sure that most of us recognized that immediately. It's a real one too, so there is nothing flashy about it. It does not move through millions of years with all sirens shouting. It moves with a click and a whisper, and for only small distances at a jump, fracturing the whole fabric of the universe, but doing no real damage. It will move through its small span, dozens or hundreds of thousands of years, if there is any reason that it should.”

“And what is this ‘stasis’ business?” Raddigan wanted to know. “I know what the word means, but you're not using it that way.”

“Oh, the time stasis sets an object outside of time completely. It puts it into neutral gear timewise. And spacewise also, since they are interlocked. A thing in stasis isn't anywhere, nor is it at any time.”

Stephen Tall and Adriana Thistle were enthusiastic when they returned from further exploration of the pavilion. They were impressed and in admiration.

“It's masterly, simply masterly,” Stephen cried. “It's a perfect job. They haven't overlooked a single thing. Attention to every detail, that's what. We can't get out. We can't even look out, not one centimeter. Really we can't even imagine ‘out’ now, the way they’ve got it fixed. It's as if there isn't —”

“As if there isn't any outside,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said. “Exactly. It's in a condition of stasis, as I was telling the young fry. There really isn't any outside. The whole cosmos disappears, and there is nothing anywhere except the ‘alpha object’, in this case the pavilion. Oh, don't look at me as if I made that up, Stephen. Joseph Abramswell here made it up. He has the equations to prove it. And his equations are accepted.”

“Well, does the cosmos know that it has disappeared?” Anabella asked.

“No, the cosmos doesn't have an inkling of it,” Abramswell said. “Well, the cosmos isn't here, so how could it know what is going on? But the cosmos doesn't disappear from time or space. It's still there, if we were in a position where we could rationally say ‘still there’. The cosmos has only disappeared from the time stasis that envelopes us. So we are isolated.”

“Forever?” Raddigan Shrike asked.

“No. It can't be forever. A time stasis will decay, after a while, or perhaps before a while. We don't know where the point of re-entry will be, since we don't know exactly who is running the show.”

“But we will re-enter somewhere back in time then?” Raddigan asked.

“Or maybe somewhere forward in time,” Joseph said. “I'm not sure that our treacherous enemies have control of that. I'm not sure who does have control. Our enemies, or those people not in accord with us, have set us off in a sinking boat, and they are pretty sure that we will never reach any land except the bottom. We don't know much about the situation because we don't know who put us into it.”

“Sure we know,” Raddigan said. “Leon here is one of those who put us into the situation. Let's pull a few fact out of him, by the roots.”

“Yes, it is time that we separated the phenomena from the people around here,” Stephen said. “All right, Leon, you ratty little phenomenon, I'll just have a hold of you and —”

But Stephen wasn't able to take a hold of Leon. Leon Yuri (they had all expected it of the grubby little monstrosity) was not human, and he did not obey the laws of humans. He did not seem to obey the laws of materiality either. He looked at them all with a sort of ratty arrogance.

“You are all in the pen now, and the gate is closed on you,” he said. “All of you sad cattle. We have you all.” Leon sniggered. Then he was gone.

“One done,” Stephen said. “How about you, Invisible Man?” he asked that translucent person. “Are you a phenomenon or a man?”

“I have always been a man,” the person Cedric Sinclair de Orsatti who preferred to be called ‘The Invisible Man’ said. “I suspect that I am an imperfectly dead man, which is to say a ghost. But a human ghost.”

“Can you come and go, out of here and back?”

“I think so. I don't understand this ‘time stasis’ talk, but it may be the usual ambient of ghosts that you're talking about. Yes, I can leave here, but I like the company of you all.”

“Can you go out from here and go get help for us?”

“I can try. But I have trouble communicating with people. Unless I meet someone as receptive as Jeffery Wind, I probably can't make my presence known to anyone at all.”

The Invisible Man went out of the pavilion. It looked easy the way he did it.

“Where do you think we'll come out of the stasis, Jeffery?” Lucille asked.

“We likely will not come out at all, except in a mummified condition. But the pavilion will come out, right about where it went in spacewise, and possibly three hundred and seventy-five days later in time.”

“Why? Is there some special value to three hundred and seventy-five days?”

“I think so. It's a special in-joke at least. Some special value to three, and to three hundred and seventy-five, and to several other intervals that are resonant to these. They fit the equation that I am putting together now. They seem to be a group-constant. I'm calling it ‘Wind's Floating Constant’.”

“Is there plenty of food and water?” Arthur Ransom asked.

“Oh, there's likely enough food for three hundred and seventy-five days,” Stephen Tall said with a crooked grin, “but a lot of it might be tiresome and bland and not fitting for such as us. We would be down to canned fare for at least part of it. There isn't any workable refrigeration now; but all temperatures (both inside and outside of boxes) may well remain where they are now if (which I take to be the case) there isn't any outside world of space for temperatures to dissipate in. There is enough water to drink, but not enough (somebody be praised!) for daily showers. This may bring us down to our essentiality. We will wash a little less, and we will have to get rid of our daily guilts in other ways. I am sure that the modern hyper-washing wasn't practiced in Reventlo's ‘Golden Age’. There is plenty of wine to drink and —”

“Remember that I will be drinking wine for two,” Catherine January said.

“— and plenty of grain for bread. The hotel always prided itself on making its own bread from its own flour ground on the premises from its own grain. The grain is here. We won't get cold if, as I suppose, the pavilion is a temperature-closed unit now. In any case, there's a lot of cut wood on hand. I believe that several loads of it were stowed in yesterday. We can keep a roaring fire in the fireplace all three hundred and seventy-five days of it. It shouldn't affect the temperature one way or the other. That fireplace never did. It's a magic fireplace that we have here, you know.”

“Is there enough to read?” Joseph Abramswell asked. “Ah, people, I am sorry that I was the one who went to pieces and pounded on the walls when I found that we were trapped. I had my hopes set on something else.”

“About eight thousand books,” Anabella Hilary said. “Some of them look interesting. Some of them look quite learned. Not many of them are trash. I shall learn Basque, and then Eskimo. There are manuals on each in the tourists' rooms that haven't been cleaned out yet. One can learn a lot in three hundred and seventy-five days, or a resonant part of that. Threat of boredom is the greatest teacher in the world. And you brainy ‘berzirk’ players can always play ‘berzirk’.”

“How about you, Cecelia Calca?” Stehpen Tall asked. “Are you a phenomenon or a person? We want to be sure of everyone.”

“I am a person, but I am what the Invisible Man called an imperfectly dead person or a ghost. But I am not a phenomenon. I won't be drawing full rations here. I don't eat, and I don't drink water. But I do drink a little wine sometimes. Things would hardly be worthwhile without it. And yes, I believe that I can come and go, inside and outside the walls of the pavilion, but I would not be able to go beyond the precincts of the White Goat Valley. I am nailed to the valley by my own blood. I still intend to tell all of you the complete story of my life and death.”

“Yes, we will have three hundred and seventy-five days to hear your story, Cecelia,” Stephen said. “But could you somehow procure help for us from outside?”

“I don't know. All the people who come to the White Goat Valley stay at the pavilion. And the pavilion isn't here any more. We're in it but it isn't here. And what few people actually live in the valley, they shy away from me because I'm a spettra, a ghost. They say, ‘Now, now, Cecelia, we respect your ways, we just don't want you to come too close to us.’ And when I do come closer and try to talk to them to some purpose, they run away from me. Well, I'll go out and have a look around.” And Cecelia went out of the pavilion.

“Pioneer J. Reventlo!” Stephen Tall barked out suddenly, “are you a person or a phenomenon? We have to be certain of everybody.”

“Why do we have to be certain?” Dorothy asked. “I'm not sure that it makes very much difference.”

“Pioneer? Pioneer?” several others of them questioned this. “But Pioneer Reventlo is the head of our expedition-and-excavation, in name at least. And he has been a leading light among us until — well, until quite lately. How could you question him?”

“I question him because he has been dimming out ever since the door snapped shut on us,” Stephen said. “And he had already lost a part of his brightness from the time that we first came to the White Goat Valley. I question him because, as I now see it for the first time, there has always been something lacking in him. Oh, he's been impressive. Everyone has always said how impressive he was. But just what was it that was so impressive about him? Why isn't he impressive now? What are you, Pioneer, a person or a process?”

“Oh, I'm sure that I'm a person, boy,” Pioneer Reventlo said, but he was smaller than he had been before and not nearly as impressive. “I seem to be pretty nearly empty now. There was always something that kept me filled up before.”

“Pioneer Reventlo was always sustained by projections that we didn't question too closely,” Joseph Abramswell said. “ ‘Whoever is unsustained, let him throw the first spear’ we used to say. Now, apparently, the projections that sustained him have been cut off, as everything else has been cut off from the exterior world. He is a man now who is deprived of a peculiar support system that he had depended on. Each of us has his own quirks, and a change of conditions might leave any of us bankrupt in our persons, as Reventlo seems to be now.”

“To be sustained principally by exterior projections is to be a phenomenon rather than a person,” Stephen said. “I don't believe that Reventlo is a person at all. I must pursue this matter further, and other matters also.” Stephen had an odd and hurrying look on him. He had become one of the older persons in the expedition in just an hour or two.

“We are fixed alright on chess and checker sets, darts, backgammon boards, dice playing, cards, poker chips?” Arthur Ransom asked.

“I believe that there are plenty of all those things,” Joseph Abramswell muttered. “But if we descend to any of them (except ‘berzirk’ with the playing cards), then we have already become less than people, and Stephen Tall might have to rephrase his questions a little bit.”

“Cigars?” Ransom asked. “Have we enough?”

“We have or we haven't,” Abramswell said. “All the cigar stores are out of business to us. Oh, what are we to do now!”

“Take a break for a few hours,” Doctor Fritz Otto said. “An afternoon nap will often clear a life-shock away. And then movies in the evening.”

“We have no power. The projector won't work,” Ransom said.

“We will have movies this evening,” Movie Master Fritz Otto said. “Where are Cyclone and Catherine?”

“They're measuring the pavilion,” Ransom said. “I don't understand why.”

“Oh yes, the results should be interesting,” Fritz Otto smiled. “Could they measure the sword of Damocles also? It's hanging over us.”

Chapter Seven

Prometheans who taller flames would crave

Will harried be by stridency of throats,

And tricks of ghosts, and by the hoofs of goats,

And sorcery into elliptic grave.

Down With the Dead Men
 — Cruse Carlyle

There were some indications that the pavilion was buried under volcanic rock and soil. There were other indications that they were under the sea. The pounding of the ocean could surely be heard around them and above. But probably these were illusions, the pseudo-sounds and vibrations that accompany stasis. The best guess was that there was no outside to the pavilion.

And no one took an afternoon nap to cure the life-shock they had suffered.

“If we are outside of time, how come time passes so slowly,” Raddigan Shrike asked reasonably enough. “And I myself have no inclination to grapple with the problem quite yet. The problem has smeared himself with bear grease, and it will be a messy wrestle when finally we join it. What time — if that word still holds here — do the movies start?”

So the movie-master started the movies a little earlier than he had intended to, and he mined his own brain for selected short and long subjects to project.

The first of the movies which Doctor Fritz Otto presented that evening was announced with flame fanfare. The fireplace rather than the cinema screen was used. The name of the movie, spelled out in garish flame, was Der Phoenix. Smoke and ashes and resurrection! That colophon at the beginning of the movie was rare and moving art. And all the credits were given to Doctor Fritz Otto, author, adapter, director, choreographer, photographer, narrator. Fritz would sit and chuckle as he projected it, and then he would add still another credit.

Doctor Fritz sat easy and smiling. He was a man who could project with great power but without strain. It was a comfortable intensity that he had. Doctor Fritz was a dynamo, apparently at rest, his high speed rotation indicated only by the low humming that came from him (the tune that he hummed unconsciously may have been the old soldiers' song ‘Wir Lieben die Stürme’). And his quiet dynamic activity was also indicated by two green pilot lights (his two green eyes) that indicated that the projection was ‘all go’.

And then the first scene opened. There was a giant and ancient bird flying out of the Arabian Desert, a bird that was leaking air badly and was going to sink, a bird that had one broken pinion and hardly any feathers at all; and it was pursued in flight by leprous ghost birds and flying snakes. And yet the giant and ancient bird coming out of the desert was a ‘Celebration Bird’.

You do not know what a ‘Celebration Bird’ is? That was the question that was being asked by the ‘Blooming Desert’ musical sequence that now became dominant. And the music was intending to answer it. And then there were old film-clip flashbacks from the corridors of Fritz Otto's mind, spectacular ‘living color’ clips from the time when the bird was still young. The clips showed the great eras of the Arabian Califs, and then the Phoenix was a youthful bird, a gala bird, an entertainment bird, a talisman bird. The desert was green then. The apricots and olives and figs and dates were all in bloom, and at the same time they were all loaded with ripe fruit. They were celebrating the fertility of the world.

The dromedaries were as rapid as racehorses in that green world, and the men were coursing them. And the horses were of a beauty and nobility to be found nowhere else in the world. The whole earth was mentally and physically jumping with life.

The five highest arts, mathematics, belly dancing, astronomy, Damascus-sword tempering, and lyric poetry formed a five-pointed star of learning that shone in the sky even in the daytime and inspired the whole land. (Doctor Fritz was projecting with elements of spoofing and exaggeration and satire also.) And the virile sports had also become high arts. At free-style wrestling, at free-style arrow shooting, at tilting with the long spear on horseback, at feasting, and at dynamic domestic transactions (sometimes called wifery), the men of the green flourishing desert showed that they had no equals.

Nor had they equals in the strong music of their voices. At reciting epic poetry, at reciting from the Book of the Way and the Life, at reciting the ‘Nine Hundred Entertainments of the Calif’, at reciting the ‘Voyages On the Arabian Ocean’, at reciting High and True History, there were never such soundful and talented reciters.

There was a little anecdote about the High and True History that projectionist Fritz Otto introduced here. One brave man was told that his rendition of High and True History was incomplete, that it lacked two lines for its poetic balance and fullness. “I will have to go and make those two lines then,” the man said. He slung his sword, mounted his horse, and rode away. One day later he returned on his blood-flecked horse, holding his blood-dripping sword, and he declaimed the additional two lines that he had just manufactured. This is the way that High and True History is made.

This was when everything was burgeoning in the land, and when the cobwebs were thick across the doorways of the lawyers' tents and the judges' booths. This was when strangers might ask the people where their flag was, and they would point to the Phoenix flying in the sky and say ‘That is our flag, the highest flying flag in the world’. It was the Golden Age when the Phoenix was the Celebration Bird, the Gala Bird, the Entertainment Bird, and the Talisman Bird.

But now the Phoenix, crossing the Red Sea and coming to land in Upper Egypt, plagued by ghost birds and scavenger birds and flying snakes, had his bones bursting through his featherless skin, and he was dying of old age.

The cinema-master Fritz Otto projected this on the screen that was the fire in the fireplace with only a few words, but with a rolling panorama of sight and sound. You loved the ugly dying bird in his fallen majesty and his maimed and flopping death. You loved him, but you didn't want to get very near him.

“Now that the ‘Golden Age’ is past, do you have any regrets?” a person (it was a person partly covered in feathers and partly with scales) asked the dying Phoenix.

“You are confused,” the parched, skin-and-bones bird conveyed. “The ‘Golden Age’ is not past. It begins tomorrow.”

And then there was the sheer spectacle as the fire was lighted and the ‘Death and Resurrection’ cantata of Mozart lifted its voice. The real name of this sequence was ‘The Resurrection of the Phoenix’. Doctor Fritz was very good at projecting this part. If he had not been a great movie-mogul, he would have been a great director of symphony orchestras. Symphony directing was his own second love, and he was especially good at it now when he was both the orchestra and the director.

This was looping, soaring, swelling, bonfire-into-dawnburst music. But even by Doctor Fritz the ‘Golden Age’ could only be hinted at. And the noon-time of it was far beyond even his genius. That blooming desert bit that had preceded this, that had not been the real golden age. The age itself was in the future always. The real name of the blooming desert bit was ‘Prelude and Intuition of the Golden Age’. And the orchestration ended with the ‘Fulfillment Fugue’.

That had been a good little movie short subject, a superior travelogue with whimsy and beauty. Fritz Otto was superb in his color-and-sound creations, and in his surging ‘narrations with-and-without words’. He projected all of this from his ruddy and short-haired head, the ‘magic pumpkin’ as Dorothy called it.

Then there was a little intermission, and they talked.

“The measurements, Cyclone and Catherine, how did they come out?” Joseph Abramswell asked. “What are the dimensions of our craft — ah — of our trap and tomb?”

“Ah, the pavilion is a hundred and thirty-seven meters long, twenty-three meters wide, and fourteen meters high,” Cyclone said, half-defiant, half-embarrassed.

“Perfect,” Joseph smiled. “Is it not perfect? It's the confirmation of a lop-sided guess that has been running wild among some of you young people here. It is so perfect that I suspect subjective influence, even though that is impossible with all our approved measuring equipment. Is it not impossible, Cyclone? I thought, when you first began, that I heard the whistling protest from your measurer. That would indicate that you were trying to influence it and had been caught at it. I believed, in fact, that it was giving the response ‘Absolute measurement is not possible on the inside of a stasis; forget it.’ But then you were gone for an hour longer, and I heard no more of the whistled protest.”

“Oh, the measurer wouldn't cooperate at all,” Catherine January said. “It did respond ‘All measurements must be figured out without the use of a unit of measurement. Measurements here are for entertainment only and are not valid’. But then we found an old meter stick in the little museum among the mummy cases, and we used that. That's what took us so long.”

“Yes, yes, there are not two more subjective persons on board this ship — ah — in this pavilion, than you and Cyclone, Catherine,” Joseph said. “Did I not hear a protest note when someone tried to get evidence about the outside of our hull — ah — about the outside of the pavilion?”

“That was Raddigan and myself,” Annabella Hilary said. “Yes, we did try to find out just what sort of insulation material it takes to put a complex object like this into stasis. But our own through-the-wall-pop-scope carried on as if we were doing something dishonest. And then we found, in the same little museum among the mummy cases, an old and unmonitored device that was meant to be put on the outside of a cheese vat to give a reading on the cheese deposit on the inside of the vat, this without one having to lift the cover of the vat to disturb the ‘patina of coagulation’ of the working cheese. That's what the explanation of the device that was printed on the card said.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” Abramswell beamed. “Our ancestors, in the long interval between the Reventlo Golden Age and the present time, had some wonderful devices. And they were highly subject to mind control.”

“I once owned stock in the ‘Ancient Calabrian Goat-Cheese Company’,” Rosa Caprobianco said. “I know how very subjective is ancient Calabrian goat-cheese, as well as all the instruments used in making it. Did you know that the old cheese reader such as you are using, when placed against the belly of a woman, could tell the sex of her unborn child? Well, what did the old cheese reader tell us about the outside of our hull — or shell — or whatever? How are we insulated to put us into time stasis?”

“Oh, our hull is double-pitched,” Raddigan Shrike said, “and sheathed with wood and rosin (or possibly with rosin-wood), and interlarded with fiber. ‘Rosin-wood, tight with fibre, and covered with pitch inside and out’ — that was the reading we got when I attached my own device ‘The Raddigan Redactor-Verbalizer’ to the cheese reader.”

“Wonderful, wonderful,” Abramswell said, “and absolutely unverifiable. It really reminds me of a case of no other than Doctor Otto. Doctor Fritz Otto, I know now where I heard of you before, for I am not knowledgeable about cinema matters. You are the movie expert who was called in on the studies of cocoon life of the Papilio karna, the Javanese butterfly, the beautiful swallowtail. You were to join into the investigations of cocoon dreams, and to aid in reconstructing them. But there was some doubt about the authenticity of your reconstructions.”

“A completely authentic reconstruction of anything would starve to death, Joseph,” Doctor Fritz Otto said. “that's what we say in the trade. Well, the Karna do some really kaleidoscopic dreaming when they're in the cocoon. For a fact, there's nothing else for them to do there. And they were even a bit organized about the dreaming. I myself learned a few things about projection from them. We learned that a single Karna has rather dull-colored dreams. A half-dozen of them within the radius of a meter will have much more colorful dreams, and they will tend to have the same dreams. A score or so of them within a small radius (though there is no good way they can communicate with each other except extra-mentally) will set up a regular theatre district. Joseph, they were having moving picture shows in their cocoons! In a score of them there will be three or four very good projectionists, and the shows they project are amazing. The colors (all of our data were lifted from the minds of the pupa by brain scan) were superb, as might be expected from incipient butterflies. Of course they would dream of colors! But the music (and this was totally unexpected) was also wonderful and moving. And then we come to the controversial area, the organized representation. They were superb here also, but they were not human. And in my translations I erred on the side of enthusiasm. The plots, the story-lines of the short plays, the role-casting, the mimicry, the sheer drama, these took control of me. Here was something new in stage craft. It was my interpreting of the plots and episodes into human terms that was called inauthentic by some, but it was as authentic as any inter-species translation can ever be. My own movie The Magic Kaleidoscope was partly based on the cinema lifted from the Karna pupae. Like all of the dream-cinemas of them it was largely Cinderella motif, and was explosive in its power. And yet I had unfairly been given the name of a cheater.”

“Poor butterfly,” Catherine January said, and caressed Doctor Fritz Otto's skull. And people often called Doctor Fritz the ‘Butterfly’ after this.

“Folks in cocoons do enjoy good shows, do they Fritz?” Adriana asked.

“Indeed they do,” the movie-master maintained.

“I like that,” Adriana said, “because we are people in cocoons now. We are waiting our long cocoon waits and dreaming of resurrection. I am, at least. We do all realize that we are in cocoons, don't we? I hope all the shows are good ones. And I know that they will be, Doctor Butterfly.”

Then Doctor Fritz Otto began to project another Selected Short Subject onto the screen that formed itself in front of the fireplace.

The short subject was Buried Alive, a documentary combined with pseudo-documentary, and with emotional overtones. Nobody has asked how Doctor Fritz Otto had this power of projecting images and scenes. Such power is not common. There were perhaps a dozen people in the world who could do it, for very short spurts, and with great strain. No one else could do it with such ease and scope, not for such intricate pieces of such length, not with such warmth and intensity of sound and color and feeling. Nobody else had been able to project with such validity. With Fritz Otto it was a new breakthrough talent. But what he did now surpassed anything he had even done before.

He projected sheer feeling without the help of sound or color.

He projected total darkness. There was a variety of lights in the main hall of the pavilion, and all of the people were seated in front of the big fireplace full of indubitable flame. The fireplace went dark. The candles and olive-oil lamps and yew-wood torches went dark. Certain ornamental phosphorus pieces went dark. Fritz Otto, by taking thought, had projected total darkness throughout the pavilion.

Then he projected the feeling of horrible apprehension. There is an Indian pictogram for ‘apprehension’ that shows a five-headed snake on the inside of a person, eating simultaneously of the liver, the greater intestine, the heart, the trachea, and the brain. This was the same apprehension Fritz Otto projected onto all of them, erupting terror, horrible despondency, total degradation.

Then Fritz Otto projected the ghostly and insane realization: “I am buried alive!” And the noiseless gasp of horror raled through every one of them. All tried to sit up. Most of them had already been sitting up, but now it was a different case. And when they tried to sit up in the total darkness, they encountered, from the insides, the lids and the sides of their own coffins, the coffins that weren't there. But they were there. Doctor Fritz Otto had projected them there.

There was sobbing strangulation. There was nightmare-shouting and tongue-swallowed groanings that could not find themselves into words. There was ineffective pounding and clawing of the coffins' velvet interiors. It was predominantly the moaning, the moaning, the moaning though, and the low sound of hair rising up, and teeth-chatter and whimpering. There was fear like nothing else and abandonment. To die in the open was one thing. To come alive in a death-sealed coffin was quite another. This was the ultimate strangulation of horror, and there was no immunity to it.

This went on for too long. It was traumatic. It was permanently crippling to the spirit. At least one person of them decided to perform a, to her, act of justified self-destruction, to rupture her own heart and to haemorrhage her own brain. It was very close there.

Then the lights came on again, soon enough to prohibit madness in all of them, but not soon enough to avoid its shriveling nearness. The glow and flame of the fireplace was bright again. The candles, the lamps, the torches, the ornamental phosphorescence were all illuminated once more. And gone were the straiting interiors of the coffins and the terror of them.

But Doctor Fritz Otto looked puzzled.

“Who?” he asked. Then “Oh,” he said.

“Oh, I turned off the dark, Fritz,” Dorothy Blue-Ice spoke calmly. “A very few seconds of that were enough. There was damage. There would have been death.”

“Flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, are you also the sharer of my new powers?” Fritz asked. “Yes, you are. I don't realize how much I overdo it. I suppose that we should have a short intermission after that one.”

But how had Dorothy turned off the dark and broken the effects, when those effects were all projections of Doctor Fritz's mind?

“What is the name of the butterfly that has the poisonous sting on its tail?” Dean Hayfield asked in rather bad humor.

“There is no such butterfly,” Joseph Abramswell told him. “It is only a legend or a biological spoof.”

“Yes, there is such a butterfly,” Dean insisted. “He does have a legendary flair, but he exists and can be classified. I classify him a little bit differently now.”

Oh, several of the people looked a little bit pale and distraught but they recovered quickly. Each one showed a ‘who, me?’ look if it should be implied that oneself had moaned or pounded on sides or lid or panicked. No, none of them seemed really upset for very long, except Pioneer Reventlo, and he no longer had much balance or resiliency.

But Raddigan Shrike did have his nails broken, and his finger ends were red and black with surface and impacted blood. He had clawed in wild spasms. And Anabella Hilary had material souvenirs of the adventure. She had streamers and shreds of rich cream-gray velvet, streaked with bright blood. She had held on to these pieces from her own projected coffin interior.

“I wish I could have this velvet analyzed and traced,” she said. “I would like to have a little police detective work done on it to find the manufacturer.”

“I wish it could be done also,” Doctor Fritz said. “I would be very curious to know who did manufacture it.”

“It was all good and dirty fun,” Anabella said, “and nobody hurt except somebody who was already hurt.” She looked at Pioneer Reventlo when she spoke that last phrase. Pioneer hadn't really known where he was for some time. Now he was still making clawing motions with his hands. He thought that he was still in the coffin or ark, and he wanted out. But the rest of them hid their shock.

Cecelia Calca came in, as she did about once a day.

“Oh, you people look more tense and serious every time I come,” she said. “I worry that you are not having enough fun, the way you're locked in this cage here. I still want to tell my story to everyone. Aren't you now what they call a captive audience? None of you could get very far from me. I think that if I am able to tell my story to a group and have the sympathy from them, that I might make a transference and be no longer nailed to the White Goat Valley by my own blood. Now I have an idea. Doctor Fritz, why can I not tell my story in the form of a movie show? The name of the show would be The Thing In the Wall, a movie which you could produce and project here, and in which I could play myself.”

“We might possibly find a place for it, Cecelia, on the late, late slot some night,” the movie-master said. “What do the people on the outside say of us and the pavilion? What does it look like to them?”

“From the outside, there isn't any pavilion here now,” Cecelia said. “And nobody remembers any of you people, except Il Trol whom they remember, and his short visits here, and his long disappearances between them. He is on a long disappearance now, they say. And they remember Rosa when she was a little girl, but they don't remember her being here recently. They shy off from talking about the pavilion, and they say that they don't remember it at all. And I don't believe that the people in the White Goat Valley do remember it, not as being here regularly, not as being here in the daytime anyhow. But there is a booger-tale of something a little bit like it, a gazebo or kiosk where spooks dance and carry on at certain nights of the year.

“If you have me on a late, late slot, maybe the people will not attend on me properly, or appreciate my story as they should. They might be sleepy and cranky and wandering. Then I would still be nailed to this place.”

“Possibly we can move it up from a late, late slot to a late slot,” Doctor Fritz said. “And now we will have another Selected Short Subject.”

There was a stentorian sound of trumpets, and then there was a stentorian voice announcing the theme of the new presentation.

“It does not matter how big the grave is,” the voice boomed as if it were coming from a very large grave or an echo-chamber. “If you are buried alive in it, then you are buried alive. The grave may be as big as the world. It may be a world, your world.”

There were panoramas (those things that Doctor Fritz did so well; when, on the last day his head would be opened up, bushels and bushels of panoramas would gush out of it), panorama of all the people in the world tightening up in alarm and apprehension. They looked over their own hurrying shoulders. What was it that was threatening them, and where was it? And where did that giant voice come from?

And then there came the voice even larger, double stentorian and fraught with doom. There was no doubt where this voice came from. It came out of the sky:

“The World is Buried Alive!” the voice thundered and lightninged. “The sky is the grave. Nobody can get out!”

And then consternation ran like ten billion plague-carrying rats through all the limits of the world.

“We're buried alive, we're buried alive!” the people howled and driveled. Some of the people had the same faces as the people who were watching this, or take-offs of those same faces. There were goofy versions of the faces of Il Trol and Jeffery and the Count of San Angelo and Catherine and Stephen. “We're buried alive! Nobody can get out!” these fun faces bawled.

And then all the newspapers and TVs in the world were blaring it and driveling it. This took flash-shots from all sorts of printing and broadcasting areas, and hearing and seeing the rolling headlines. Hot-color, luminescent headlines screamed The World Is Buried Alive. Scientists Seek Way Out. World Leaders Plead With People to Remain Calm.

Ah well, it was burlesque really, the only thing that Doctor Fritz did badly. He was ham. He milked and he bilked. And then he got very extravagant in his projections.

There was a line of people, pushing and shoving in driven hurry, but still maintaining a sort of line in the human way. Line-buckers were railed against, scuffled with and sometimes punched. The line was waiting for elevators in the lobby of a large building. One elevator came, and people pushed and shoved to get on it. And finally the loaded elevator shut its doors on all who were not in, and ascended with its ‘overload’ lights flashing. But it had made hardly a dent in the surging line that waited.

Cut to above then, and the elevator disgorges its too-many passengers onto the roof-garden. These fought to get to the iron fence around the roof, but other persons were crowded ahead of them. People, in swarm after swarm of them, were climbing the iron fence and leaping to their deaths. Well, wouldn't you do the same thing if that voice was thundering over your head ‘The World Is Buried Alive. The sky is its grave. Nobody can get out’? Welders were cutting out sections of the guard-fence to allow more persons to jump to their deaths faster. That showed that someone was still thinking.

Down in the street, a new extra was out with the headlines Scientists Say That The World Was Always Buried Alive. Nothing Has Changed. Persons caught one newsboy who was trying to sell these papers to them. They poured gasoline on him and set him afire. They would show people that things had changed.

And the bodies continued to rain down from above. ‘The World Is Coming to An End.’ Well then, cheat it, cheat it!

One enterprising man had set up a booth with the sign I Shoot You Between The Eyes For One Dollar. The world is buried alive! Neat shooting done. There was a line of people here too. Each person, as he came to the head of the line, gave the man a dollar. The man shot the person between the eyes and ended his worries. And then the next person would step up to the head of the line, and in turn he would be shot between the eyes.

“The world is buried alive,” came the big voice from the sky.

“Do you give credit?” a slight man asked the man with the gun. “I have a check coming Tuesday. Could you shoot me on credit?”

“I just can't do it,” the man with the gun said. “Step aside, please. The next person with a dollar.”

“This skit is a turkey!” came a big voice half as high as the sky. It was not the same sky voice that had been heard before. It was the voice of Jeffery Wind, not one of Doctor Fritz's projected voices. “Cut it, Fritz, cut it!” Jeffery said.

So Doctor Fritz Otto ended the skit The World is Buried Alive. He filled in the rest of the time slot with travel shots of the Julian Alps. Fritz was very good on projecting travel shots. He was good at everything except burlesque, and in Germany even his burlesque went well.

If you're buried alive, you might as well have a little fun out of it. Well, they had all become smilingly thoughtful, and they were having a measure of good fun as their deaths closed in on them. The cocoons had begun to form around them already, a thread of silk here, a thread there. They were still invisible cocoons, and they didn't restrict yet. But they had begun to form.

Jeffery Wind had been experimenting with an artificial air, for their old air might give out before anything else did. The pavilion was getting stale already. Oh, there was lots of things to make air out of. They could pull the carbon out of the air and use it all again, they could get oxygen out of almost everything in the pavilion, but they could not recycle these things forever. What time there was, it was against them.

“The mummies in the pavilion here, is there a history on them?” Raddigan Shrike asked one day.

“Oh yes, sure,” Anabella said. “A sort of one printed up for the guests who stay here. It says that the mummies were found right here in the pavilion which was a cave then. I don't understand that part of it. The mummies were found on couches, dead apparently of starvation, but they were not harmed in any way. And this had never been a starvation country around here.”

“Then there has been other game taken in this same trap,” Stephen Tall cried. “We are not the first. So they failed, our mummies there. They probably weren't as expert as we are. That is nothing to worry about that they failed, and that incident should not influence the odds on ourselves. I believe that the betting now should be no less than a hundred to one against us. Cecelia, can you go out and get bets with someone at a hundred to one? Where is that ghost? She's gone again.”

The final episode of the Vivian Oldshoe and Curtis Bald Flight Into Death serial was almost missed. Persons like Doctor Fritz had even said that there would be no more episodes of the drama, that it was finished. The neglected end of it came on about the third night of the movies, after most of the persons had come to realize the problems they were in and were not so much distracted by the Fritz Otto projections as they had been before. Most of the people were asleep.

Only Anabella Hilary was awake. And Raddigan Shrike was half-awake.

Vivian Oldshoe burst into the pavilion, flying through the air, landing, rolling, and tumbling onto her feet again. She had surely swung in somehow on her favorite vehicle, the swinging vine.

“Oh, thank Heaven you are all safe inside this blessed trap!” Vivian cried out. “We enticed you here every way that we could think of. I was afraid all the time that some of you would slip out of it. This is where it all happens, you know. There isn't any way you can get out, is there? Caught, caught, caught! We're happy about that. Now we can die happy.”

“No, wait, Vivian, wait!” Anabella cried out. “Don't die, Vivian. Wake up everybody! Vivian's here!”

But no one would wake up except Raddigan, and he was only half-awake.

“That isn't Vivian,” he said. “It's only a cardboard poster that they used to put up for their acts. It belongs to Dean Hayfield. He was stuck on Vivian.”

“No, no, she's real. Wake up everybody!” Anabella cried. “It's Vivian and she's dying.”

“She died last winter, back in the States,” Raddigan said. “They found her body there, and that of Curtis. They were murdered. Go back to sleep, Anabella. That's part of a cardboard poster that you have in your hand. And you're hallucinating.”

“Yeah, it's the end of me,” Vivian said. “You're the only one I wanted to say goodbye to anyhow, Anabella.”

“Don't go Vivian, I love you,” Anabella said.

“I'll show you a trick, Anabella,” Vivian said. “The last one.”

This would be good. Though she had suffered, Vivian now showed a flash of her roguish humor. With her cardboard hands, Vivian tore pieces off of her irregular poster and put them in her cardboard mouth and ate them. She did that until there was nothing left but her cardboard hands and her cardboard mouth.

“You can't make a mutation jump without breaking a few categories, Anabella,” Vivian said. She ate her hand with what mouth she had left, and she was gone.

Fountains of The Deep was possibly the greatest movie that Fritz Otto ever made. He borrowed extensively from it for one particularly strong presentation that he made one fateful night in the pavilion. And he also borrowed extensively from his movie The Magic Kaleidoscope which interpreted the pupa dreams and cinema of the incipient Papilio karna butterflies of Java. He himself had not realized that the two movies were both fragments of a still-unrealized masterwork.

Creatures in cocoons have a sense that their cocoons are in motion. This statement was projected in the fire of the fireplace that was now functioning as a cinema screen in the pavilion. They have the feeling that their cocoons are traveling strongly in space and time on a voyage of immeasurable importance.

Of course being in a cocoon is the same as being buried alive, but the cocoon-grave must have the feel of being alive and in motion. There would be no joy at all in it otherwise.

The pavilion had become a master-cocoon, and — (Doctor Fritz Otto was no longer the solo projectionist of these mysterious movies: Jeffery Wind, Dorothy Blue-Ice, and Raddigan Shrike had joined him in the composite projection), and it was a cocoon in motion by an allegorical sort of duality. It was the pavilion. And it was also a great ship of the identical dimensions of the pavilion.

It is said that the paradox of motion requires that a thing must be in two places at the same time if it is to move. But there is an alternative. It can also be two things at the same time. Then it can move. The pavilion was two things at the same time.

The sound of the crashing ocean! The pounding and roaring of the ocean about them and above! The felt assurance that they were really in space and not in the ocean; the knowledge that the crashing of the ocean is only a weak memento of the crashing of space.

They were in, all at the same time, a coffin, a grave, a cocoon (which is a bomb), an ark, a pavilion, a world. Anaxagores was the first one who knew that the shape of all of these was elliptical and that one may voyage equally in any of them.

There was a great and close companionship here, but the quarters were confining. They were all of the same kindred, of course, even the animals. The rampant animality had been an irritant for a while, but now that was all subsumed. They kept that fireplace a-going in the center of it. It was a hearth and a galley-stove. It is the galley stove that is the heart of any ship.

“There were three arks when they started out,” Anabella said, “but one of them was sunk near St. Kitts, and one of them ran aground in the Grenadines, and only the third of them finally arrived at fair land. Their names were The Little Girl, The Painted Woman, and The Holy Land.”

“You were always weak on history,” Raddigan said. “Those were the ships of Columbus. Yet his also was a mutational jump akin to this one that we have been backed into attempting. He mutated the world, twinned it or doubled it. But he lose all his juice in the jump, just as Reventlo has done.”

Yes, the persons in this oceanic cinema spoke in the voices and thoughts of the people ‘trapped-to-their-death’ in the pavilion. Now the fact is that the pavilion sailed directly into the cinema and absorbed it, or was absorbed by it. And it became, for the duration of its voyage and until its resolution and judgment, identical with all those other things, with the coffin, with the grave, with the primordial cocoon which is also a bomb in the special case, with the Ark, with the Argo, with five other ships at least (Seven Holy ships in all), with valleys (do valleys make voyages? yes, they do), with other pavilions.

“Are such as these the ambients in which mutational jumps have been made?”

“To give a simplistic answer, yes, they are.”

Checkers were first played on the Ark. The same is true of chess and ‘berzirk’ and ‘ghosts and goats’ and Kelly pool. They played a lot of games on the old Ark. It was much like the Fimbul-winter they had gone through a little while before that (the world itself was the Ark during the Fimbul-Winter). They played Donkey's Uncle and Shadow-Play and Moving Pictures, all very creative games. They first played the Writing Game on one of the early arks. Ships' logs were the first things ever written down in the primordial language. But the Writing Game was one of the games that quickly became tiresome.

“There was one early voyage where a ship full of monkeys started out, and when they reached the other shore they were a ship full of people.”

“Not quite. It was a matter of comparison and viewpoint. They passed as people to the folks on the other shore, but those folks were double-monkeys.”

The Masterwork-Movie of Doctor Fritz Otto and many of the others, that temporarily unnamed movie (they decided that they would put the name at the end of it instead of at the beginning), it did not end as the other ones ended. It merged with the Promethean Company itself, and it remained an open question how it would end. The odds against it were steep. Well then, they were steep.

“Why should such goofy people as ourselves be selected even provisionally for such a shot?”

“Consider some of the other people. Consider all of the other people. Talk about goofy!”

But this was not necessarily the end of the ‘Selected Short Subjects of Doctor Fritz Otto’. This was not the end of ‘Every Night At The Movies’. There could be innumerable little movies inside the big one. There might yet be a slot for that unproduced Victorian Melodrama The Peculiar Revenge of Cecelia Calca.

Chapter Eight

Comst thou smiling from
The world's great snare uncaught?

Antony And Cleopatra
 — Shakespeare

Many days and nights had gone by.

Jeffery Wind was reading ‘Life In the Grave’ by von Hildebart, ‘Essay On the Symbols On Ancient Tombstones’ by Bachofen, and ‘Death By Drowning As An Experienced Mutation’ by W. W. Yates. No, these were not gloomy writings. All of them were sparkling with symbolism and bright magic. In ‘Life In the Grave’ we find this passage (Jeffery was reading it out loud):

“The first metro or subway railroad that I ever saw in my life was in the Germanies when I was quite young. I was not at all predisposed towards underground things, and I was in a panic about being taken down into that sloping cavern, the motor entrance at the main terminal. We went down into the ground there in a taxicab that was driven by a negro, the first black man that I had ever seen. This was the land of the dead that we went down to, and no one ever gets out of it alive. My father paid the black Charon in coins, and he left us. And then we were alone, entombed below the city and only a very little way from Hell itself towards which our steps compelled us.

“But then I was utterly overcome by the fascination and sparkle of the shops and booths that are on the Road To Hell. This was ‘Vanity Fair’ of which para-scripture speaks, and this early encounter with it was one of the passions of my life. There were electrical signs in an explosion of colors. Some of them were moving and spelling signs, cascades and fountains of colored light. It was daytime in the city when we had come down, and I had never before been in a town that had anything more than simple electric street lights. And, beyond the electric, there were the shouting words and pictures on the posters that were everywhere, in the windows of the shops and above the doors. My father took me into a penny arcade. There were games, there were puzzles, there were even carousels. There were prizes. There were bioscopic movies with whole worlds inside them that could be watched for half a penny.

“My father took me to a pancake-and-sausage palace that was also a coffee house. In all the world there had previously been no such place as this. He took me to a fur shop and bought me a bear-skin hat. He took me to a jewelry store and there he bought a red ruby for my mother. Then we got on the metro train and traveled past a full one hundred blocks of arcades and dazzling shops.

“Ever after this, I knew that there were (and still are) more enchanting things below the ground than above it. And I looked forward and I still do, to the sparkling splendors that appear in the grave. These splendors light up only after the sexton has shoveled the last spadeful of dirt onto your coffin, and the earth-top people have gone away. But you have the sparkle after these lesser people are gone, and you will have it forever. To me, things above the ground are still only pale reflections of things below.”

“I rather enjoy being buried alive myself,” Dorothy Blue-ice said in kindly answer to von Hildebart, himself dead and in splendor by that time. “Yes, it is a sparkling life here in the grave. It is intellectually and aesthetically stimulating. And it will zoom to a climax soon, as do the moving and spelling signs in the metro arcades. What will our own climax be? Even poor people are buried in velvet-lined boxes as indication of the luxury to come. How completely will our life be changed by death?”

“Whence have you your name, Dotty?” Doctor Fritz Otto asked her.

“Oh, my family was named Blau-gletscher, Blue-Glacier. I changed it to Blue-Ice, a pun name that sounded like ‘blue-eyes’ in my still-German accent. I hoped that the fellows would say ‘Oh, how big they are!’ when I told them my name. Some of them did.”

“They are big,” Doctor Fritz said, “and I did know you back in the days of the blue glaciers. It seems like only yesterday. That was when I was working on the movie The Road To Yesterday, though I was only an assistant director on that one (I was quite young). I wanted you for a part in that movie and I couldn't find you. But I knew that you were real and that I would find you again someday. That was the theme of the movie, recognizing a loved one across many millennia. Then it came to me that the name of the movie should be The Road To Tomorrow rather than The Road To Yesterday, and that I would find you in that tomorrow. And now I have. That is also the theme of our present case. We do all realize by now that what we were excavating for in yesterday is really in tomorrow, don't we?”

“I realize it, yes,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said.

Then Jeffery Wind was reading a passage from Yate's ‘Death By Drowning as an Experienced Mutation’:

“In the previous chapter ‘Three Days In The Belly Of A Fish’, I mentioned that, though many of us believe that we do recall that archetypal experience, being three days in the belly of a fish in the depth of the sea, yet very often we are confusing it with the memory of a resonance of it, the simply pre-natal experience ‘Nine Months In The Belly Of A Fish’. But now I propose that there is another experience that many of us were confusing one or both of these happenings with, and that is the ‘Three Hundred And Seventy-Five Days In The Cradle (cunae or arca) of The Deep’.

“What is significant about this number, or about the cycles and resonances of this number? What creature has a gestation period of three hundred and seventy-five days? Only the sperm whale. If we are to believe Cottonwood's translations of the only whale writing known, those deep-water, iodine etchings on basalt stones that are off the Ile d’If, the sperm whales are very much involved in all this and have taken pains to record it. But who today believes in Cottonwood's translations? Or who even believes that the ‘whale writing’ is writing?”

“What all the ‘in-the-belly-of-a-fish’ memories really symbolize is change,” Joseph Abramswell said, interrupting the reading of the recently dead Yates. “And change is always a sort of ‘sea change’ in the unconscious. And the unconscious is always a sea. We will all be changed greatly, people.”

“These mutations or changes have happened before, have they?” Dean Hayfield asked with half a doubt. “You older and slightly wiser ones are saying that they have happened before?”

“All human change has been by sudden mutation,” Joseph said. “And all those mutations have the ear-marks of being elaborately arranged or staged. They are ritualized, and ritual is probably a necessary part of them. There is a sort of birth-ritual about them, the bent grass that is at the birth site of all the prodigies. Of all nests, the most symbolism is to be found in the grass around the mare's-nest, and perhaps our own changes are birthed in such a place.”

“Oh, what are you all talking about?” Dean Hayfield asked in exasperation with himself for not keeping up. “How does all that grass get into the middle of the sea? May we not have a poor-boy translation of all this malarky?”

“We are talking about, and reaching for, the ‘Eden Archetype’,” Abramswell said, “that fine pitcher that has been going to the well for all these thousands of years. We have been to that well with that pitcher so many times that I don't know why we remember it as being in the past instead of in the future. We have an excuse for our memories being fogged now, but they are not so fogged as they were when things were going well for us.”

The excuse that they had now for foggy wits was that they were in a dying state, and some of them were very nearly dead. There was a reluctance to examine those people who had been quiet in their couches for the longest times. Their sad case had come about by their being out of food (a red rot or other plague out of Egypt had destroyed much of their grain and all of their canned goods), out of water (and severely rationed on wine), and very nearly out of good air (another plague of Egypt had made it that the air should sting and wound the lungs like scorpions). All that was left were a few bales of hay for the animals. Hay for the animals? What was this anyhow? They really were fogged, and yet the hay was there.

But most of them were not really fogged in their wits. They slept and woke, and they made prodigious scientific and mathematical discoveries, which however they were not able to communicate to any potential or possible outside world just now. They smiled and realized themselves and each other. They no longer counted the days, but very many days had gone by. Many of the people had long since formed transcendent arrangements with each other.

The ghost priest from the castle had come and regularized some of these transcendent arrangements, and the partners of others of them had resisted him. Doctor Fritz Otto and Doctor Dorothy Blue-Ice (yes, Dorothy was several kinds of doctor) had their union in attested words, and even had it drawn up on attested paper. The certificate of their marriage was carried back to the castle by the ghost priest, and likely it is still there. Nobody ever goes away with attested papers in that castle.

The ghost priest had a very easy attitude towards the troubles of the people in the pavilion, but only Shrike and Hayfield resented this easiness.

“After all, it is not you who are dying,” Raddigan Shrike would tell that ghost with an acid turn. “You have already died, and I suspect that you have botched your own death. You would not be nailed down to your own area otherwise.”

“I did not botch my own death,” the ghost priest said. “I died well. It is for your own case, I believe, that I am to remain here and watch and counsel you. If you would hurry it along (a little less complaining, young friend, and a little more resolute dying), then I would be going on my own delayed way.”

“But does it not seem like a waste of time that we should die here like this?” Dean Hayfield had asked. “We are really (though I have come to realize it only since we have been entrapped here) the most variously talented group in the world. But the Stoicheio, the Lemures, the crooked-winged caricature of angels who are jealous of the people, they have trapped the elite group of us in a trap here and left us to perish. Oh, they swept us in shrewdly and got us out of their trashy way, but that is all to the bad. This is loss, loss, loss, for the whole world. The Father of Lights, if there is such, makes a mistake in allowing it. It is a loss to the whole cosmos that we should perish here in a goat trap with an unclean seal on the outside of it.”

“No, no!” the ghost cried. “The Father of Lights, and there is such, permits reasonable obstacles as a test to your readiness. The container will not explode and scatter the new seed unless it is packed very tight, to the point of explosion. Yes, young friend, I see that you are about at the point of explosion now. And you here have not failed the readiness test yet, and there is no reason that all of you should fail it. Several groups, in the comparatively short history of mankind, have not failed it. Some of them succeeded gloriously, and perhaps none of them had more advantages than has your own group. You are not in a goat pen here. You are in a cenacle. And it isn't an unclean seal on the outside of this cunae. It is a holy seal.”

“Are you sure of that?” Jeffery Wind asked with rising interest.

“Yes, I am sure of that,” the ghost priest said.

“Then answer me this then —” Jeffery began, but the ghost priest used a trick on them that he had used on them several times when he was unable to answer questions. He went through the walls and was gone.

“A holy seal on the outside of our cubicle?” Jeffery still questioned it. “Then what is the holy purpose of it all?”

“I begin to get a glimmer of it,” Joseph Abramswell said.

“The glimmer had better turn into something much brighter fast,” Jeffery growled. “We will all be dead very soon. Everything else we may say comes up against the same wall: ‘We can't get out of this place.’ ”

They talked about all their diminishing possibilities and negative choices.

“We're starving to death, of course,” Raddigan Shrike said.

“No we're not,” Anabella contradicted. “We're getting fat inside. We're being interlarded with nourishment. Oh, I don't know how it's done. The tadpole in the cocoon doesn't know how he's being nourished. But he doubles his weight after he goes on his hunger strike. And then he explodes into the higher stage. He becomes the jumping king himself, the fine frog. He makes the quantum jump. He makes the mutation jump.”

“You are more confused than usual, Anabella,” Adriana Thistle said. “Tadpoles are never in cocoons.”

“Oh, but they are! Tadpoles are one of my specialties. All cocoons aren't made out of silk threads and leafy fiber such as caterpillars and butterflies and worms use. I think that many cocoons are made out of water. Right now, each of us is in a tight cocoon right here, and we don't know what our own cocoons are made out of. They are probably made out of air, but they have us pretty well constrained. The tadpole, before he makes his frog jump, is confined to a very small extent of water. He does not move at all. He holds himself tightly and he generates his forces. There are walls and lids of water in that water, and he cannot go out through them. Our own case, a few nights back, was like this. We were confined in the coffins that Doctor Fritz projected. Perhaps they were mental or immaterial coffins, but we couldn't get out of them, not until Dorothy broke the projection. That was a clever and instructive projection that Doctor Fritz devised, for it was a premonition of the restraint that closes in on us now. We had the terror for those moments when it lasted, but we may not have it again. By fetish-transfer, it may be blocked out from any such feelings as we may have for the real thing now. But we are in pitch-black coffins now, and we are either dead or dying in them. Unless Dorothy can break this other projection that is imposed by someone else, we are caught for sure. Can you break it, Dorothy? Do you have a way out of it?”

“No, I don't have a way out right now,” Dorothy smiled, “and yet I can say that the answer is very possibly within me. It's fun to be cryptic every now and then, and I'm the only cryptic person here who doesn't overdo it.”

“I believe that I will just dissect old (that's curious, why is he old? — chronologically he's younger than I am), old Pioneer Reventlo here and see what has gone wrong with him or what is lacking in him,” Jeffery Wind said, and he began to lay out instruments.

“Is he dead?” Arthur Ransom asked.

“Dead enough for all purposes,” Jeffery replied, and he spread Reventlo out on a table, set torches at the four corners of that table, and he began an exploration-and-excavation of the cadaver.

“Perhaps you don't really overdo being cryptic, Dorothy,” Lucille Creighton said. “Well, don't overdo the pregnant pause after your statement either.”

“I made you use that word,” Dorothy chortled. “I projected it into you and out of you again. Oh, my son says that he knows the way out of this place. He says that he remembers the way in, and he will be able to lead us out of here the same way. Why should I doubt my own son?”

“Are you also wandering, Dorothy?” Anabella asked. “I never saw so many wit-wanderers as we have here presently. You have no son.”

“Yes, I have a son, my son in my belly. He knows the way out of the pavilion. He will show us the way, he says, if we are able to wait a very little while until he is more the master of his movements and signals.”

“I never saw so many fruitful persons as we have here presently,” Anabella said.

“Oh, Dorothy's is the old fireplace story, the old campfireplace story. That is what my wife is telling you,” Doctor Fritz said. “Among the Shining Mountains (which are presently called the Rocky Mountains of North America), there was one of them that reached clear up to the sky, or so close to it that one would have to walk bent over to go between the sky and the mountain top. There was a hole in the sky at this place where one might go through and above the the sky; but it had a sky-colored blue flap over it so that one might go right past it and miss it. Certain Red Indians would find this hole by a stratagem, and they would go up through it and camp above it for six weeks in the coldest part of winter. And they would be in the warm sunshine there, with plenty of deer-meat and ripe corn and pumpkins all the time. After six weeks they would go down through the hole again, and they'd set a little pile of stones there on that part of the mountaintop to mark the place. But after they were gone, bears, jealous of the ability of the people to go through the sky, would scatter the stones again, and so the way through the sky would be lost to the people once more.

“But the people had resources. That's what distinguished them from the bears. Each year, a woman in fruit with a very active child would serve as a guide to them. The child would guide his mother by pressing on the left inside wall of her when he wanted her to go to the left, and on the right inside wall when he wanted her to go to the right. And so they would come under the sky-hole again. All the children who come into this world come through that hole, and the more intelligent of them remember the way almost until they're born.”

“You should do a film on that, Doctor Fritz,” Dean Hayfield said.

“I did,” the movie-master answered. “It was called The World In The Attic. The ‘attic’ was the world above the sky. The picture wasn't a great success. Like so many of mine, it was before its time. It was never shown outside of Germany, and now it's nearly forgotten.”

“How does it go with Pioneer?” Abramswell asked Jeffery Wind. “Have you decided what is lacking in him?” The table with dead Reventlo on it, with Jeffery Wind bending over it with his glittering instruments, and the four torches burning at the four corners of it, was like an old Dutch painting.

“It should be named ‘Midnight Appendectomy of Count Ortiz’,” Adriana giggled.

“I think that he lacked a sense of time,” Jeffery said, examining molecule-thin sections of brain, and apparently reading them like sheets of an old book. “Reventlo was a mighty jug, and if he had been properly filled he would have been without equal. He was a resonating chamber, and the wind blew past him and through him for a while. He was wrong about the direction of it, though. He was wrong about everything, and he brought us to the right place. And now there's not much here except a desiccated body and brain that the spirit withdrew from many days before his death. He's a dried-out Moses, and he doesn't get to enter the Land himself. He's an unswept empty house now.

“Cecelia Calca talked one day about the class of ghosts who are resonances of future persons, and who are under-cut when the future varies away from the probability of them, and their primary sources become never-to-have-been's. I believe that Pioneer was such a resonance. Whatever his primary will be, and it will be, it will not have much apparent resemblance to him; he himself has changed that. Pioneer was a sort of ghost in that he had a very loose association between body and soul. He was inhabited a little by the ‘Eden Archetype’, a projection from the future. He knew of course, but with his mind only and not with his feelings, that all archetypes are these projections from the future and none of them from the past. And yet he sincerely believed it was the past he was excavating. He was (unknown to himself) one of the elements of the conspiracy that has trapped us here in this stasis. He believed that the conspiracy was to good purpose, and maybe it is. The scenario of our trapping operation was really concocted by ourselves, though we have no one to praise but ourselves if it succeeds.”

“Jeffery, that cadaver, it's mummified. It's that of a man who's been dead for many years.”

“I know.”

“But he spoke a few words yesterday.”

“I know, Joseph, I know. But a slight adjustment to reality-framework has obsoleted most of the Reventlo element. And so it is indeed like one of the ghosts whose primary has disappeared.”

“Your free-handed brain sectioning there is impossibly fine, Jeffery,” Joseph Abramswell said in admiration. “And you are reading without magnification. That's on the verge of impossible. So are some of your interpretations almost impossible, and yet I believe they are valid. This is breakthrough stuff that you are doing. You couldn't do any of this before, could you, Jeffery?”

“Oh, I’ve received new powers unquestionably. So have you. So has Il Trol and Dorothy Blue-Ice and Doctor Fritz. But we haven't time to analyze ourselves now, have we? The younger students are showing changes even more strongly, but there are coltish elements in all of them. And the four, or is it five, or is it six now, carried children, they should be born with exceptional endowments. All is assuming the less than one percent possibility that we will not all die here, as we seem to be doing.”

“The Count of San Angelo is very quiet these last few day,” Anabella said. “Is he dead?”

“No, he's a true nobleman,” Abramswell answered her. “In dire situations commoners and false noblemen usually die, but true noblemen hibernate. It's the bear blood in them. And then, when the dire time has passed, they wake again, after a year or two or a century or two. There are still a few of those moth-eaten noblemen surviving in the world for a long, long, long time.”

“Even Il Trol is very quiet, and that's not like him at all.”

“Oh, he's working, working away at every moment. He is too busy for words.”

“He doesn't look very busy, sleeping away there.”

“Yes, he's quite busy. He is in an intensely creative sleep. He is making up for some of us who don't have his degree of creativity.”

They had all become quite mental in their last days of it, and quite sleepy also. But there wasn't any conflict there. The sleepiness and the vital sleeping did not at all reduce their mentality. Asleep or awake, they were mentally active, and new criteria might have to be established to distinguish between their sleeping and waking. They held illuminating conversations with each other, some of them in sounded words; but most of them were silent conversations that they could hear equally well and that could be overheard by others of them.

They were eating a lot now and becoming well interlarded. How does that fit in with the fact that they were starving to death? They ate indifferently whether they were sleeping or waking. Most of what they ate though was illusory or projected food. Or it may have been that ‘other food’ that lesser people do not know about.

“Will you dissect anyone else, Jeffery Wind?” Anabella Hilary conversed with him in her sleep. “Raddigan Shrike is dead.”

“No, I won't cut anyone else after Reventlo here,” Jeffery said. “For Raddigan, and for others, it is more likely a case of catalepsy than death.”

“What will we do with all the loose ends?” Catherine January Boniface conversed. (This was not the same day. It was the next day, or the day after that.)

“We will weave a shroud out of them,” the Troll's wife said. “Weaving is a specialty of mine. Which loose ends?”

“The mathematically ‘floating constant’, the three hundred and seventy-five days, or a resonance thereof. What does that represent?” Catherine asked.

“Probably a cheerful hoax or misunderstanding,” movie-mogul Fritz dreamed an answer to her. “It was the period from the seventeenth day of the first month till the twenty-seventh day of the first month of the following year, the period when the ark was in stasis. But the figure arrived at is most likely wrong. Those were probably lunar months that they were using then, and they floated their way around the year. But the ‘floating constant’ is still effective, simply because it floats. I researched all this when I was making the film Over The Oceans To Ararat. It is all a little essay in analogies, to tie the ark and the grave and the whale and the pavilion and other manifestations together.”

“But nobody believes that the ark or the flood happened,” Raddigan Shrike conversed out of his catalepsy. (This,again, was on another day.)

“Not that it ‘happened’, possibly not,” Il Trol spoke out of his belly. “They don't believe that it ‘happened’ but that it ‘happens’. There are many persons now, a whole cult of them, who believe that it ‘will happen’. Myself, I don't believe that it ‘happened’ or that it ‘will happen’ either. But I firmly believe that it ‘happens’.”

“What is the ellipse?” Dean Hayfield asked. He spoke out of a short wakefulness but that isn't important.

“The ellipse, having two foci, is a circle in motion or change,” Doctor Fritz answered from his mixed state. “The two foci are really one, and this is a form of Zeno's ‘paradox of motion’, that a thing can move only by being in two places at the same time. This is the reason that a time machine must be in the shape of either a plane or a solid ellipse. It is the shape of the grave after it has settled, of an ark, of a whale, of certain valleys where the demarcation between the several states of creatures is the thinnest. And it is the shape of this pavilion. The word also means a deficiency, something left out. When a perfect circle or a perfect sphere moves at all, or when it shows any life at all, it immediately becomes an imperfect ellipse. It will never be perfect again until it comes to rest. In our present project it has no particular meaning. It is just one of the many keys that we tried, and we find that it fits several locks.”

“To be in an elliptical grave, is that to be going somewhere?” Dean Hayfield asked.

“Why, I don't know,” Abramswell answered. “We hope that we are going somewhere.”

Another day or two went past. Anabella broke open some of the bales of hay that had been intended for the animals and strewed it around on the floorways. This was so that the para-scriptures might be fulfilled. And then somebody might want to draw pentagrams in it.

It is said that there are no days in a time stasis, but there are. The days are there, like hard, blue-white things, even in stasis. And several more of them went by.

“What was the Cro-Magnon jag that Reventlo was on?” Stephen Tall talked the question.

“The Cro-Magnon was a particularity only,” Jeffery Wind blew the answer off his lips like foam. “Il Trol is also a strong particularity. I believe that several such strong ideas are necessary in this. We are strong and striking persons in the beginning, yes. In every beginning we are. In the continuing beginning we are. Reventlo is one of the strong and imposing fellows. We will meet him if we live long enough. Maybe it will be in the very next century.”

“We hint that we may have a rendezvous with mutation,” Raddigan Shrike framed a statement later that same day. “But how does a successful mutation work? Has anybody ever watched one happen?”

“No one in our time has watched a mutation happen,” Dorothy Blue-Ice said in a crystalline void. “Some of the ninety-nine that fail have been observed. That hundredth one that succeeds has not been. We may see it before and after, but we do not see it happen.”

“What are the odds against us now, Cecelia?” Cyclone Boniface asked that restricted ghost in one of her visits.

“Jimmy the Calabrian has the odds set at one hundred to one against us,” she said. “Do you want to bet money on us? If we win we will make a killing.”

“We don't know how to get money out of the pavilion,” Cyclone and Catherine said.

“I can get it out,” Cecelia told them. “If you want me to bet on us, give it to me. And I'll throw in for all I’ve got too.”

Everybody of the party gave Cecelia all the money they had.

“Bet it on us,” they said.

“What is the White Goat Illusion?” Lucille Creighton wrote on a wall with whitewash and a broad brush.

“It is the illusion that you might survive this,” came a metallic and bitter voice. “But you won't. We'll intercept you. We'll keep watch until all of you are dead.”

“That is the voice of Leon Yuri, old 1-212-1212,” Adriana jeered. “We will whip this to spite you. We used you, to prepare the place for us, the place where the thing will happen.”

“No, no,” 1-212-1212 shrilled like an angry rat. “Nothing will happen here except your own extinction.”

“The White Goat Illusion is really the pavilion trick,” Jeffery said. “Under the illusion, we walked into a hole that wasn't there, the pavilion, and disappeared completely. Nor have we been heard from since.”

“The White Goat illusion is something still otherwise,” Il Trol spoke. “It means that you don't have a chance. And then it means that a hundred to one against you will beat a thousand to one against someone else every time. Nobody knows whose side the goat will finally be on. It is really a fast dice throw known as ‘The White Billygoat’. It is the ultimate long shot throw. We can make this throw. We have got to make it. It has been made.”

After that, they went up and up.

“Could we back out now?” Raddigan Shrike asked.

“I don't think that any of us could now,” Doctor Fritz projected. “I believe that's really what Pioneer Reventlo tried to do, back out of it. We don't want to back out, not any of us.”

“Why are we chosen? Or why have we chosen ourselves for a shot at this?” Stephen Tall threw out the words like a fowler throwing his net to catch birds. “And what will we look like if it happens to us?”

“Ah, we are intelligent, we are adaptable, we are open, we are able to see things that are invisible to many persons, and we are mutationable. That is why we have formed ourselves into a group to mutate. But we will not look greatly different if it does happen to us. We will not mutate in body or appearance, except to grow more handsome. We will mutate in brains and dispositions. We will keep our variety.” That was either Joseph Abramswell or Jeffery Wind who had winged that answer. The hay on the floor did look very much like the grass around a mare's-nest now.

“Have there been other mutations? Were they great things?” a person asked.

“There have been others, yes, three or four major ones,” another person answered. “Sometimes they are forgotten or they go unappreciated. But they are what we are. We are the sum total of our previous mutations, and of the slighter essence we were given to begin with. If they all don't seem to add up to enough, then we are the only ones in the world with a chance to correct that deficiency this time around.”

They had moved into more intricate states, and yet they were held immobile in the stasis that had now enveloped them personally. “Is it not very likely that we will be wasted?” said one of the older ones.

“No, we will not be wasted, not either way it goes,” answered one of the more nimble-minded of the unborn. “Nothing is wasted except by choice. I haven't chosen to be wasted. Nor have the rest of us.”

“Are such things not mere solaces that we tell each other?” Arthur Ransom asked with a last flicker of self-doubt. “Isn't the likelihood all against us? Isn't it that we have been made goats of by the goats? Haven't we been ambushed by beings of an inferior species because our questionings impinged a little bit on their pasture? Haven't we been trapped by animals who are inferior even in their peltry? Haven't we been locked into a goat-pen by goats?”

“As you say, the odds are against us,” another of them answered.

“Will there be a climax?” Rosa Caprobianco questioned.

“If we do develop, if we do make it, we will live forever in a perpetual and exciting climax,” that was Dorothy Blue-Ice projecting. “I seem to be living in an exciting climax right now.”

“Will the ghosts ever stop being jealous of the people?”

“Not the hard ones among them. They hate us forever.”

“Do they have any last trick to play this time?”

“They do. They have a dirty trick so tall and dread that the shadow of its big toe brings a midnight darkness over everything. It's a trick so murderous that — here it comes now.”

“Yes, I feel it coming. Oh, what bleak murder of a trick! What will it do?”

“There is a clarification of the odds. They have swung to nearer a thousand-to-one than a hundred-to-one against us now,” one of them calculated.

“Those aren't bad odds. We take the bet,” several of them answered.

“Go, Prometheans, go!” Raddigan Shrike cheered out of a confident catalepsy.

They were all quiet for a day and a night and a day.

Then the spirit came and moved over them.

But which way did it move?